REVIEW: Good Girls Die First (book) by Kathryn Foxfield

Good Girls Die First is YA horror. I bought it brand new.

Review:

Ava and nine other teens are invited to the abandoned amusement park on Portgrave Pier. Ava's invitation indicates that whoever invited them knows her darkest secret, the one she'd rather not admit even to herself. She figures that the others are also hiding things, although of course no one wants to admit it.

When the group discovers that they're trapped on the island, they find themselves stuck playing a deadly game. They'll be repeatedly confronted with the ugliest parts of themselves until they either break or become the last one left alive.

In her acknowledgments, the author writes that "This book started out as a love letter to Agatha Christie, the Point Horror books, and all the scary films I probably shouldn't have watched as a child" (361). When I started reading this, I wondered whether it was a loose adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Aside from the "10 people trapped on an island, while they gradually come to doubt each other and eventually crack" basic premise, this wasn't like And Then There Were None at all, but Foxfield definitely nailed the Point Horror feel. Reading this was like being thrown back to my teen years, albeit with more casual acceptance of gay/lesbian characters.

Every one of the characters trapped on this island did something in the past that they were ashamed of. Some of the things they did were only personally shameful, but others did things that were outright illegal and/or harmful to others (in one instance, rape). You'd think that this would make their secrets memorable, but I'm finding, now that I've finished the book, that I can barely remember what most of their secrets were, although the characters themselves managed to be memorable enough.

The whole Whispers thing reminded me strongly of YA books I'd read in my teens - stuff by Christopher Pike, L.J. Smith's Forbidden Game books, etc. I suspect that nostalgia played a part in my overall feelings about the book, because it didn't really have any of the features I currently tend to prefer in books, like characters I could root for. A few characters were decent enough that I thought they deserved a chance to go back and confess to the appropriate people, but there wasn't anyone I truly cared about.

All in all, this was okay, although the ending was unsatisfying and I wonder how well the book overall would work for modern teens versus an adult like me, with my boatload of '90s YA horror nostalgia.