Nice Girls – Book Review

A pulse-pounding and razor-sharp debut with the emotional punch of Luckiest Girl Alive and All the Missing Girls that explores the hungry, angry, dark side of girlhood and dares to ask: Which is more dangerous for a woman—showing the world what it wants to see, or who she really is?

What did you do?

Mary used to be such a nice girl. She was the resident whiz kid of Liberty Lake, Minnesota—the quiet, chubby teen with the scholarship to an Ivy League school. But three years later, “Ivy League Mary” is back—a thinner, cynical, restless failure who was kicked out of Cor­nell at the beginning of her senior year and won’t tell anyone why. Taking a job at the local grocery store, Mary tries to make sense of her life’s sharp downward spiral.

Then beautiful, magnetic Olivia Willand goes missing. A rising social media star, Olivia is admired by everyone in Liberty Lake—except Mary. Once Olivia’s best friend, Mary knows better than anyone that behind the Instagram persona hides a willful, manipulative girl with sharp edges. As the town obsesses over perfect, lovely Olivia, Mary wonders if her disappearance might be tied to another missing person: nineteen-year-old DeMaria Jackson, whose case has been widely dismissed as a runaway.

Who is the real Olivia Willand, and where did she go? What happened to DeMaria? As Mary pries at the cracks in the careful facades surrounding the two missing girls, old wounds will bleed fresh and force her to confront a horrible truth.

Maybe there are no nice girls, after all.

I listened to the audiobook on Scribd and I have mixed feelings about this book.

Mary was known as “Ivy League Mary” as she got into Cornell University and left the small town of Liberty Lake. But soon, she was expelled from the university and Mary returned back to the town and found herself working in a grocery store. Mary’s friend Olivia Willand, a rising social media star goes missing. Mary thinks Olivia has run away initially as the whole town get together to search for her. But soon, she finds that few months before Olivia went missing, another girl named DeMaria Jackson went missing as well and Mary thinks there is a connection between the two cases.

I was excited to read this book because the synopsis in the book sounded interesting to me. Even though I feel the writing was good, I didn’t like the narrator and I didn’t like the main character Mary. I feel Mary is naïve who complains too much about her life and so as a result, I didn’t get to be interested in the book as I didn’t like Mary at all. I am not sure if it is intentional. But the story was great although the ending was predictable and there were some twists and turns that you actually expected in the book. But what I did enjoy is that despite being a fiction, I like how realistic the story is–if a white girl went missing, then the whole media goes frenzy and the whole town gets together to search for. her. But if a Black girl like DeMaria goes missing, people and the police assumed she ran away. So that part I think author did a good job of drawing that into attention and making it realistic.

Overall, the book worth 3.5 stars.