Goodreads

Release date: March 9, 2021

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Genre: Mystery/Thriller

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:

Ahh this was such a devious, wickedly fun thriller! Think Mean Girls with a sharper, darker edge and that’s what you have here. Secrets, lies and girls behaving appallingly make up this tale of horribly toxic relationships, backstabbing and revenge.

Told from alternating timelines from back when Amb was in college and then ten years later as she’s getting ready to go to her reunion, this style almost always keeps my attention. I usually prefer one timeline over the other but here I was equally invested in both. It starts out a little slow but then about halfway through things ramp up and I was totally hooked. I kinda predicted a few of the twists, but seriously didn’t even care because this was so dark and shocking that I was just too swept up in the story I couldn’t be bothered enough to be mad about guessing. This one was pretty disturbing and hits basically every trigger around, but if that doesn’t bother you definitely check this one out!

Overall rating: 4/5

Thanks to the publisher for my review copy.