The It Girl
by Ruth Ware
Blurb:
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.
My Reaction:
This novel could have benefited from trimming down, in my opinion. Too many paragraphs were just "round and round" clichéd internal dialogue. Every time we had to hear about Hannah's blood pressure or the baby kicking or her present-day interactions with Will, it felt like a waste of words and time. I started skimming those sections, at some point.
More than once, I found myself wondering just how intelligent Hannah is actually supposed to be. She made it into Oxford, and yet... There are several times that she doesn't seem like the brightest bulb.
At a certain point, the murderer's identity became very obvious (more on that below), and from then on I was mostly just waiting around to see how long it took Hannah to realize. I was still curious about the "why", though I could come up with a few plausible reasons on my own, based on April's behavior to her "friends" as a whole. In the end, I was a bit "meh" about the explanation of why the murder happened. It fits well enough, I guess. A bit of a let-down, though I'm not sure what else I wanted from the explanation. More of an emotional connection or motivation, maybe.
I found it difficult to connect with Hannah or care particularly much about April. Also, the setting... I don't know much about Oxford, except that it's old and "elite", and frankly, I'm not particularly interested in learning more about it. I get the impression that we are supposed to care much more about Oxford than I do (or even can). Maybe I'm a bit jaded by the whole college/university thing. It's largely a racket! Possibly I also found most of the circle of friends to be utterly obnoxious caricatures of rather bratty and unsympathetic college students. Whatever the reason, my reaction to the setting was not positive.
Final note (before I get to spoilers): When I first saw this book's title, I thought it was The IT Girl, as in "information technology"— so a mystery/thriller centered around a young woman working in IT, I guess? That probably would have been fresher and potentially more interesting than a spoiled "It girl" in a college setting, to tell the truth!
SPOILERS
FOLLOW:
After a long while of not being sure who would be revealed as the killer, the solution suddenly became blatantly clear (to me, at least). As soon as we learned that Hugh sent Hannah out of the room to seek help, I was positive that he'd killed April. There were only two ways this could have worked. In the first, he could have drugged April to render her unconscious (tricky to plan and time perfectly). The second option was that April had arranged with Hugh to pretend to be dead to scare Hannah; paired with April's love of pranks (and the fact that she hadn't pranked Hannah), that seemed the likeliest scenario (though maybe still not foolproof). ...Ta-dah. (Is it better to guess whodunit ahead of time and feel a mild sense of superiority or have the fun of not having a clue until the very last minute?)
Another kind-of-a-spoiler: Hannah needs to get over her guilt for supposedly being the one to send John Neville (was that his name?) to jail. All she did was tell the truth of what had happened to her and what she'd seen with her own eyes. Besides, Neville was a predatory creep and stalker who should most definitely not have been working in close proximity to vulnerable young women! Maybe he didn't commit a murder, but he certainly seemed the type to do something nefarious, and I wouldn't lose too much sleep over his incarceration.
Oh, and this isn't a spoiler, but do any modern-day, living, breathing English people— even the posh ones— actually unironically call one another "old bean" these days?! Hugh does it repeatedly, which I found unbelievably ridiculous. I ain't reading about Bertie Wooster here! I know Hugh's supposed to be some sort of British version of Niles Crane, with the embroidered dressing gown and everything, but... Please, try to keep it realistic!
