The Girls Are All So Nice Here

By Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Published by HQ

What it’s about?

From Goodreads:

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.

What I think:

This is Mean Girls go to college on drugs!

Ambrosia reluctantly heads back to head 10 year college reunion to face the demons if her past and confront the truth about her actions.

The chapters are split between the present where Ambrosia does not want to go to the reunion as she has worked hard to put her experiences at Wesleyan behind and become a different person, and her freshman year at college as she navigates the world of dorms, boys and parties.

She is determined to be someone new. Never feeling like she fitted in at high school she wants to reinvent herself and recover from her break up with her boyfriend.

She rejects the friendship from, too good to be true roommate, Flora, and instead gravitated towards Sloane Sullivan. Charismatic and reckless, Sully introduces Amb to a life of parties, drugs and casual sex.

Amb still feels like an outsider. And then she meets a boy who she think finally understands her. And Sully will help her get him.

The truth about the events of that night emerge slowly through a series of flashbacks. As a narrator Amb is honest and vulnerable but can the reader trust what she says?

This is such a compelling read – it’s a read page turner and I could not put it down. There are some shocking twists along the way. The reader has to work to unravel the truth among the lies.

Thank you to HQ Stories for gifting me a copy of this gripping read.