SYNOPSIS
Mary used to be such a nice girl. She was the resident whiz kid of Liberty Lake, Minnesota—the quiet, chubby teen with the scholarship to an Ivy League school. But three years later, “Ivy League Mary” is back—a thinner, cynical, restless failure who was kicked out of Cornell at the beginning of her senior year and won’t tell anyone why. Taking a job at the local grocery store, Mary tries to make sense of her life’s sharp downward spiral.
Then beautiful, magnetic Olivia Willand goes missing. A rising social media star, Olivia is admired by everyone in Liberty Lake—except Mary. Once Olivia’s best friend, Mary knows better than anyone that behind the Instagram persona hides a willful, manipulative girl with sharp edges. As the town obsesses over perfect, lovely Olivia, Mary wonders if her disappearance might be tied to another missing person: nineteen-year-old DeMaria Jackson, whose case has been widely dismissed as a runaway.
Who is the real Olivia Willand, and where did she go? What happened to DeMaria? As Mary pries at the cracks in the careful facades surrounding the two missing girls, old wounds will bleed fresh and force her to confront a horrible truth.
Maybe there are no nice girls, after all.
Title: Nice Girls
Author: Catherine Dang
Publisher: William Morrow
Publication date: September 14, 2021
REVIEW
RATING: ⭐⭐⭐💫
“Ivy League Mary” could not see the moment to leave her hometown behind, but after three years away at college she gets expelled after an incident and is forced to get back. With a tense relationship with her father and a not so bright future she gets invested in an old childhood friend’s disappearance. When another girl’s arm is recovered from a lake she’s determined to prove both cases are connected at the same time she must face some old wounds.
I think Nice Girls was a good debut and Ms. Dang’s future in the writing world really promising.
I got drawn into the story pretty quickly. The writing was solid and even when things didn’t seem to move forward it was good enough to hold my interest.
Mary was not a really likable character but you could empathize with her to a point. The incident that motivated her expulsion was a bit out of proportion. I don’t know, I guess I was expecting something more…spectacular?
Her role as “amateur sleuth” was not really substantiated either. Why so much interest in those girls? She didn’t know one of them and the other one was just an old acquaintance! What I liked was how it touched upon racial injustice and the different way the disappearances were treated depending on the victim’s race both by the police and the press. It is disgraceful that this is still happening today!.
The mystery kept throwing around red-herrings that kept me changing theories about the killer and its motivations, although I had my eye on one character that turned out to be the correct one. Things got a bit OTT as the end got near and the actual ending left me with some unanswered questions.
I listened to the audiobook version and the narrator did a really good job portraying all the different characters.
A pretty decent debut so I will definitely keep my eye out for Ms. Dang’s next release.
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