This had a very high plot for a thriller. The setting and environment is very specific but once you've figured out the situation that our main characters are living in, it is a very interesting mystery. The ending did feel a little anticlimactic for me but it was overall very well told and a very interesting read! I really enjoyed the complicated dynamic between the main friends and how they worked together (and against each other) to solve the mystery of their friend's disappearance. I'm very excited to see what the author does next!

(this book was provided to me as an Advanced Reader's Copy by the publisher through netgalley)

I didn't expect this to be a YA sci-fi thriller/mystery/romance. It was a little bit of everything and moved quickly. After Blythe watches her best friend Gabi melt down at school, and their vice principal is found dead by apparent suicide, Blythe starts to question everything she knows. She suspects that people are keeping secrets. All of her friends, and her sister Sydney, have dreams and 'memories' of horrific things... but their parents tell them it's just their imagination. What is happening at their private school?

I liked the fast pace of this book, and it keeps you guessing, not knowing who to trust or who might be in danger. The ending is a little far-fetched, but if you count it as sci-fi it makes sense. Overall, it was an entertaining read.

thank you to netgalley for this arc! this was my first arc to read from netgalley, so I was excited! the plot was intriguing to me and it didn't disappoint. definitely unique and kept you wanting to read more! overall happy with how things unfolded but did want a little more information on the why behind CMT's actions. I really enjoyed how these characters were written and developed. they were easy to connect to!

Someone Is Always Watching was a fun, fast paced YA thriller. I did find it to be a bit slow in the beginning -- I kept putting it down and picking it back up another day. However, by the half way mark, it significantly picked up and I read the rest in one sitting. I found the concept of the book to be interesting. It was nice to pick up a science fiction thriller book (even if some of the science didn't always make sense).
I didn't think the different POVs were entirely necessary but they were well done. Each character was well-developed with their own voice. I also think there was a bit too much going on. There were so many things happening to each of the characters that I didn't feel were entirely resolved by the ending.
Overall, I would recommend this to my followers if they are looking for a quick weekend read with a little murder mixed in.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC!!

It’s been a while since I read a YA book and this one makes me want to keep requesting them. Great story about a group of friends who have to solve the puzzle that is their lives. Premise is good and I like that it’s not too much romance, not too much science fiction, just the right amount of imagination. Characters are all believable. Now to find others from this author… 😊

Gritty and disturbing. Premise is that a study group takes in children with violent behaviors, erases the memories of those behaviors and replaces them with new memories and modifications to the behaviors and then "follows" them in a made up town and home setting to see how the new situation is working. This study is to see if it would work on a larger scale in the real world to correct others and change criminal behavior and lower crime rates. The problem is that the memories aren't holding, the old memories are breaking through and causing issues in the friend group. The adults that are monitoring this group don't all have the same Intel and so there are breaks in the infrastructure for these kids. They take matters into their own hands to learn what is going on and when things break down, tragedy strikes. Very disturbing and sad. A first rate read, just hard with such scary real world connotations. Could it be done? Is it being done? Would it work? Would we want it to work? And what are the ramifications if it did break down? Would they have to pay for the original crime as well as the new one? Guilty of both? Such questions raised.

I'm sad I didn't enjoy this one as much as I thought I would.

I loved Kelly Armstrong's Darkest Powers series and had high hopes for this one. Unfortunately, it didn't meet my expectations.

The story follows Blythe a girl used to following the rules. Her friends start having mental break downs and Blythe starts seeing weird things after she has a concussion. Her friends and her start investigating when their friend Gabi goes missing after acting irrational and lashing out.

I didn't connect with any of the characters and thought that there was no chemistry between them. The mystery was very engaging at first but by the end I wasn't interested.

Reviewed for NetGalley:

The premise of this was good, the beginning was good. I was very interested to see why these students were having headaches, memory lapses, the mystery behind what was going on with Gabi, etc.

Soon after, the too many character perspectives lost me, along with the story.

Book Title: Someone is Always Watching
Author: Kelley Armstrong
Publisher: Penguin Random House Canada- Tundra Books
Genre: Teen/YA, Mystery Thriller
Pub Date: April 11, 2023
My Rating: 3 Stars

This YA Mystery starts when one teen snaps and kills their teacher. Our protagonist Blythe is a witness but doesn't remember it happening.
Blythe is ambitious, a math whiz, who attends a STEM high School that is for children of the researchers and employees of CMT, a neurological research lab.
She is someone who follows the rules but when she and her friends start to investigate, it seems no one is fully trustworthy.
How can Blythe and her friends trust each other when they can’t even trust their own memories?
This makes Blythe think it just might be okay to break a few rules.

Want to thank NetGalley and Penguin Random House- Tundra Books for granting me this early eGalley.
Publishing Release Date is April 11, 2023

I received an ARC from NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

The story seemed promising to me. We follow Blythe, a teenage girl that loves following the rules. She witnesses her friend have a mental breakdown and attack a teacher. The next day, she can't remember what happened but has "invasive thoughts" about events she thinks she is hallucinating. She and her friends investigate, and it seems everyone has a hidden truth, something that was concealed from them.

While I enjoyed the story at first, it was intriguing, and though it started slowly, the pace picked up after the first third of the book. It is well written, but the author insists on some elements for no apparent reason (so many recurring headaches/migraines at the beginning that are never mentioned afterward). It could have tied to the story, but no. It was just a random characteristic repeated over and over.

At first, I was interested in seeing where the story was going and how the characters evolve, but I stopped caring for them at one point. They felt unidimensional, like puppets serving the author, and weren't allowed any character development.

Still, I kept wanting to know what would happen next. Overall, it is a good story, sometimes rushed a little, but it kept my attention. It is nothing groundbreaking, but it was a good read.

What happens when your friends don't believe you when you tell them you are being watched? Who really knows what's happening in school and around town? Quick read that got me thinking about what can really happen when others are given their way.

Super interesting concept from Kelley Armstrong! Loved the twist between Tanya and Tucker at the end.
Absolutely could not get enough of Tucker! He was the perfect mix of protective and respectful/loving. His obvious love for Blythe throughout the entire book was achingly beautiful. Loved the friendly dynamic and mutual quiet love between the two.
Really enjoyed the mystery in this as well. I was sure I knew how the ending was going to turn out, but I missed the mark in the end.
Definitely recommend Someone Is Always Watching!

Blythe and Tucker have had a tumultuous friendship, and she hasn’t spent much time with him lately. But now they find themselves coming back together as Gabrielle, one of their friends, begins having random bursts of paranoia. Then their principal kills himself and Gabrielle is sent away unexpectedly. As the friend group try to understand what’s happening, they begin to uncover dark and disturbing secrets about everything they thought they knew.

This was a fascinating premise that was executed well. I enjoyed how the author controlled the release of information – it was fast enough to keep you interested but slow enough to keep the mystery engaging. While the ending and resolution weren’t the worst, I did find it a little dissatisfying in how rushed it felt then its vagueness. There were several themes explored in interesting ways as well, including nature vs. nurture and if the ends justify the means.

The characters were good overall. They had unique voices and personalities, but I wanted a bit more from them. I liked the relationships between the characters in the friend group and how that was explored, but a few of the secondary characters almost felt like afterthoughts. This story is told from multiple POVs, so we get to see several different sides of the same story.

This suspenseful YA mystery was quick and engaging, keeping me entertained. My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for allowing me to read this work, which will be published 11 April 2023. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.

I found this book to be fast paced, interesting and enjoyed the twisty plot points throughout the novel.
This was my first time reading one of the author's books but it definitely won't be the last.


Thank you to Net Galley, Kelly Armstrong and Penguin Random House Canada for providing me with a copy of this book.

I had pretty high expectations going into this book. I haven’t read the author’s other work but I’m aware of her. And the synopsis made it seem like this book would be right up my alley. At the beginning, I was certain this was going to be a five-star read for me. We had a girl behaving irrationally, with paranoia over being watched on the school security cameras to the point she is willing to murder her vice principal or kill herself to escape them. Mix in some nonconsensual memory-erasure and a concern that the people raising the teen characters are not their actual biological parents, and you have the makings of an incredible sci-fi thriller. I was so ready for this to be my next favorite book.

But then it turned out the teens had the whole plot figured out in practically the first quarter of the book. There was nothing for the reader to figure out, no clues doled out to allow us to put together the puzzle pieces and figure out what was going on. The story devolved into the teens hashing and rehashing their theories over and over, and the plot became convoluted. By the end it sounded like they were just trying to force the pieces together to fit a story that really didn’t make sense. In the end there was no government conspiracy, no evil organization. Characters died for no real purpose other than unfortunate little accidents. Some characters had no point or purpose in the story other than to solve what appeared to be problems on the author’s end. For example, there are several mentions made of a character named Andre, who is part of the main characters’ friend group. Except he never actually appears in the book save for one brief moment where he hands a razor blade to another character to be used as a weapon later. Could she not have gotten a razor blade from anywhere else? I don’t understand why Andre was even in the book. There is also a scene where the teens steal some encrypted files, and they reach out to a teen whose sole purpose in the book was to decrypt those files. Cassidy actually had a very interesting role to play in the beginning, as the main character’s younger sister’s love interest, and she had a backstory about being trapped in a religious organization with homophobic, abusive parents. But once she decrypts the files for the main character, she is never seen again. She served her purpose and the character was then just dropped from the book, same as Andre.

Speaking of stealing classified files, my largest problem with this book is that, despite being called “Someone is Always Watching,” it turns out nobody was ever watching! I imagined that since all the main characters were teenagers involuntarily being experimented on, that they would be closely monitored. But they freely spy, break and enter, and steal without consequence or really any fear of being caught. It was just too easy for them to go sneaking around and Gabrielle’s whole hangup about security cameras, which were expected to play a huge role in the story that took its title from that issue, turned out to just be Gabrielle’s personal issue from childhood and had nothing to do with anybody else and never really came into play after the inciting incident. The adults in the story never have any idea what’s going on, even with their own children. Absent adults are often a problematic issue in YA books, but in this case it was an especially questionable choice because they were supposed to be scientists running an experiment, and they had absolutely no clue what was happening with their subjects at any point in the book.

The first quarter of the book felt really polished, fleshed-out and filled with what I expected to be clues to unlocking the big mystery behind the rest of the book. But the longer I read, the more convoluted and rushed the story felt. The beginning feels like a finished product, but everything after the halfway mark feels like a first draft still pending editing. Suddenly a lot of things seemed to just be summarized instead of the reader getting to see the scenes fully play out, more like an outline was being drafted than the second half of a book being written. Devon kidnapped Gabrielle, but she suddenly pops out of nowhere in the final scene, and the reader never knows how she was kidnapped, from where, where she’d been held or how. The biggest mystery in the book revolved around “where’s Gabrielle and who took her?” and we actually never find out those things.

I was confused as to why one character's perspective was written in first-person but everyone else's chapters were written in third. I didn't notice at first, but once I did, it felt distracting. I liked reading from Blythe's perspective the best because she felt like the most fully-realized character, but it also made me not care about the other characters as much because there was an obvious focus on Blythe.

I was also distracted by the names of the siblings, Tanya and Tucker. I couldn't help think about country music singer Tanya Tucker every time. Was that an intentional reference? If so, maybe some clues should be sprinkled into the story. Maybe their dad is a big Tanya Tucker fan. Otherwise, it was distracting and didn't make sense.

I also noted some dated language, like when the main character uses the word “ticker-tape.” I had no idea what that is, and I’m in my 40s. Google explained the concept to me but said the word had fallen out of use by 1970. So I don’t understand why teens would be using a word like that, or how teens today would be expected to understand it when they see it.

I feel like there are good bones and serious potential to this book but they need fleshing out. I was very invested in the beginning, but the more I read, the less I enjoyed it. In its current state I would not be able to recommend this book and I would not purchase a copy to reread it.

I have read enough Kelley Armstrong to know what a solid writer she is (though this is my first read of her YA), so this book was a little disappointing. She does something here, twice, that always disappoints me when I see it in a mystery: she allows a character to clearly know something (here, the identity of the perpetrator), but hides it from the reader. If it’s revealed on the next page, that’s one thing, but when it’s chapters later, I find it to be a cop-out. She’s a much better writer than that, so it saddens me to see her use this device. I also felt like the perpetrator was so obvious far in advance, as were some other plot points, that it took the mystery out for me. I did find the concept of the book compelling, but, unfortunately, it didn’t deliver.

sadly, this one started off so intriguing and heart pounding, but it fell kinda flat after that 🙃

I love a good ol mind control premise, especially when it has to do with sci fi advancements and not a divine intervention (*cough* manifest *cough*)! so I was super into the beginning and the mystery of the government hiding certain events!

the intrigue, however, ended there. the characters were capable of only making bad decisions and wandering off on their own. literally, they did nothing else.

and don’t even get me started on their parents. for being labeled helicopter parents, they sure were pretty lenient about their high school children 🤨

the ending was a little too wrapped up and HEA for this kind of story. I wanted an ambiguous sci-fi ending, and instead, I got “and all was well and right in the world.” and I was like … alrighty then?

it just felt super unedited and disjointed for me, but I loved the premise!!

thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review!

rating: 2 stars
wine pairing: napa valley sauvignon blanc

I have been a Kelly Armstrong fan forever. I did worry that I may have aged out of her YA books, but after reading this, I am still a fan. Definitely a suspenseful read. I admit there were some unexpected twists. And, without sharing too much, there is moral level to the book. Do our actions as children define us? It did feel a bit rushed through the ending and open ended enough for additional books. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me a e copy to read and review.

I chose this book to read based on reading books by this author in the past (supernatural books). This did not disappoint! Such a great psychological thriller with amazing characters! Great pace, and loved the mystery of it as it unraveled. Great ending, read it in one sitting!

This was my first Kelley Armstrong book and it won't be my last.

From those early pages to the rest of this rapidly paced YA thriller, I was hooked. The cast of characters is decent sized but told through only four of their POVs: Blythe, Tanya, Tucker and Callum.

What would you do if you couldn't trust your memories?

This was a decent psychological thriller delving into the science fiction of the mind. More can't be said without revealing the plot. But the reveals, and there are many, are good. Highly recommend for fans of YA and thrillers.