Reviews with content warning for Toxic friendship - They'll Never Catch Us

Reviews tagging 'Toxic friendship'

They'll Never Catch Us by Jessica Goodman

13 reviews

aformeracceleratedreader's review

dark reflective sad medium-paced

3.0

Pretty solid story, but I didn't LOVE it. I liked seeing how the sisters relationship grew and changed. I knew a bunch of people who were in crosscountry so that was pretty cool to read a story centered around a sport people don't really focus on. I think the very end was pretty satisfying. Wish Noah would've faced more consequences tho.

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haley49's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I really really enjoyed this book. Ya thrillers are very hit or miss and this hit the majority of its beats. I enjoyed the story of sisterhood and how women are often perceived a certain way and it impacts how they are treated by the men in power. I liked the brief inclusion on how this perception of women impacts races differently.

However, it did slip up in the end and the cause-effect did not seem to add up for certain characters and the ending was a but abrupt.

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libraryghost's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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booksofautumn's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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bookedandbusy's review

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mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I loved this book! It was such a great thriller. It kept me guessing and I never saw the plot twist coming!

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theromanticace's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

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lia_reads_123's review

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I loved this book. It loses a half point because the beginning was slow at some points and the ending was partially predictable (I'll go into more detail at the bottom under spoiler tags). Otherwise, it was amazing. The characters aren't always great people, but you can see why they're doing certain things. The last quarter of the book was my favorite part, because questions started getting answered and pieces started falling into place, just for more questions to be brought up.

I said the ending was partially predictable, and by that I mean Ellie's involvement. Around the time Mila disappeared, the book started focusing much more heavily on Stella's POV and never explained where Ellie was the morning, making it fairly easy to realize Ellie wasn't innocent. However, Raven's involvement was COMPLETELY unpredictable. She would've been the last one I guessed. I did like that it made us think it was just Ellie and Noah, only to reveal that Raven did much worse.

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bethany_grace's review

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dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

RAVEN???!

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smugreadsbooks's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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emily_mh's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

This was such an improvement from They Wish They Were Us, which aside from problematic books I read, was probably the worst book of 2021 for me. They’ll Never Catch Us was more enjoyable, the message on misogyny and sexism shone through, and the conclusion was much better. I also liked how Goodman didn’t sanitise how teenagers act. I did have three major criticisms, though. The first is that Ellie and Stella’s voices were incredibly similar. I sometimes had to check halfway through a chapter whose perspective I was reading from. The second is that the inciting incident didn’t happen until 37% through the book, so it was quite a slow start. The third is spoilery:

essentially, I wished the cold cases played a bigger part in the mystery. Because they were already technically solved before the book began, I would have liked a more definitive statement that X person definitely did do Y but the police screwed it up, rather than X person probably did Y but the police screwed it up.

Regardless of these criticisms, this book has shown me that They Wish They Were Us was probably a one-off bad book, so I’m interested in what Goodman writes next.

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