I Hope You’re Listening – Tom Ryan (ARC Review!)

Title: I Hope You’re Listening.

Author: Tom Ryan.

Format: E-ARC (Thanks to Edelweiss)

Publisher: Albert Whitman.

Page count: 369.

Release day: October 6^th 2020.

Genre: YA, Mystery.

Rating: 4 stars.

What is it about? (Summary from GoodReads)

EVERY MISSING PERSON HAS A STORY.

In her small town, seventeen-year-old Delia “Dee” Skinner is known as the girl who wasn’t taken. Ten years ago she witnessed the abduction of her best friend, Sibby. And though she told the police everything she remembered, it wasn’t enough. Sibby was never seen again.

At night, Dee deals with her guilt by becoming someone else: the Seeker, the voice behind the popular true crime podcast Radio Silent, which features missing persons cases and works with online sleuths to solve them. Nobody knows Dee’s the Seeker, and she plans to keep it that way.

When another little girl in town goes missing, and the case is linked to Sibby’s disappearance, Dee has a chance to get answers with the help of her virtual detectives and the intriguing new girl at school. But how much of her own story is she willing to reveal in order to uncover the truth?

Rating:
Characters: 7/10
Atmosphere: 8/10
Writing: 8/10
Plot: 8/10
Intrigue: 7/10
Logic: 8/10
Enjoyment: 7/10
Average: 7.57 (which means 4 stars!)

My thoughts:

I’m so surprised by how much I enjoyed this one! An I have no idea why haha, I’ve been enjoying quite some YA mysteries!

I feel like this one was so original! It was writing partly in podcasts, and it was so much fun! I bet it would be a great audiobook!

In this book we follow Dee, who 10 years ago witnessed the abduction of her best friend Sibby. In a way to deal with the guilt she feels she started a true crime podcast, in which she solves the mysteries behind missing persons. People reach out to her with cases, and she together with her followers try to figure out where these missing persons are. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t.
No one knows she is the one behind this podcast, except her good friend Burke, and she plans on keeping it this way.
Then one day another girl goes missing in the town, and there are  lot of similarities with the Sibby’s disappearance, so this brings back a lot of feelings.

I really loved this mystery. We are both solving the disappearance, but at the same time we are also learning more about the Sibby and her disappearance. And in the end we are trying to solve both. And it was so well done! I loved how the two stories were woven together, I loved the use of the podcast, and I also really enjoyed the characters.

Dee was very interesting, and I liked how we saw her grow throughout the story. We learn about her feeling guilty, even though she knows she shouldn’t, but she also learns to respect others who were hurt by the disappearance years ago!  

I would have liked to learn a bit more about Burke, since he was also a very interesting character, especially the position he got in near the end of the book. The only character I was not a huge fan of was Sarah, she just felt very flat, and made a weird character change. She came into the story as this cool girl etc, and then randomly changed as soon as she started talking to Dee. The vibes I got from her just didn’t match and felt a bit weird.

The writing was so good, and I will definitely check out other works by Tom Ryan!

Happy reading!