A review by jorgilusty
The Girls I've Been by Tess Sharpe

dark emotional mysterious tense fast-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

3.5

Things I liked:

I have mixed feelings about this book. There’s things I loved and things the author did that just really got under my skin. Maybe because it was a YA it just wasn’t giving what I needed.

-fast paced, tense, needed to find out what happened
-interesting premise/love a good con
-I 

Things that I didn’t like: 
-I feel like Nora is supposed to be a morally grey character but I think it was overdone and she never actually worked on her flaws much minus one therapy session we got a peek into
-give us more about Lee!! She was my fav but we just got vague hints about her past and that bothered me
- the author using trauma as basically three characters whole personalities. like, I get it but it just seems far fetched to me 
- moral platitudes and virtue signaling from the author that gets gets old fast. I feel like she just took a bunch of sensitive topics and threw them together and it just left a lot unsaid. like, if you’re going to write about these things you should take the time to flesh them out properly and not just throw every single sensitive topic ever  in for the sake of being “woke” or whatever.
-open ending that left a lot to question. At least there was assured mutual destruction that makes it more palatable but still, would have been nice to have it wrapped up 
- a love triangle with 0 hard feelings or jealousy? I don’t know, it’s a little too trope-y and convenient for me

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