Title: The Girls Are All So Nice Here
Author: Laurie Elizabeth Flynn
Pages: 400
Published by: HQ
Release date: 1st April 2021
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.
The Girls Are All So Nice Here opens when Ambrosia Wellington receives an invitation to her ten-year college reunion. Only, slipped in with all the expected information about lodging and the weekend’s schedule is an anonymous letter that says: “It’s time to talk about what we did.” Instantly, Ambrosia realizes that the secrets of her past—and the people she thought she’d left there—aren’t as buried as she’d thought. Amb can’t stop fixating on what she did—and who she did it with. Larger-than-life Sloane Sullivan (“Sully”), who could make anyone do anything. The game they played to get a boy who belonged to someone else, and the girl, Amb’s angelic roommate, who paid the price.
Amb had thought that she and Sully had gotten away with what they did their first semester at Wesleyan. But as Amb receives increasingly menacing messages during the reunion, it becomes clear that she’s being circled by someone who wants more than just the truth. Amb discovers that her own memories don’t tell the whole story, and that her actions and friendship with Sully had even more disturbing consequences than she ever imagined.
Told in alternating timelines between the reunion and Ambrosia’s turbulent first months of college, The Girls Are All So Nice Here is a gripping rollercoaster ride of a novel that examines the dark complexities of female friendship and the brutal lengths girls can go to take what they think they are owed.
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Firstly, thank you to HQ for sending me a review copy of The Girls Are All So Nice Here via Netgalley, and for my spot on this blog tour!
The Girls Are All So Nice Here is a dark and chilling story of toxic friendship, manipulation, and revenge, packed to the brim with twists, turns, and betrayal.
I could not put this book down.
Told alternatively through the past and present tense, The Girls Are All So Nice Here kept me guessing the whole way through, teasing at the tragic events which took place during Ambrosia’s first year at college.
At the beginning of her college journey, Ambrosia (‘Amb’) is desperate to be liked, to fit into this new environment.
Enter Sully, a whirlwind of a character who is the centre of attention in every social situation. People either love her, or they love to hate her. And Amb is determined to be her friend.
She soon realises that Sully uses people for entertainment, and dumps them when she’s done. But Amb will go to extreme lengths to stay by Sully’s side.
And then we have Flora, Amb’s nice roommate, who befriends Amb but doesn’t realise that she is becoming trapped in Amb and Sully’s twisted web.
At times heart-wrenching, shocking, disturbing, and unsettling, I couldn’t look away. After a months-long reading slump in which it took me weeks to read a single book, I devoured this book in three days, I was so desperate to get to the truth of what happened.
And every time I thought I’d guessed it, a new twist came along, darker than the last, which had me guessing all over again. Each reveal was chilling, the truth shocking, and the final twist almost had me falling out of my seat.
It’s worth reiterating that this book is very dark, and I’d recommend looking into the content warnings if you feel like you might need that. I’ve listed the ones that I noted at the end of this review.
I finished this book late at night and was still thinking about it over my morning coffee the next day. If you hadn’t guessed it already, the girls are not actually very nice here.
Content warnings
rape, suicide, bullying, stalking, drug and alcohol use, threats, victim-blaming
Be sure to check out the other blogs participating in this tour!
The Anatomy of a Bookworm 