Thank you to Netgalley & Aw Teen for providing me with a copy of I Hope You're Listening in exchange for an honest review!

Absolutely loving the number of thrillers that include a podcast element! I Hope You're Listening is a perfectly fine story, but it really didn't do much for me -- the story was a bit whatever & one of the conclusions was a bit ridiculous.

🔒 BOOK REVIEW 🔒

Synopsis: The anonymous host of a true-crime podcast is faced with a new case that could uncover secrets from her past. 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 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 is she willing to reveal about herself in order to uncover the truth? Dee's about to find out what's really at stake in unraveling the mystery of the little girls who vanished.

Review: This book definitely intrigued me more than I expected! I really enjoyed the premise and liked that a lot of detail went into the characters and the setting. It was medium to fast paced and didn’t drag out at all. Although it wasn’t explicitly stated what the MC’s sexuality is, there is a same-sex romance in the book. This brought a another side to the story outside of the mystery and suspense, and I loved it! Would happily read a sequel that explores the relationship further. There’s many messages of activism in here that I really appreciated as well, slut-shaming, minorities being victims of crime, and how women are more likely to be victims of abduction than men. Whilst I always feel a bit cringe when men write about female main characters, I can definitely appreciate that it’s coming from an LGBTQIAP+ own voices perspective. This wasn’t mentioned in the synopsis so it was also lovely to read during pride month 🏳️‍🌈

My sincerest thanks to @tomryanauthor and @albertwhitman for a copy of this book in exchange for my review. This author is definitely now on my radar!

4/5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A good YA mystery. I love the premise of this book and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. The characters were fantastic

I am SO into YA mysteries right now and really enjoyed I Hope Your Listening. It had the YA mystery vibe I love. We have a great female lead character in Dee, a teenager who can't forget about the unsolved case of her missing childhood best friend Sibby who was kidnapped while they played together. Dee starts an anonymous true crime podcast focused on finding missing people as a way to cope. When another girl goes missing, Sibby's case is back in the news and Dee is pushed in the spotlight again and motivated to find out what happened to her missing friend.

Loved seeing an LGTBQ+ lead character (Dee) and her relationship with Sarah and how it progressed throughout the book.

This is a character-driven book and I loved how the reader got to know the characters alongside the progression of the mystery at hand. The characters had real growth that felt true to and relatable to their ages. The mix of the cold case with the present day case was really well done and kept me turning the pages quickly to find out what happened.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and definitely recommend it to fans of YA mysteries!

Thank you to Netgalley and Albert Whitman & Company for the gifted e-copy for review.

This book, while somewhat predictable, was so good! I love a good, strong female lead. The conflicts between characters could have been developed a little more and given a little more drama. Overall, a good read but maybe more suited for middle grades.

I read Tom Ryan’s book Keep This To Yourself a couple years ago and loved it, so I was excited to read another by him. I enjoyed this one though not quite as much as KTTY. I Hope You’re Listening is a YA mystery novel. The main character, Dee, was present when her best friend was kidnapped and she was left behind (they were seven). Ten years later, Dee has a secret podcast where she tries to gather people to help solve similar crimes. She disguises her voice though, and only her friend, Burke, is aware.

When a young girl goes missing from Dee’s old house, the subject of Sibby (Dee’s childhood friend) starts coming up more often and now Dee is thrust into a mystery of whether the two are connected, and whether or not they are, is Sibby still alive? It was an intriguing read; one that I read really quick. I loved Dee’s parents and her girlfriend, Sarah, though I wish we had gotten a bit more from Sarah at the end of the book. Dee does make some dumb decisions in her search for the truth, but I felt like I could give her some leeway since Sibby was kidnapped right in front of her and even with her podcast, this is the first time she really puts herself into the actual investigation. If you like YA mysteries, I would recommend Tom Ryan.

This is a new genre for me, I’ve only read a small handful of mystery/thrillers at this point but with this book also being shelved as young adult and LGBTQA+, I figured it was a solid choice for me to try to branch out with. Considering my previous experience with the genre included such things as the wildly popular and very dark Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series and things like the Charlotte Holmes series, I still wasn’t sure what I actually thought of the genre. I think after reading this I’m closer to saying that I think I might be able to like mystery/crime books. At any rate, I at least liked this one, it had a lot going for it.
I Hope You’re Listening is about Dee Skinner, high school, senior and anonymous host of the hit true-crime podcast Radio Silent dedicated to sharing the stories and helping shed light on missing person cases with the help of her listeners. The one case she’s never talked about on Radio Silent is the reason why she started it in the first place: the abduction of her best friend Sybie when they were kids. Dee blames herself for not being able to do more to stop Sybie from being kidnapped back then so she does what she can to help others. Sybie’s disappearance has never been solved and Dee has done her best to try to move on and keep her podcast a secret but when another girl goes missing from the same street ten years later, Dee may not be able to ignore the need to investigate the links between the two cases. With the help of the girl who just moved in across the street, Dee finally tackles her town’s biggest unsolved mystery: what happened to Sybie all those years ago?
I found this book incredibly addicting and compelling. I loved the angle with the podcast and the laptop Detective Agency that the listeners formed. That element was powerful. I was also just very much on the edge of my seat at the various twists and turns and desperately curious about how the various mysteries would resolve and just so wary and hopeful and gosh the adrenaline was really pumping in a few places.
One of the things I really loved about the book though was Dee and Sarah’s relationship. Given how complicated and difficult so much else was it was so great that Dee had one thing that was reassuring and lovely and they were just so sweet. And like the fact that Dee’s queerness was never in question was just so great. It was just a basic fact to her and that was so nice to see.
So yes, because I really enjoyed myself with this one, I think I may yet try again with more thrillers/mysteries in the future, or if nothing else, I plan to give Tom Ryan another try in the future. I enjoyed this one a lot!

I Hope You're Listening by Tom Ryan is a book I've had on my TBR for a while, and it took me a while to feel like I was ready to read this. Once I got started, I found myself really drawn into the plot and read it almost continuously until I finished.

This book tells the story of Dee, a teenage girl whose best friend was abducted when they were young. As a means of coping with this loss and her feelings about not being able to do anything about her missing friend, Dee starts a podcast about missing persons that encourages listeners to help solve the crimes.

I loved the podcast segments featured in the book and thought that was a really interesting component to have as part of the storyline. I also really liked the mystery within this story and I found myself wondering what had happened to Dee's friend all those years ago and whether it was connected to the case in the present. This book really picked up for me around 60%, and I was surprised at the conclusion. I didn't figure out the mystery before the characters in the story did which is always a nice way to wrap up a book!

Overall, I felt this was a fantastic read and I'm sorry that I waited so long to get to it! I would highly recommend this one for fans of mysteries and YA titles.

I received an e-copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley which did not affect the contents of my voluntary review. All opinions are honest and my own.

This book was just amazing! I absolutely adore Tom Ryan and will buy anything he writes because he never disappoints. Full of twists and turns, I Hope You're Listening has stuck with me and still has me thinking about missing children, misdirection, and how we deal with trauma.

This book has a great hook. The start is great and I couldn’t put it down at first. I think what really lost me is how unrealistic the characters felt to me. Dee is 17, and yet this seems told more through the eyes of an adult. A particularly sophisticated, skilled adult. It’s more off putting than I would have thought. The story was not bad and the writing is good as well. I just don’t think it’s my style. I’d recommend this book to younger audiences more than any others. Thank you for the opportunity to review this book, I truly apologize how delayed this has been.

Dee was the girl who wasn't taken after witnessing her best friend's abduction. She then starts a true crime podcast to help solve unsolved cases. Reading "I Hope You're Listening" feels like you are on a Ferris wheel. I absolutely loved the representation in this book. We have a LGBTQ main character and minority characters and the disparity in their investigations.

I do feel like this book wasn't as climatic as I wanted it to be and overall fell a little flat in pacing. At times, I felt like this was two different books. But I enjoyed it nonetheless and would recommend it to fans of true crime podcasts.


** Thank you NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review. **

I think there is a lot of potential in this book, and capitalizing on the true crime podcast wave is a really smart idea. Ultimately I just feel like there's so much going on, and the actual solution seems so overworked. Dee makes a giant leap that doesn't make any sense and could have been reworked with an easy fix. It's not a bad book by any stretch, fast paced, queer rep, stay at home dad, but the pieces don't fit together as well as they should.

Nobody knows who the Seeker, true crime podcast Radio Silent’s mysterious host, is. And if Dee Skinner has it her way, no one ever will. The Seeker does what Dee never could. The Seeker operates Radio Silent, a podcast, helps a community of online Laptop Detectives find missing persons, closes cases. Dee though, Dee could only tell the police everything she remembered and watch as the years went by. As a decade passed since her best friend, Sibby, was taken from the woods leaving Dee the only witness. When another little girl goes missing in the same area, a little girl who lives in Dee’s old house, Dee will have to decide how far she is willing to go for answers. How far she is willing to go and, indeed, if she can even bring herself to look.

Tom Ryan’s I Hope You’re Listening is a book that I find myself having a hard time finding my feelings on. It feels, in many ways, like a selection of sub-plots that could not decide on a main idea and so made due. It feels like the core of the work is not properly there for everything to be built around, or like there is nothing to build off of. Which is a shame because there is a lot of potential here.

Dee having essentially both hidden herself away to avoid dealing with Sibby’s kidnapping while also having become the Seeker to try and keep other people from having to deal with those same feelings is something I really like the idea of. She feels isolated from her peers because she is the girl who got left when Sibby was taken, the only witness who could not tell anyone anything useful, so she turned to the internet and the anonymity it offers to become someone who could help. And she guards her secret identity as the Seeker as seriously as she can, and that is something I wish more had been done with. Early on a hot shot reporter, Quinlee Ellacott, emails the Seeker threatening to unmask them and suggesting that they just make this easy on themselves and give her an exclusive interview revealing their identity to the world. Said hot shot reporter shows up in Dee’s home town to cover the case of the missing little girl and she antagonizes Dee and her family because of the connection to Sibby’s disappearance a decade earlier. I would have loved to have seen more done with that, something to give a more solid on page threat to Dee’s anonymity as the Seeker and given the hot shot reporter more of a place in the story as a sort of secondary “threat” while Dee tried to figure out what she was going to do. Something to put more on page pressure on Dee to keep her from using Radio Silent to help with the current missing child case rather than her just not wanting to cover it because it feels too close to her.

I would have liked to see more build up in the relationship between Dee and Sarah, the new girl at school. They meet a few times and it is cute, but it does not feel like there is a relationship there until after they have already wound up together. After they are together I like the couple, but I want to see more of what makes the couple, more of what makes Dee trust Sarah and why she wants to open up to her. It almost feels like the best friend character, Burke, and Sarah could have been combined. The story sort of just replaces Burke with Sarah after a certain point, which leaves Dee feeling very isolated even as she opens up. It is, again, a place where more would have been better.

Which, really, is my issue across the board on I Hope You’re Listening, Ryan had several ideas that could have been quite good but it feels like he did not give any of them enough support material to entirely work. This is a book I enjoyed, but it also winds up being a book that felt oddly sectioned out. There is the plot of the missing girl and the plot of Sibby having been missing and the plot of the two missing women that Dee is covering on Radio Silent and the plot of Dee and Sarah getting together and then more minor things like Quinlee Ellacott digging for a scoop and generally antagonizing everyone she comes across. None of it feels like it quite fits together though. I found myself looking for how things tied together and how each case tied together and largely just not finding it. Which is a shame, I liked Ryan’s writing and enjoyed the characters. I wanted the more that it felt like I Hope You’re Listening needed because I was enjoying the book and felt like it could have been taken from enjoyable but not necessarily good to enjoyable and pretty great.

Ultimately, I enjoyed I Hope You’re Listening. I liked the characters and would happily read more featuring them, possibly even a series focused on the various cases brought up by Radio Silent. I would almost definitely read another book written by Tom Ryan. But he really needed to have taken the space to develop things more thoroughly and he needed to have tightened his focus and tied things together better. So, at the end of the day I give I Hope You’re Listening a three out of five.

I loved this story so much! This is easily one of the best YA mysteries I have read this year.

Where do I even begin? Do I talk about the gripping way the author constructs multiple missing cases in parallel? Or do I talk about what an amazing protagonist Dee is? How about the adorable romance between Dee and Sarah? There are just too many reasons to mention!

The plot is the standout of the story. There is a LOT happening as the author introduces multiple missing cases of Sibby, Layla, and Vanessa. He beautifully flashbacks between the past and present, and also changes the style to progress Vanessa’s case through the podcasts. Okay, there are a few minor things in the story that I didn’t grasp, like how Sarah finds out the secret, or what happens to Burke and Dee in the end. But, the main plot is so engrossing that I did not mind this.

Also, Dee is amazing in the lead. I loved the way she investigates Sibby’s disappearance while growing up with the secret of her podcast. Moreover, I also loved her romance with Sarah. I love the moments when they go to the Winter Carnival dance. I also adored the relationship Dee has with her parents. Similarly, the supporting characters are memorable too. Even if they only appear for a short time, Burke, Brianna, Quinlee, Jonathan, Terry, and everyone else add so well to the plot. Brianna and Quinlee are horrible characters that you despise.

Overall, this was an unforgettable read and I finished it in one sitting because I could not put it down. I love this author and want to read all his books!

I really wanted to like this book but unfortunately I could not get into it. I do not think this was the one for me. The premise was super interesting, but towards the end to me it just fell apart.

I would Highly Recommend this book to anyone who likes a good thriller or mystery. It was a captivating read. 4/5 stars because it was a bit hard to get into, but once you do it is just amazing.
Thank you to NetGalley and Albert Whitman & Company for giving me an ARC

This was just okay. Nothing new going on in this book that would have me recommending it to people. I feel like there are far great YA thrillers to pick up before this one. However, for those that do enjoy YA thrillers and can’t find something to read, you may enjoy this one.

i definitely didn't get around to reading this as soon as i hoped i would, but i ended up loving this so much more than i was expecting! i have a hit/miss relationship with thriller/mystery books, and this one took me by surprise (in a good way!).

it took me until about the 30% mark to get invested in the story, but by then i was absolutely hooked on the mystery and i read the rest in one sitting! the mystery was written in such a way that clues were laid in front of us with just enough space between them that the major twist still managed to surprise me, and it felt like i was solving the case along with Dee.

i thought the friends to lovers romance w/ Sarah was very cute, and i enjoyed Burke as a side character as well! the podcast element was really cool, and it would be interesting to hear that in an audiobook.

if you're looking for a fun read with wintery vibes - i'd definitely recommend this one!

I Enjoyed this book a lot, but it also felt like there was something missing. I dont usually say this, but I feel like the book could have benefited from being a bit longer.

That being said, I wanted to read more. It was a great story and great writing. I dont read many mysteries and this book had a bunch thrown in which I actually found really fun to read.

I thought it came together in a great climax as well.

2.5 rounded up

Thank you Albert Whitman & Company and Netgalley for providing me with a ARC in exchange for a honest review

TW/CW: Kidnapping, confinement, minor drug use

Synopsis:
Living in a small town in USA, where everyone knows everyone's business, 17 year old Dee Skinner is known as the 'girl who didn't get taken'. At at age seven, her best friend Libby was abducted when the two of them were playing alone in the forest.
Even now, ten years after the incident, Dee is overtaken by guilt - guilt for not being able to save Sibby when it happened but also guilt for not remembering enough details for the police to find her friend.
Feeling like everyone has been able to move on except her Dee channels her guilt into Radio Silent - a successful, true crime podcast where she takes on the anonymous part of The Seeker to cover missing persons cases across USA, cases that sometimes gets solved thanks to her listeners and the platform Radio Silent provides.
Only her best friend Burke knows that she is voice behind the Seeker, and Dee plans to keep it like that. She just wants to have the most normal life possible, and perhaps a chance to get closer to the intriguing girl thar moved in next door.

However, when a 11 year old girl, a girl who lives in Dee's old house, gets kidnapped everything is dragged back to the surface.
Is there a connection between this kidnapping and Sibby's? And exactly how much is Dee willing to risk to finally get some answers?




The narration in this YA mystery thriller shifts between first person narration when dealing with the present day, a third person narration in the flashbacks of the abduction, as well as transcripts of episodes of the Radio Silent podcast. As a person who loves to geek out about narratology (I know how pretentious that might sound, but bear with me - I'm a masters student in comparative literature, I wouldn't have made it this far without turning a little pretentious) I really appreciated that structure of story telling.

However, being "inside Dee's head" for most of the novel resulted in that a lot of the supporting characters felt a bit flat to me. I would've loved to get to know her stay at home father, Sibby's little sister Greta who grew up in the shadow of a sister she barely remembers, former childhood friend now high school Queen Bee Brianna etc, but unfortunately I felt like I didn't get the chance to.
Even worse, I felt something similar regarding both Dee's best friend Burke and her love interest Sarah, and sometimes even Dee herself.

Seeing as one of the reasons I love YA-novels is because of their tendency to focus on the individual (rather than social structures/communities) I can't help to feel a bit cheated whenever I finish a YA-book feeling like I haven't got to know the protagonist at all.

It's a shame because the book had lots of aspects I enjoyed - the effortless way Dee was allowed to be queer without having to come out, the representation of stay-at-home dads and the ever present theme of how much damage sensationalized news stories can do, to name a few.
Unfortunately that wasn't enough, since I often feel like a story falls flat for me if the characters have done so.

I would still recommend this book to anyone who prefers action driven stories, since the book really picked up the pase in it's later half.
I actually found myself reading with a raised heartbeat and I just wish that the conclusion of the book had been as exhilarating as the events leading up to it.