Reviews with content warning for Infidelity - Final Girls

Final Girls had a slow beginning and a quick end. Many reviews complained about the pacing throughout the book, but I think it adds to the chaos and unravelling of Quincy’s peaceful and put together life after Sam’s arrival. The pace picks up as Quincy begins to return the memories of her massacre and the anger and violence she’s hidden inside herself for a decade.

I felt like the twists and reveals were nicely paced and put together. There was enough suspicion threaded that I got the impression that people aren't who they were portrayed as and that Quincy’s memories might be wrong. But the final villain twist caught me completely off guard.

I liked the snippets of Quincy’s memories of the massacre spaced throughout the book until Sam’s reveal and the ending. Each memory lined up with current events in Quincy’s life, while keeping me interested in figuring out what actually happened and why everyone distrusted Quicny’s memory loss.

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violetbentbackwards1036's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad medium-paced

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

3.75

i would’ve given the a five star rating if it hadn’t been for the painfully slow beginning and the unbelievably perfect ending. i think it was just how mundane the first half of the book was, but when the plot actually picked up, everything happened so fast. the ending was also just really perfect. everything, and i mean everything, gets resolved. i also found it really weird how after quincy gets her memory back, we don’t get anything else about her mourning her friends? you’d think after having to relive watching her friends be slaughtered in front of her, there’d at least be something about her accepting what happened to everyone. i just found it kinda disappointing how quickly quincy moves on from everyone’s deaths, how there’s nothing else about the friend group. i wish we got to see more of the friend group, more about rodney, amy and betz.

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abicaro17's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective slow-paced

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

4.25

This book was definitely interesting! Quincy seems at first to be a flat and uninteresting traumatized woman, but eventually evolves into something much more. The inner turmoil she displays at not only her current actions and choices but reflections of her past as well develop her into a multi dimensional character worth reading to the end for. Speaking of which, the ending was both as expected and sooo very unexpected! The last third of the book had me on the edge of my seat! My qualms with this book lie with the stereotypical and expected things. Like the boyfriend and other final girls. Even the twist was somewhat expected. I just wasn't as surprised as I like to be with these books.

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frantically's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious medium-paced

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

2.5

I loved how character focused this was — for most times it was more like the aftermath of a thriller & what it did to the characters — but I didn't really enjoy the twists.

Also:

I WAS ROOTING FOR YOU COOP, WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU

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cait's review against another edition

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percys_panda_pillow_pet's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense fast-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

3.25

At this point in time, Riley Sager is a popular thriller author online, having published several successful thrillers in the past few years. Final Girls is his first thriller, published in 2017. I picked up this book partially because of the author's name and partially because a friend of mine who is into 80's slasher really got me into horror and the concept of a final girl, the one who survives all the horrors of a single terrible night.

Sager's Final Girls isn't unique in wanting to explore the idea of the final girl further, of what it's like after everything. Previously, there was The Last Final Girl by Stephen Graham Jones in 2012 and later, in 2021, Grady Hendrix's The Final Girl Support Group. All of these books follow a similar storyline: there are these "final girls" who each survive what is by all accounts a massacre and then they are seemingly being killed off until the main character is left. This leaves the main character a "true" survivor, I suppose.

My problem with Sager's Final Girls isn't that there are other books like it, there are many ways to tell the same story after all. More so, I could tell Sager was still inexperienced at writing when it was published. While I appreciated the thematic nature of the past being told in the third person point of view and the present told in first person point of view, since the main character and narrator, Quincy, is unreliable due to her amnesia of the horrible night all her friends were killed; in the end, I found the switch in POV jarring to go between.

As well, I could tell Sager was inexperienced in writing women specifically. Quincy herself was very annoying, and constantly got in her own way. But there was not only a strange love triangle between her, her boyfriend Jeff, and Coop, the cop who saved her life, there were also strange homoerotic tones between Quincy and her female friends/acquaintances. I felt like the was supposed to be a commentary on sexuality perhaps, especially when it comes to final girls (Check out Dead Meat Podcast Episode 15: Final Girl on YouTube for more information about that), but so much of it flopped and came off as cringey.

I liked that Quincy was unreliable and I was intrigued by the complexity of several of the characters. However, they were often too unlikable for me to really invest in them fully, and I constantly found myself hating each and every one of them at different points in the book.

Overall, I personally think that maybe the concept of finals girls should be left to the movies, or perhaps women authors who may be able to understand the deeper fears that persist in today's society of violence against women.

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sapphicpenguin's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

4.0

Much more suspense/mystery than action/thriller. I wasn't expecting to enjoy this as much as I did! I did often get mad at the main character, but I guess I'll give her a pass for the, y'know, slasher-movie trauma. The plot twists were well set up/thought out, and kept me guessing till the very end. I liked the subversion of movie tropes, plus the writing was very satisfying. Great nonlinear storytelling. A good all-in-an-afternoon read. I guess I don't have the patience for too much mystery, though, as sometimes I just wished we could get to the next thing.

ACAB btw

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