THE GIRLS ARE ALL SO NICE HERE

SYNOPSIS

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.

Title: The girls are all so nice here

Author: Laure Elizabeth Flynn

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Publication date: March 9, 2021

REVIEW

RATING: ⭐⭐

Talk about misleading titles! The girls AREN’T all so nice here. In fact, they’re terrible. This is a story about mean girls being mean just because they can, and I hate that. I’m all up for morally corrupted characters making debatable choices, but only if there’s some kind of motivation behind their acts, not only for the sake of it. Here there isn’t any motivation at all!

I found both main characters so despicable I had a really hard time getting into this. Sully is the quintessential manipulative mean girl and Ambrosia is just a pathetic and insecure girl seeking her approval. I could not warm up to any of them nor in the past line, nor in the present one. If I were supposed to feel some empathy for Amb in the present the author didn’t get it right. I found her very self-centered, worrying only about her life not going up in pieces and not showing any real remorse for what they did. It was disgusting! I hate it when a character’s justification for their acts is “he/she doesn’t deserve what they have, but I do, so it should be mine”. 

I didn’t find the present line mystery of who was behind the notes that exciting. There were some character that seemed to be there just to add suspects to the pool, but they didn’t have a real role in the story. The ending was in part predictable but still managed to surprise me with some details, although I’m not so sure how realistic they were.

After finishing it I learnt this is the author’s first adult novel and that previously she has written several YA. I’m sorry to say that this one still read like YA to me. Mean young girls behaving like mean young girls with mean young girls motivations. 

Although not my favorite I’m still willing to give the author’s next work a chance as long as there’re no mean girls involved! 😅