Good Girls Lie by J.T. Ellison

I received an ARC of this book thanks to Net Galley and publisher Harlequin-Mira in exchange for an honest review.

YA thrillers get a bad rep and to be fair, most of them don't live up to their synopses. Thankfully Good Girls Lie manages to be the exception to this rule and delivers an intriguing, well-paced and engaging story.

British Ash has just arrived at The Goode School, an american boarding school for teenage girls of the highest caliber. She has a troubled past but she's determined to keep her head down...that is, until she accidentally gets involved in one of the school's secret societies and catches the attention of the Head Girl. When her roommate is found dead, Ash must fight harder than ever to keep her secrets to herself. Even from the reader...

I will admit, it took me a little while to get into this book. It is primarily told from Ash's POV but there are a few chapters told from an unknown POV and occasionally it will focus on the Dean of the school, with these being told in third person. None of these changes in POV are indicated so it was quite jarring to suddenly find you had switched perspective without realising. However, once I got to grips with that, I became very invested in the story. One thing I really liked was you were unsure what direction the plot would take for most of the book. Once certain things are revealed it does become very easy to guess, but before that you don't get much to work with which means you can't predict what will happen (in a good way).

Ash herself was a breath of fresh air. I found her a very compelling character, even with the narrative deliberately keeping a lot of information about her back from the reader. Similarly all the other main/side characters were pretty interesting and none of them were stereotypes which is where YA thrillers usually suffer. I liked that the Dean got such a lot of focus as that rarely happens in these kinds of books.

Overall, this is a solid YA thriller to pick up. It gives you so little to work with plotwise in the synopsis but that only strengthens the style of storytelling and the way the narrative slowly unfolds. It's not the fastest paced thriller but if you crave YA thrillers with well-crafted characters and a neat little story, this is definitely worth a try.

Overall Rating:

.5