book reviews

Girl in Snow is Danya Kukafka debut novel exploring how a small town in Colorado reacts after the most popular girl in school, Lucinda Hayes, is murdered. Three characters share the spotlight as narrators: Cameron, Lucinda’s stalker; Jade, a unpopular girl whom Lucinda was indifferent to; and Russ, a police officer who is in love with Cameron’s dad. As they tell their stories, we learn about their relationships with Lucinda and their grief, longing, love, and obsession.

I feel like I need to 1) read more, a LOT more, and 2) write intelligent book reviews of every book I read. After all, I want to succeed in book publishing, right? And this is how you do it?

I’ve fallen victim to some weird mix of internal pressure (you need to write book reviews to advance your career) and the fear of missing out (everyone on #bookstagram writes several reviews each month) that led me to this mindset. I have to churn out book reviews, especially if I am so lucky to get my hands on an ARC or a newly released book. When I received an ARC of Shari Lapena’s latest thriller, A Stranger in the House, I felt that urge to read it just so I could write a review of it. I don’t usually read thrillers, but here it was, a golden opportunity to read a new book and showcase my book reviewing skills to the world.

Spoiler alert: This review has all the spoilers for The Girls. Although, I’m not sure how you don’t know what this book is about by now (it was ALL over bookstagram last summer) and how you haven’t come to the conclusion that it ends with a murder.

Emma Cline’s debut novel The Girls made a splash in the summer of 2016. Readers loved the story of Evie, a girl who flirts with joining a cult as she grows away from her mother and her former best friend and becomes entranced by a girl—Suzanne. The novel ends with gruesome murders, which leaves Evie questioning what she was and is capable of.

It was really hard for me to get into this novel for two reasons: The jumps between the past and the present were confusing at the beginning of the novel, and Cline’s word choices jarred me.