The Girls Are All So Nice Here | ARC Review

Synopsis

Two former best friends return to their college reunion to find that they’re being circled by someone who wants revenge for what they did ten years before—and will stop at nothing to get it—in this shocking psychological thriller about ambition, toxic friendship, and deadly desire.

A lot has changed in the years since Ambrosia Wellington graduated from college, and she’s worked hard to create a new life for herself. But then an invitation to her ten-year reunion arrives in the mail, along with an anonymous note that reads “We need to talk about what we did that night.”

It seems that the secrets of Ambrosia’s past—and the people she thought she’d left there—aren’t as buried as she’d believed. Amb can’t stop fixating on what she did or who she did it with: larger-than-life Sloane “Sully” Sullivan, Amb’s former best friend, who could make anyone do anything.

At the reunion, Amb and Sully receive increasingly menacing messages, and it becomes clear that they’re being pursued by someone who wants more than just the truth of what happened that first semester. This person wants revenge for what they did and the damage they caused—the extent of which Amb is only now fully understanding. And it was all because of the game they played to get a boy who belonged to someone else, and the girl who paid the price.

Alternating between the reunion and Amb’s freshman year, The Girls Are All So Nice Here is a shocking novel about the brutal lengths girls can go to get what they think they’re owed, and what happens when the games we play in college become matters of life and death.

Review

This book was pretty dark and gritty and somewhat of an interesting read. Not my favorite thriller/mystery, but I’m glad I finished it.

This book jumps between the present and the past, specifically, the year everything went down for our main character, Ambrosia. I’m glad we got insights into the past while still being able to follow along with the mystery unfolding in the present.

Most characters in this book are pretty unlikeable, but I don’t think we were meant to be rooting for any of them. They all did things wrong in the past and most of them are still pretty miserable in the present. I just kept wanting to smack them all on the head, especially Amb, for the decisions they were making. But, then again, that’s kinda the lesson to be learned from the book. It’s meant to show what toxic friendships and lust/desire can lead to if not checked.

Overall, I wasn’t wowed by this book, but it did have some good moments. I think the lessons it touched on are important and, perhaps most of us won’t experience things to this extreme, but they’re things to keep in mind all the same.

Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed a gifted and advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Rating

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