This story is told in alternating timelines of the past and present. We see Ambrosia in the present, hesitant to go to her 10-year reunion. Then we go back to the past she’s tried so hard to keep from her husband, and with good reason. Ambrosia was a mean girl, the worse kind.
Ambrosia is an incredibly unreliable narrator because she skews things to suit her narrative. It’s because she is so unreliable that makes the fact she’s a mean girl even worse. She’s vilified her roommate Flora into something she’s not from jealousy, to gain popularity, and to steal her boyfriend. The bulk of her actions in college are simply to impress Sully because she wants so desperately to fit in.
In the present, the fact Adrian was going nowhere with his novel isn’t something she should complain about. If it was such an issue for her, she never should have married him. The ending fell apart for me in a lot of ways, but I can’t discuss them because I don’t want to spoil things. But I feel there was a lot of reaching to get us to the last page.
So why four stars if I have issues with it? Because I love that we have such a crummy narrator. There was nothing redeeming about her. She is written so extremely well that you have to love it. Overall, this was a rollercoaster and an enjoyable read. Thank you, Simon & Schuster, for sending this along.
The Girls Are All So Nice Here is available on Amazon for $12.99.
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Blurb:
Two former best friends return to their college reunion to find that they’re being circled by someone who wants revenge for what they did ten years before—and will stop at nothing to get it—in this shocking psychological thriller about ambition, toxic friendship, and deadly desire.
The Girls Are All So Nice Here opens when Ambrosia Wellington receives an invitation to her ten-year college reunion. Only, slipped in with all the expected information about lodging and the weekend’s schedule is an anonymous letter that says: “It’s time to talk about what we did.” Instantly, Ambrosia realizes that the secrets of her past—and the people she thought she’d left there—aren’t as buried as she’d thought. Amb can’t stop fixating on what she did—and who she did it with. Larger-than-life Sloane Sullivan (“Sully”), who could make anyone do anything. The game they played to get a boy who belonged to someone else, and the girl, Amb’s angelic roommate, who paid the price.
Amb had thought that she and Sully had gotten away with what they did their first semester at Wesleyan. But as Amb receives increasingly menacing messages during the reunion, it becomes clear that she’s being circled by someone who wants more than just the truth. Amb discovers that her own memories don’t tell the whole story, and that her actions and friendship with Sully had even more disturbing consequences than she ever imagined.
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