Brooke Nelson

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

In the interest of complete honesty, this was not a book I enjoyed. Just for context, I say this as a 22-year-old woman whose favorite genre is thrillers with female main characters, which is precisely what One of the Girls is.

My first issue arose when I realized I didn’t actually like many, if any, of the six main characters, all women in their thirties as far as I can tell. We have the heavy-drinker-partier type, the absolutely-downtrodden-personality type, the couple who hangs all over each other the whole weekend while using the word “babe” an inordinate amount of times. Based on the vast differences between the women, I hoped to connect with at least one of them. But I ended up really feeling nothing.

One problem I had that skirts between a character issue and a writing issue is the repetition. When one woman’s feelings are described a certain way, in very specific words, it is almost a certainty that her feelings will be described in a following chapter in the exact same words. It gets repetitive very quickly. I can’t tell you how many times one of the women felt a tightening in her breast. I mean, come on, there has to be another way to describe that.

Moreover, the whole book carries a distinct pro-female, anti-male tone that feels a lot more like an inserted author bias than the opinions of the characters, which makes it painfully easy to draw a map of what will happen at the end. Overarching themes are fine; overarching themes that make the story predictable are…less fine. But for the sake of not spoiling, I promise not to say anything further. I just prefer books that are more mysterious throughout, including the end, such as You Are Not Alone and Final Girls.

That said, I always wish a new story success, whether it’s my cup of tea or not, and I do hope this book finds its way to the right people, even though I wasn’t one of them.