A review by sarah984
They Wish They Were Us by Jessica Goodman

dark mysterious slow-paced
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

This book was just not very good. In a lot of ways, it felt like the author wanted to write a darker book but had boxed herself into YA, so she keeps intimating that terrible things had happened but then all of the things are kind of standard hazing situations. (Yes that's still bad, but not as apocalyptic as it's made to sound for most of the book) The secret society is also just sort of silly - a bunch of answer keys that could change at any time and some social connections they would have anyway. Nothing worth the way all the kids and adults treat it in the story.

The murder mystery portion is very stupid because there is a character who is always acting suspicious and every clue points to them but no one ever suspects them which makes it extremely obvious.

There's sort of an attempt at feminism in terms of guys controlling everything and forcing worse hazing on the girls but we're only ever told this directly in narration, it's not really shown in the challenges that happen on-page. The one explicitly bad thing that happens isn't part of a challenge, and when the main character actually does witness something that affects a girl more she is only upset about it because her brother is involved.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings