The It Girl

I've read two Ruth Ware books this year and i'm actually in love with her.

Didn't like a certain part of the ending (which does majorly impact how i view the book) which does lower the star rating to a 4.. everything else is a 5 star read though!

i'm a pure genius so i guessed who done it and how it was done but it didn't take away from the book at all, i still enjoyed the twists!

I've been all over the place with books and audiobooks lately. I put The It Girl and Rivals on a library hold and they both came in!

The newest thriller/mystery from Ruth Ware started slow for me. It wasn't until halfway through that I started getting into it.

And, of course, I listened to the audiobook because Imogen Church.

This follows Hannah and her struggle over her best friend's death in college, still going over what happened and what she remembers ten years later. Did she send the wrong person away for April's murder? Did she really see what she saw or what did she miss?

She starts digging into the past after the person who was convicted of April's murder dies in prison. She needs to know if she condemned an innocent person to die in prison.

I like to be surprised as to who did it. This might be too easy to figure out, but the why is what got me.

If you like Ruth Ware, it's a pick for sure!

I love all of Ruth Ware's books but this one took me ~50% before I was hooked.

It's not my favorite but I was confident in my 3 star rating until about halfway through when I realized I kept reaching for the audiobook to continue. I was so eager to figure out who did it, as well as learn the future of Hannah, Will, and the baby. It was a good ride.

Note the audiobook quality is not great. The narrator is good, but half the book sounds like it was recorded in a stadium; it is echoy. 

2.5 stars

Very middle-of-the-road story to me.

It was entertaining, I'll give it that. The mystery was interesting but it became repetitive, the pacing was off, and Hannah's stupid decisions started to annoy me from a certain point and I started to lose interest. The twist was interesting, but the motives were lacking.

I was expecting much more from this one.

I liked the beginning and the flashback chapters; academic thrillers about a mysterious friend group will always be one of my favorite tropes. Once the flashback chapters ended, I lost interest. This book was about 150 pages too long. We are reminded that Hannah is pregnant on every page, and it got so stale. She was also making really stupid and dangerous decisions investigating the case and she was very unlikeable. The ending was not satisfying to me and I was skimming the last 100 pages. 

Intrigerend en voor het grootste deel een meeslepend verhaal, maar misschien een beetje te langdradig.
Ik vond het heen en weer schakelen tussen het heden en het verleden een goeie keuze, maar het feit dat onze hoofdpersoon er geen probleem mee had om plotseling iedereen te verdenken die ze ooit had ontmoet behalve de persoon die ze aanvankelijk beschuldigde, maakte het een beetje te ongeloofwaardig.
Sommige rode haringen lagen er ook een beetje te vingerdik op of werden nooit bevredigend uitgelegd, wat toch wel wat ten koste ging van de eigenlijke grote onthulling.
Dat gezegd hebbende, was ik grotendeels geboeid door het verhaal en vond het moeilijk om het neer te leggen, omdat ik wilde weten hoe het zou aflopen. En dat is eigenlijk alles wat ik van een thriller verlang, dus missie zeker geslaagd!

Slow slow SLOW. Slow and boring for almost all of it. Almost DNF'd, but stuck it out because I was curious enough to see where it was going. What hooked me was the way it highlights an imperfect victim in April. Messy girls deserve dignity too, and this book does a great job exploring that idea. 
I guess it did pick up in the last, like 1/5 of the book. 
Didn't like that the motivation for the murder was only given to us through the main character's speculation. And then the motivation itself was lame. It feels lazy to leave things open to interpretation in a book like this. 
I did like how the pranking thing came full circle. 
At the very least it all made sense, the reveal was plausible if not necessarily believable, didn't leave any loose ends that bothered me. 

This book was way over detailed and unnecessarily long. I felt the story did not move forward in a lot of places where it should have. To give an example, I was 150 pages into the book and I felt like I went no where with the story. The second half is a little better and the twist is pretty good. However, after reading all the detailing and dialogue the payoff to get to the climax and ending is not the most satisfying.

This will be the last book I read from this author.

I disliked profoundly the character work, the lack of development, the non-existent set up for the motive, the pace of the story, the way Ruth Ware beats me over the head with the same phrases until I grow to hate them.

And all of that wouldn't have been so bad, but for the fact that I am tired of contemporary domestic drama being sold to me as a thriller.

If you're looking for a college murder mystery with twists and turns, this is a good book to pick up. I really enjoyed the twists and turns, but there were too many dead ends to the “investigation”. By the time I got to the ending I was like finally we made it! It felt unbalanced, there was a lot of build up for an un-explosive ending. I'm not saying the ending was bad, in fact I think it was solid, there was just too much filler to get there. 

Bonus points for the audio book using different voices & accents for each character.