The Reunion

By: Kit Frick

Narrated by: Zac Aleman, Andre Bellido, Marisa Blake, Kurt Kanazawa, Angel Pean

From the author of I Killed Zoe Spanos comes a “suspenseful and atmospheric” (Kirkus Reviews) YA thriller in the vein of The White Lotus and Karen M. McManus’s The Cousins following a doomed family reunion at a posh Caribbean resort, where old grudges and dangerous secrets culminate in murder.

Eleven Mayweathers went on vacation. Ten came home.

It’s been years since the fragmented Mayweather clan was all in one place, but the engagement of Addison and Mason’s mom to the dad of their future stepbrother, Theo, brings the whole family to sunny Cancún, Mexico, for winter break. Add cousin Natalia to the mix, and it doesn’t take long for tempers to fray and tensions to rise. A week of forced family “fun” reveals that everyone has something to hide, and as secrets bubble to the surface, no one is safe from the fallout. By the end of the week, one member of the reunion party will be dead—and everyone’s a suspect:
The peacekeeper: Addison needs a better hiding place.
The outsider: Theo just wants to mend fences.
The romantic: Natalia doesn’t want to talk about the past.
The hothead: Mason needs to keep his temper under control.

It started as a week in paradise meant to bring them together. But the Mayweathers are about to learn the hard way that family bonding can be deadly.

Uneven

A family reunion to celebrate an engagement turns into a murder mystery in Kit Frick’s latest release THE REUNION.

Told from the four teens’ points of view, readers aren’t privy to which narrator is the victim until over half way into the story. From the first chapter, it’s clear each is hiding secrets, some more serious than other. Frick spaces out the revelations throughout the book which helped the pacing, although each disclosure felt anticlimactic, many involving characters we only hear about but never see in THE REUNION. The novel also had a number of instances where a character did a Very Bad Thing, but an excuse is quickly made to mitigate culpability. While I understand that people are more than they seem on the surface and behaviors often have reasons behind them, Frick’s use of the reasons oversimplified the process. X was kicked out of school for being drunk at a swim meet, then we learn it’s because she was sexually assaulted. Y abandoned her family and never wanted to see them again, because she had postpartum depression. I could go on, but I want to avoid spoilers.

THE REUNION is a worthwhile, yet flawed read.

The secrets families keep

The different voices made it easy to visualize each character. Love the twists & turns in the story.