My Rating
Book Review
Ruth Ware’s IT GIRL is a dazzler, you know like that sparkling Christmas bauble at first glance but has a thousand and one glittering jewels shining out of it in the light. The IT Girl is what April Clark-Cliveden is referred to in the Pelham College of Oxford University and she is the girl who deserves the title. Wealthy, beautiful, and stylish, she is the queen bee around whom her circle of friends orbit. The story that unfolds thru April’s roommate, Hannah Jones, and is driven thru two timelines, of events in the college leading up to the death of April and 10 years later in Scotland, where Hannah resides, takes its time to grip the reader fully.
Ruth Ware has used the setup of college wonderfully, there is a sense of awe that we get to see thru the eyes of Hannah as she finds herself overwhelmed with the sheer majestic appeal of the old university. Hannah’s thoughts on first arriving with stars in her eyes and in the span of two months becoming one of the students belonging there were conveyed brilliantly.
Hannah was not an easy character to warm up to, her insistence on doing the right thing when doubt is sown in her mind about the killer John Neville was believable but what was unbelievable was her impulsive jumping to wrong conclusions again and again. Well, an average person I believe would think twice about assuming things when there’s a chance that one might have been wrong in the first place. Hannah, however, seems to lack that reality and moves on from point A to point B wanting to know the truth no matter the cost to her own personal life.
Though there was a certain lack of adrenaline rush in the thriller that I had expected, Ruth Ware engages the reader wholly with twists and turns galore. Multiple suspects formed in my mind while reading but WOW, never expected that climax, and then she keeps us waiting even if it’s a couple of minutes to know whose funeral is going on.
Awesome!
Book Blurb
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of One by One returns with an unputdownable mystery following a woman on the search for answers a decade after her friend’s murder.
April Coutts-Cliveden was the first person Hannah Jones met at Oxford.
Vivacious, bright, occasionally vicious, and the ultimate It girl, she quickly pulled Hannah into her dazzling orbit. Together, they developed a group of devoted and inseparable friends—Will, Hugh, Ryan, and Emily—during their first term. By the end of the second, April was dead.
Now, a decade later, Hannah and Will are expecting their first child, and the man convicted of killing April, former Oxford porter John Neville, has died in prison. Relieved to have finally put the past behind her, Hannah’s world is rocked when a young journalist comes knocking and presents new evidence that Neville may have been innocent. As Hannah reconnects with old friends and delves deeper into the mystery of April’s death, she realizes that the friends she thought she knew all have something to hide…including a murder.
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