Private school, secret society, love triangle, trust issues, missing roommate, and a secret society/ cult. What else do you need for a twisting, turning mystery?
Maren is determined to figure out where her vanished roommate Polly has gone, but to do that, she will have to get to the bottom of all of the secrets she realizes Polly was keeping from her. In her quest to learn the truth, Maren stumbles into the clutches of the Gamemaster's Society, and she realizes that she will have to become a member and play their games if she is going to discover the truth about Polly.

Do I hate this book? No. Do I love it? Also, no.

The premise of the book sounds interesting. A girl joining a secret society to save her best friend. Who wouldn't be intrigued by that?

However, the execution was quite disappointing or was it the plot that's kind of frustrating?

I have to give it to the author that atmosphere of the story, especially the secret society set up, is really atmospheric. I could imagine myself being in that same place and it was scary. But the thing I didn't like about the book is the romance. The love triangle felt forced. The main character sounded stupid with her internal monologue of trusting and not trusting one of the guys but in the ended getting swept up by whatever they say. I also think I would have enjoyed the games better without the overpowering need to insert the romance that took me out of the story. In the end, I am just fed up with the book and just wanted to end as everything felt repetitive as the story goes on.

I will start out by saying that I wasn't a fan of the last Ichaso book I read, so this is me giving her a second shot. I thought the premise of this book was very interesting - what's not to like about a culty secret society and a missing girl in a boarding school setting? But I found it to be unfortunately predictable in most cases.

Many twists and turns, very entertaining. I enjoy mysteries, secret societies, gothic nature and puzzles. I really enjoyed this read.

I received a free arc from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This could have been a really good book. It had a pretty decent plot, good characters, and moved along pretty quickly. But, for a lot of the book I felt like it was written in a high school creative writing class and the author was trying to use too many metaphors and similes and went in heavy on the thesaurus. I don’t think teens will mind, but as an adult it just felt too forced.

2.5

This book took me by surprise a little bit. It was a little slow at first but it picked up pretty quick and it kept me interested. Maren is a scholarship student at a prestigious high school, Torrey-Wells Academy. Her best friend Polly is also a scholarship student and Maren's roommate. Up until Polly met Annabelle, her and Maren were practically inseparable. Polly started to act as if she had something to be afraid of and then Polly went missing. Maren would do anything to find Polly because she doesn't believe that she ran away like everyone else seems too. Maren needs to infiltrate the schools secret society so she can finally find some answers. What happened to Polly? How dangerous is this secret society? Will Maren be able to figure it out on her own?

Maren Montgomery is a student-athlete at Torrey-Wells Academy, an elite, and very expensive, private school. Maren is a scholarship student, so she doesn’t always fit in with the other students. Polly, her roommate, is one person she has felt close to during her time at Torrey-Wells, so when Polly goes missing Maren is determined to find out what happened to  her, especially because, right before she disappeared, Polly told Maren that she had a secret she had to tell her. Finding an envelope among Polly’s things, she peers inside and discovers an invitation to the Gamemaster’s Society, along with a message instructing her not to tell anyone. Could the Gamemaster’s Society hold the key to discovering what happened to Polly, or is something more sinister at work at Torrey-Wells Academy?

This novel was enjoyable, but it had way too many similarities to the movie The Skulls for my tastes, it almost made the novel extra predictable. I liked the character Maren. She is a tough girl with her heart in the right place. I also liked the connections to ancient mythology. At times it seemed like things happened just too perfectly, and in almost unrealistic ways, making this piece of fiction almost too fictitious. There were some random times in which I was surprised, and the climax was quite eventful. I also thought that the ending was very fitting to the story and the characters.

the premise is good and i liked the layout of the book, but it didn’t grab my attention at all, and i tried to read it like two times so my review will be fair.

Thank you to the publisher for providing me with an eARC via NetGalley for an honest review.

CWs: secret society, kidnapping, poisoning, death

I really enjoyed this one. It was exciting, mysterious, and incredibly tense. I was having fun trying to guess who the Gamemaster was, and I liked the constant back-and-forth of who to trust. It made the story more interesting for me because I was invested in Maren and trying to uncover the truth.
Maren was a good character. Her loyalty to her best friend, Polly, is amazing, and her desire to find answers in the secret society is unfaltering. She trusts too easily, but when she starts questioning everything it raises the tension between the characters. I liked Remington and Gavin even if I didn’t trust either of them. I liked their connections to Maren, and I thought both were good characters and allies.
The secret society in this novel was well written and totally creepy! I thought the author did a great job of developing the tense atmosphere. I’m a sucker for books with secret societies, and this one was really well done. It provides mystery and causes problems, and hides some big secrets.
This was an entertaining and fast-paced YA thriller, and I’d definitely recommend it!

As usual, Chelsea nailed it. I'm a huge fan of hers and have loved her previous books. This was no exception. It was so easy to read and highly addictive. I needed to know what will happen next and binge-read it! I enjoyed the romance in the story too and I felt like I was part of the mc's squad, tagging along to investigate this secret society with her.

Can't wait to see what's next!

*Thank you to Netgalley and Sourcebooks fire for the e-arc*

A book about a secret society is already asking you to willingly suspend your disbelief. So it has to create a believable, compelling scenario. I though that was going to be the case here. I actually really love the idea of this society structuring around games. Not games of chance, but those of skill, of planning your moves twelve steps ahead and using information to your best advantage. It's a solid concept. Unfortunately the details are for more to the extreme. And the characters are not compelling and believable enough to drive the plot and keep us engaged. The result is a story that tries too hard and suffers as a result.

They’re Watching You is an interesting raje on the boarding-school mystery. In this book, main character Maren is attempting to solve the mystery of her friend Polly’s disappearance. Infiltrating a secret society, Maren is given tasks to complete to earn clues to locate Polly.

Honestly, this one is rather out there. The secret society with virtually ever character you encounter being a part of it… doesn’t seem very secret. The characters were all untrustworthy for one reason or another. Maren wasn’t the best MC, as she was rather one dimensional. The romance was convenient but had no build up. The ending felt very rushed and easy.

3 stars - issues present, but I read the whole thing and wanted to know what would happen

I received this book from William Morrow and NetGalley for an honest review.

Polly goes missing and no one seems to care. Soon Maren her roommate finds a note mentioning a secret society on campus, She gets into the society to find out the reason for her disappearance. Some of the book was "slow" but it did pick up later. Some of the plot twists were predictable but I still did enjoy the story.

All in all I did enjoy the book and I would recommend it to a friend

Firstly, I have to admit that I'm certainly not a YA being in my mid 40's yet the blurb grabbed my attention. I love books involving cults and I love puzzles being a Escape Room enthusiast so thought I'd give it a go.
Secondly, it's extremely rare for me to give a book a 5 star rating, I've read so many books (yes I'm old) and I find too many of them telling the same thriller with just different characters and location. However, I really believe this YA #TheyAreWatchingYou deserves each 5 stars. I would've loved it as a teen as much as I did now.
I know it was a bit far fetched but it felt like something that could get a cult following on Netflix, very Pretty Little Liars/RiverDale style.
Please give it a go whatever your age, I'll certainly be checking out the authors other books now. #NetGalley

I like a secret society type novel and this one was perfect for just that. I enjoyed this one and would recommend that you give it a try.

I’m not sure if I knew this book was tagged as Young Adult Fiction when I requested it. I just knew it was suspense set at a posh boarding school. It does feel YA in some way I can’t quite describe. Or at least not without seeming to be dissing it. I guess what it comes down to is though the subject matter could be viewed as dark and there are some “adult themes” (not the sexy kind; more the murdery, vast-conspiracy kind), there is something kind of unsophisticated and simple about the story and the narrative voice. To be fair, I guess that could be seen as a diss, since a lot of YA fiction, especially these days, rises above those stereotypes.

When the story opens, Maren Montgomery (whom I keep wanting to call Maren Morris because of the country singer) is in chemistry class with her new lab partner, the goofy, charming screw-up Gavin. Maren has been recently paired with Gavin because her former lab partner, roommate and best friend, Polly, disappeared from prestigious Torrey-Wells Academy several weeks before. Maren thinks Polly’s disappearance is suspicious, though she left a note and everyone else thinks Polly simply ran away. Maren and Polly, formerly inseparable, had grown apart in the weeks before Polly went missing; Polly was spending all her time with Annabelle, a snooty, rich ballet dancer straight out of mean-girl central casting. But the last time Maren saw Polly, she was distraught and wanted Maren to meet her later in the day, promising to disclose what was troubling her. Polly never showed, and Maren is now sure there is something more to Polly’s absence.

Searching Polly’s belongings, Maren finds an invitation to something called the Gamemaster’s Society. Maren is sure Annabelle is the gamemaster, and so she endeavors to get an invitation to the society through her. She is successful, and that night with much secret doings and fanfare and hooded black cloaks, Maren meets the other potential initiates, as well as member of the society. She’s surprised to find that Gavin is a member, but figures that he may be able to help her in her quest to find information on what happened to Polly.

Maren is also a bit discomfited to find that one of the other initiates is Remington Cruz, a classmate she had briefly had a crush on the previous year.

(A note here about the location of much of the Gamemasters Society action: it’s an abandoned, burned out “cathedral” on the school grounds. I double-checked my understanding of the word cathedral here, and Wikipedia agrees that it’s a church that serves as “the central church of a diocese, conference or episcopate.” So, unlikely to be on the grounds of a posh private school. Also not passing the smell test was the idea that a huge, partially burned building would be allowed to stand on those grounds – wouldn’t it have been demolished? It sounds like a safety hazard to me. Anyway, a book about a vast conspiracy involving a secret society at a private school can probably not be expected to be totally grounded in reality, but still – details matter.)

The rest of the book is basically Maren (and Remington, who also passes the initial tests to become a member of the Society) running around campus getting involved in increasingly sinister scenarios (in one, a fellow student is poisoned) while trying to find out where Polly is. Maren also discovers that the Society has members not just in the student body, but in the faculty. She faces many dilemmas about who she can trust, which usually having her ping-ponging between Gavin and Remington.

Maren is not a particularly compelling heroine; she’s fine but lacks a strong narrative voice or personality. In a way, she felt more like a real teenager to me, albeit one that proves to be smarter and more competent in facing off with the Gamemaster Society than one might expect.

Suspense is all about the twists (was it always that way? I haven’t been reading it for very long). Some smaller ones were kind of lame – it’s pretty obvious at a critical point in the story that going to an authority figure to expose the society isn’t going to work out as planned. One of the big ones was obvious from very early on (at least I expect that it was supposed to be a surprise though it wasn’t; I’m never sure though, with suspense).

There were two related twists near the end that I didn’t really see coming, and I appreciated that – they weren’t surprising just because they were out of left field; they made sense in the context of the story (I mean, as much as anything made sense in a story where there has to be a high suspension of disbelief).

They’re Watching You held my attention, but I ultimately think I would have liked it more if I read it when I was in high school (which was, um, a long time ago). Not specifically because it’s not very sophisticated and I imagine that teenage readers aren’t sophisticated readers; more because I know that at a certain age – probably starting in young adolescence, actually, I was THRILLED to read stories that had people around my age living lives that were so much more glamorous, exciting and thrilling than mine. My grade for this, at my current age, is a B-.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was a great thriller and it kept me on the edge of my seat.

#netgalleyarc Not my fave thriller written in the last year but not my least fave either. I like thrillers that are about secret societies and this book had the right theme but took me awhile to get into it. Overall I felt it had a slow start but at about the midpoint I started to enjoy it more. A most likely buy for my high school library.

Unfortunately, this one didn't quite land well for me. It was a little unbelievable and farfetched for me and I just couldn't connect. The characters didn't really draw me in at all and I was more annoyed by them than anything. I feel like the concept had potential but the execution just wasn't there.

This was an exciting thriller. I really enjoyed the dark academia setting and the secret society world. The characters were well developed and the mystery had enough turns to keep me guessing. I would definitely recommend this to others!