The It Girl by Ruth Ware
Ruth Ware’s The It Girl is a mystery centered on two friends/roommates: Hannah Jones and April Clarke-Cliveden. The girls meet up at Oxford and quickly team up with a group of friends: Will, Hugh, Ryan, and Emily. However, by the end of the year, April is dead.
Now, ten years have passed. Hannah and Will are expecting their first child, and April’s murderer, John Neville, has recently passed away. Then, a podcaster comes around asking questions. What is the truth? Does Hannah really know her friends as well as she thinks she does?
The It Girl was on my list of July most anticipated books, but it tanked. And it tanked hard.
To be completely honest, I might have rated this book higher if I had not just read Upgrade by Blake Crouch which was so completely awesome. Reading that book and then going to this is like eating the best meal of your life and just eating a regular meal.
Where to start?
This book is boring. It dragged over forever. I did not enjoy the ride. There are a few reasons.
One, the writing style of this book just did not work for me. It is way, way, way too long. I would read and read and read and read, and I would hardly make a dent in it.
Second, the writing style of a thriller is important. Let’s go back to Upgrade for a moment, a writing style that just worked. It had short paragraphs and short sentences. You may already know this but just in case you don’t–when you read a thriller and you are madly flipping through pages, you have a physical experience. It actually feels that you are running and catching up to the bad guy, increasing your blood pulse, almost as if you are part of the story. In The It Girl, the paragraphs, sentences, and chapters are just too long.
Third, the storytelling needed to be refined. If the author was sitting on a corner, relaying this story, I would have walked away. It didn’t capture my attention. The ending did not surprise me at all. It also was very boring and unremarkable.
If you liked Greenwich Park, I think you will probably like this one as well. They both have main characters who are expecting babies who are working their way through mysteries set in England.
Overall, if you have to buy either Upgrade or The It Girl, buy Upgrade.
*Thanks, NetGalley, for a free copy of this book in exchange for my fair and honest opinion.