Book Review: Close Your Eyes by Nicci Cloke

Close Your Eyes 
Author: Nicci Cloke
Publisher: Hot Key Books
Pages: 294 pages
R.R.P: $16.99
Publication Date: 26th April 2017

It could have happened anywhere....
Southfield High School is nothing special. With its good teachers, the bad, and the cliques.

It could have happened to anyone...
Aisla and her friends are just like any group of mates. They never thought that someone would come to school with a gun.

It could have been stopped....
But now it's too late.

My review
Thoughts on the book: Close Yours Eyes is a intriguing novel that keeps you on your toes throughout and talks about some difficult topics that are relevant very much at the moment. It tells the story of a group of six friends who all hang out together but also have their own seperate groups. Little do they know that one of them will end up shooting students at their school, including members of their own group. Close Your Eyes is told in multiple POV and through different mediums- Facebook conversations, police interviews, memories, WhatsApp to name a few and will leave you hanging until the last page.

So as you may have been aware I recently read Violent Ends which was a story about a shooter at a high school with each chapter being told from a different person's point of view and not all were necessarily told in the moments around the shooting, they were also from before and after. One thing I didn't like with this book was that we never got the shooters POV. We never knew why he did it, whether there was actually a motive or not. Well in Close Your Eyes we defiantly get the shooters POV, but it also has a little twist with who the shooter is. 

Throughout the book I thought I had it figured out who the shooter was and I knew why they were doing it but as I got further and further into the book I learned I was so far from the truth it wasn't funny. The author makes you think that it's one person basically from the first few pages and when you keep on reading you become more and more convinced that it is them. That is until a spanner is thrown in the works around page 157 and something happens to the person I thought was the killer and I was left thinking well who is it now? It's not who I expected it to be. Then something else was said a bit later and I had two people who I thought it might have been. In the end one was the shooter and one got shot. Now this one that got shot I thought had died instantly because of how the author had written the story, but then you read on and you think maybe not. Maybe they actually survive. Well we are left wondering until the last page as to whether they actually make it out of there alive or not. These little plot twists is what made the story for me and I can't wait to read more by Nicci Cloke.


Rating: 4/5
(The only reason this wasn't a 5/5 was because at times I found it a little bit slow and a little hard to work out which POV I was reading. This mainly occurred at the end when all of the shooting took place so maybe that's why).

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