People Like Us

-

People Like Us by Dana Mele (375 pages)
Overview: There's a girl dead in the lake. Kay and her friends are the ones to discover her body after a school Halloween dance, and they're immediately at the top of the detective's suspect list. While no one else has anything to fear, Kay has a long history with police questioning and suspicion, and she's terrified of finding herself in the same position again. Then she gets an email with a link to a revenge website that claims to have been made by Jessica, the girl that they didn't even know till they found her body. But as the website intensifies and orders Kay to betray her friends one by one to keep her secrets under wraps, Kay begins to realize there's something more sinister at play. Overall: 4 

 Characters: 4 Kay is an interesting character. Guilt plagues her and informs nearly every action in her life, but once she gets to boarding school, Bates, she transforms into a quintessential mean girl with a whole posse.
They don't really get much into Kay's other friends, but, besides the murder, the main story centers on the love triangle (or possibly some other shape) between Kay, her best friend Brie, and her on again off again boyfriend Spencer. Brie is dating another girl, and her story with Kay is one of plenty of missed connections. I liked both these characters, and the approach to their relationships is very interesting, but Mele never digs into any of the other character's motivations. They're very vivid through Kay's eyes, but they have no incentives or motives of their own.

Plot: 4 There were plenty of twists and turns to keep you going through the book. The boarding school, the revenge website, Kay's ruining personal life... there's lots to choose from. My only comment is that there are a lot of scenes that slowed the pacing down that didn't really contribute to the plot or gave minor details that could have been incorporated in other ways. Overall, though, I was pleased with how all the little details crescendoed up to the big reveal as any good thriller should.

Writing: 4 I LOVED Mele's style. It was immersive and kept me drawn into the world. It made the pages turn quickly, and it planted the seeds of the murder investigations very well. Although I'm not in love with the ending, the story was fun and engaging for the most part.

*Possibly Spoilery Comments, but I have to say it*
Proceed with caution...
I'm not naming who the killer turned out to be, but if you're in the middle of it, you might guess based on what I'm going to say, so, you've been warned. Anyway, I was in love with this book before the last twentyish pages. Then it's revealed that the killer was the awkward girl that Kay and her friends bullied, and she killed the girl as collateral to her greater plan to punish Kay by framing her for it. Clearly, and it is said that she was a pathological liar, but there's something deeper there when it comes to mental illness from the way she described how and why she did it. Instead of focusing on how much of a tragedy it was that the girl's mental illness or personality disorder went undiagnosed and untreated, it's mostly chalked up to how sad it was that bullying lead this girl to snap, and it just came off as victim blaming to me, and I didn't like the jump between she was hurt and she had to get revenge that was a magnitude uncountably greater than what was done to her. While it's horrible how Kay treated her, it wasn't Kay or any of those girl's fault that the girl did what she did because she did not have a normal, sane reaction in anything during or after the crime. I feel like the way the author treated it did no service to portraying how harmful bullying could be or how victims of bullying respond.

Links of Interest:
Into YA with Nikki Barthelmess: Here
The Quiet You Carry: Review Here
On The Come Up: Review Here
You Asked For Perfect: Review Here

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You'd Be Home By Now by Kathleen Glasgow: YA Book Review

-
Image
  You'd Be Home By Now  by Kathleen Glasgow  I'm very thankful to the publisher for providing me with this ARC to share my honest thoughts on this book with all of you. Overview: Emory has always been the good one. The nice one. The easy one. The invisible one. Her older sister, Maddie, is gorgeous and talented. Her older brother, Joey, is struggling with addiction issues, and her parents saddle Emory with the responsibility of being his forever babysitter. No one thinks about Emory- ever. Which leads her to pick up a habit of stealing and collecting small things and hooking up with the high school baseball star next door to feel seen and important. While Joey is stuck on the rollercoaster of his addiction, his family is right there behind him, and as Emory struggles to keep Joey stable, she's also left to contend with her own precariously okay life. Overall: 5+ Characters: 5 Emory is maybe the most universally relatable teen character in YA. She feels unheard and unseen by
Read more

Hole In The Middle

-
Image
Hole In The Middle  by Kendra Fortmeyer (September 4) Overview: Morgan is like everyone else starting senior year. She's easing into adulting and thinking about her future. She's living in an apartment with her best friend Caro and trying to figure out how to break it to her super driven, successful, fitness guru mom that she doesn't really want to go to college. Morgan also spends a fair amount of time at the doctor's office because she has a peach sized hole straight through her abdomen. There's been one rule her entire life. Don't let anyone know about the hole, and, besides Caro and Caro's boyfriend Todd, she's succeeded. One night, though, she cuts herself a crop top and goes out to a club called Mansion where she shows off her true self, in all her glory. Photos spread like a wildfire on the internet, and she's approached by a new doctor who thinks she might have a cure. Though it  comes with press crews, a boy who has a lump that won'
Read more

Happy Place by Emily Henry: romance review

-
Image
Happy Place  by Emily Henry Overview: Harriet found her friend group for life in college. They might as well be her family. They've grown together through graduation and law school and medical school and one member leaving to go to South America to learn organic farming because they always come back together to spend a week in Maine every year at one friend's family summer house. Now, as they confront true adulthood and the changes that come with it, they have one more summer together before the house is sold to set the course of the future of their bonds. Overall: 4 Do I think this is an incredible romance? Maybe not. But it is a great book.  Characters: 4 There's a lot of characters in this book. The core friend group is six people, plus we get a closer look at both Harriet and her ex-fiancé Wyn's families. They're all well developed and have good dimension despite there being so many characters involved.  Harriet is at a crisis point in her life. She's in the
Read more