This YA novel was the choice at a new book group I joined recently and would probably have slipped past my consciousness entirely otherwise.
Sade Hussein (luckily she corrects someone on how to pronounce her name about three pages in so I knew Shar-day rather than say-d) is the new girl at an exclusive boarding school. Her room mate disappears on her first night and a few weeks later, a student is found dead at one of Newton House's famous parties.
Sade is suspected to be involved in both of these incidents. Can she prove her innocence? What are her own deep hidden secrets?
This was all going fine for the first 400 pages or so despite some reservations on the nature of the school itself. Then the explanations started to kick in and IMHO the story pretty much fell to pieces.
On the subject of the nature of the school. This is supposed to be a boarding school somewhere near London, England. However, Sade has apparently joined the third year. She's 16- which would make her a 5th former (or maybe year 10 these days). The school has it's autumn half term two weeks after Halloween- which is far too late unless the term only started in October (a month late for UK schools). There's no mention of GCSE's- which 16 year-olds would be studying for, or A' levels which the 17 year old forth years would have been starting to study for. The whole set up of the school is very alien to the UK. This has been written for the US market with no thought to make the school feel like an English school would. I suspect the UK setting is merely for the upper/lower class divide. I don't know where the author lives but she has either done zero research into the UK school system or she did and ignored it all for her market of choice- even reading Harry potter would have given her clues how to make it more convincing to UK readers. It shares strong similarities to Netflix's Sex Education in that regard.
I was willing to give it a pass on the school being so US-centric because it was a decent enough read. But then the plot revelations started piling in in all their unconvincing lack of glory. I'm always willing to forgive some narrative flaws in YA books, predictability, oversimplification of themes, some unrealistic adult behaviour, etc. These books aren't written with savvy adult readers in mind. But this just started taking things too far. The allegations coming forward would have pretty much closed down the school instantly they were made public.
The fact that every straight male character in the book was a villain was quite noticeable. Every single diversity tick box was ticked except for nice straight male. Yes, the book is trying to warn against a certain type of predatory behaviour, but...
I would expand on the exact plot points but that would be quite spoilerific and I didn't hate the book enough to do that. Overall this starts well and descends into silliness. I will say that considering the revelations about Sade's family, the central villain of the piece would certainly have recognised her more than just a passing "have I met you before?" line when they met, and he certainly wouldn't have acted the way he did towards her.
Good to kill a few days. A quick easy read but unconvincing even by YA standards, and a bit irritating. But it has nice spredges.
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