Review: They Wish They Were Us by Jessica Goodman
I read an ARC of this book through NetGalley.
They Wish They Were Us is a high school murder mystery. Jill is a senior, and her best friend Shaila was murdered when they were freshmen when they were initiated into basically a(n open) secret society called the players. One of their classmates is in jail for the murder, but Jill gets a text about his innocence and becomes wrapped up in trying to figure out who the real killer was.
My absolute favorite trope is a group of people do something bad, it is not years later, and the past is back to haunt them. This book has that trope but does not really execute the things I love about it so much very well. There are secrets and lies and people having to face who they were in the past, but I really think having it be set at the school cuts down on a lot of the dissonance that typically is present in this game. I do think this kind of plot is much better suited as an adult book. If the flashback scenes had been with these characters as freshmen in college, they would have made much more sense; I think even if the flashbacks stayed as high school, it would have made more sense at a boarding school or if the future scenes had the characters in college or even after.
I do like 'unlikable' characters; reading through reviews of this book, a lot of them are annoyed that people who participated in a toxic bullying ring would dare to be kind of bad people. My only qualm is I don't like that Nikki's behavior is never really addressed. I wanted an actual conversation with her about her decisions, she is pretty much absolved when she does what she does at the end of the book, but I still wanted more about how she was justifying her own behavior earlier in the book.
I think this book also tried to do a really valid feminist critique of the power structure setup, but it felt odd because there was no mention of Nikki carrying on the exact same gross patriarchal stuff. Why not mention the way women are complicit in enacting that kind of violence on each other? It felt like a massive oversight. There were a few other times when it felt like the author was trying to make a social statement that she hadn't quite figured out how to make.
Something else that really bothered me is that when 17/18 year old boys and men are sexually harassing 13/14 year old girls that is mostly treated as the creepy terrible traumatic thing that it is. But it isn’t really addressed with Adam. And it is really not addressed at all Marla, a 17 or 18 (probably 18 by this point) year old hooking up with a at most 14 year old boy. It makes Jill angry, but the narrative does not draw attention to how incredibly explorative that behavior is.
My biggest issues with this book were how incredibly predictable it was and the pacing. I knew who the killer was literally the first time their name was on the page. By the time we got to the first flashback with them, it was glaringly obvious. And by 14% of the way through this book, I was getting antsy for the characters to catch up with me.
The pacing suffered a lot because of how predictable the book was. The narrative dragged between clues and set up details; I just wanted to get to the end, please. I very rarely think a book is overly long. I am typically in the boat of wanting books to be longer. But I genuinely think this would have been a very nice to read novella. But there just wasn't enough content to sustain a full-length book for me. I was not surprised by any of the reveals; there were no twists, and there weren't really side plots going on. I just think this book dragged a lot and absolutely could have been much tighter.
I read this book because I really liked the cover, I don't typically read YA mystery, and this book has solidified that as a good choice in my brain. I am glad this book found people who love it, and I am sad I was not among them.
