Review: The It Girl by Ruth Ware
I love this book. Sometimes it is harder to organize my positive thoughts than it is my mixed to negative thoughts but I am going to give it my best shot.
The It Girl follows Hannah in two timelines. The current day Hannah is a married pregnant bookshop employee who is a bit reclusive and ten years earlier Hannah was a new Oxford student who was full of promise and excited for the future. The event that separates before and after was the murder of Hannah's suitemate and best friend April. In the past Hannah's story starts with her entering Oxford and meeting April and in the present day we begin by hearing that the man who was convicted of April's murder has died in prison.
I was absolutely GLUED to this book. Nobody keeps my attention like Ruth Ware. The way she builds tension really works for me. She does such an excellent job of quickly rooting the reader in the world so that she can immediately start to slowly unsettle. She writes a slow descent, an unraveling of safety, incredibly well. By the time she has introduced what is at stake I am so invested I have trouble putting the book down.
This book, as well as some of Ware's other novels, explores the way media and the public react to murders. This book felt particularly in conversation with true crime as entertainment and the almost requirement of making the victim into a caricature. Hannah's experience of being hounded for years about the case, the desire of people to know salacious details of a real person's tragedy, the ways in which April needed to be boiled down to either an angel taken from the world too soon or a lesson in what happens when a women behaves incorrectly.
I also really thought the way she handled John Neville was great. She really dives into the way his looks and general oddness played into the willingness of people to overlook the signs of his innocence. He was creepy, he was old, he was unattractive and all these things played into his trial and public image.
Obviously in a review of a mystery novel I am wary to dive too deeply into my feelings on the plot. But I did absolutely love the plot reveals in this book. It truly was a perfect mix of things I knew and things I did not. Ware is really excellent at leading the reader to the answer slightly before Hannah, so we can be worried on her behalf. As I kept getting more clues I would return to a scene about 2/3rds of the way into the book and reread it. Every reread was completely different with a new piece of information. I just think this book was so excellently and tightly plotted.
Not going to spoil anything, but there's a moment where there are three questions that need to be answered, and Hannah knows the answer to two and the reader knows the answer to two but only one of those answers are in common between you and Hannah. I really loved this.
I really love mysteries that focus on a friend group and have a time split. I have no idea why this works so well for me, but it absolutely does. The characters in this book were so excellent. I really loved getting to know these characters in their past selves and seeing how that compared with where they ended up ten years later. The interplay of seeing how information changes in the retelling of it, of seeing how someone's future colors the way the reader looks at their past. I just love all of it.
This book writes friendship and romance really well. You absolutely feel like Hannah is a part of a larger community and that all of these peoples relationships to each other are really nuanced and real. Obviously The Lying Game is another Ware book that is very rooted in friendship, slightly more so than this book even. The Woman in Cabin Ten and The Turn of the Key have had romantic relationships in them, but this book really spends a lot of time in Hannah's marriage in a way I found really interesting. She does some really fascinating stuff with this relationship, playing with the readers expectations, sending them back and forth between romance and murder. It is clever and excellently done.
I am not sure if this is my new favorite Ruth Ware, but it very much might be. I really loved reading this book and, as always, am so looking forward to what comes next.
I gave this book five stars.
