Ten years ago, Julie Portland accidentally killed her best friend, Reba. Even worse, no one else knows. Consumed by guilt, Julie has long left her small Mississippi hometown behind, but she can't escape the memories. They have already ruined her marriage, and they threaten to take over her life. So when Reba's long-ago high school boyfriend shows up, claiming Reba left behind a diary, Julie reluctantly returns home with him to help search. Once there, however, she's caught up in a swirl of memories and secrets.

Oh, I have mixed feelings about this one. The novel switches POV and time periods in an effort to set up suspense. Our main character is Julie, but we hear from others as well, and the author includes snippets from Reba's diary. Bits and pieces of the story unfold slowly, with portions coming from the past and then others as the characters think back and remember. For the most part, this does work; you become almost frustrated, waiting and wondering what on earth happened back then. Reba's diary entries don't always seem to be in the voice of a seventeen-year-old teen, though, and some of the plot (both current and past) just seems odd. Plus, we also get bits and pieces of more recent parts of Julie's life and those really just distract from the real story.

I think the hardest thing for me was that while I really didn't have a major problem with the novel, I just wasn't incredibly connected to it, either. I liked Julie well enough, but I wasn't really invested in her, or really, Reba's story. I was curious about what happened to her, but I didn't particularly care, and there's a big difference there. In the end, I felt like there was a build up for... not much. I found the story intriguing and suspenseful, but somewhat disappointing. I kept waiting for some big shocker, or reveal, but it never happened. The ending felt a little cliche, and I was just sort of frustrated by the end.

So, overall, this isn't a bad book. In fact, it's often quite intriguing and can be a real page-turner at times. Unfortunately, I was bogged down by its uninteresting characters and a plot that I found to be a bit of a letdown. I'd go with 2.5 - 3 stars.

At first this was a slow read, I may not have kept going but Harrigan has a really beautiful writing style that helped keep me involved. I enjoyed the decision to go back and forth from past to present and loved the usage of Reba's diary. However, at times the jumps seemed a little choppy and the transitions weren't always clear.

The characters are really well thought out, most are enjoyable and very relatable which adds to the reading experience. The story-line of Toby was probably the best thought out, throughout his parts of the story you really get to know him and feel for an originally rather unlikable character.

While it is not the best book ever, I think it was well done. Those looking for a mystery will enjoy this.

How would you live your life if you thought you killed your best friend?
How would you feel knowing you get to grow older than 17 years and she doesn't?
How would you sleep after watching her drown?
How would you survive motherhood knowing you took that from her?
But what would you do if you found out all of that was a lie?

Reba had no idea how much her life was going to change the day she met Julie. Scared, innocent Julie who just lost both of her parents. Reba knew they would be close friends and made sure they would tell each other everything. Until one day....they didn't.
August, the only black boy in Lawrence Mills, Mississippi, wanted Reba for himself. He knew her father was a racist, but he still needed her touch. He needed Reba to know how much she meant to him, even if they decided to runaway and start a family together. He wanted to be there.
But Toby wanted Reba too. He always had, and knew she wanted him BAD. He often finds himself painting depictions of Reba, again, and again, and again. He knew her better than anyone else. He knew the full truth. He knew about her love affair with August, he knew about her fights with Jules, he knew about how sneaky she was, he knew she was his, he even knew what happened when she died.

Most of the book is told through Julie's perspective, with sprinkles of Toby and August throughout. However, we also get a taste of Reba's little purple journal, her diary. Honestly, I wish the journal was more frequent throughout Secrets of Southern Girls. Towards the end, we're reading journal entries one right after the other. Wherever the story was at that point is where we were at in the journal as well. Overall, it was a fairly decent book. Not quite the thriller I was hoping for, but the secrecy of it all was exciting to me. I often wondered why it was so scattered, but I understood it all in the end.

Huge thank you to NetGalley for giving me an advanced reader's copy to review!!
Mark your calendars, Secrets of Southern Girls hits shelves on June 6th!

Julie & August have been suffering for 10 years since their friend Reba fell from a bridge and died. Was she pushed or did she commit suicide? August was Reba's secret boyfriend, but secrets aren't easily kept in a small town. Reba also has a relationship with Toby, the neighborhood player and drug dealer. Julie was Reba's self involved best friend. All of them thought they knew Reba. Little did they know Reba was very good at keeping secrets by writing everything in her diary. When August tracks down Julie after 10 years to find help him find the diary, they find out that Reba might not have been the sweet, angelic girl they thought. Overall, this book offered an interesting premise. Unfortunately, the characters tended to be trite and too forgiving and gullible.

I did not finish this book. I could not get engaged with the story or the characters.

First I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher Sourcebooks Landmark for giving me a copy of this book.

My eyes were completely glued to Secrets of Southern Girls and I sped through it in one day. This book was tragic and the people in it were so messed up, almost every one of them. From the first page when we meet Julie we can see that she has issues with love and men that are deeply rooted in the past. Then there is her best friend Reba who died, and Julie blames herself, but she finds out that there are two other people who also feel responsible for Reba's death. I won't spoil who they are or why they feel responsible. The less you know ahead of time the better. I was expecting this to be a thriller with a murderer on the loose, but that isn't what this is at all. This is a mystery, but the mystery is more about revealing who the characters really are and what made them do the things they did than a who-dun-it.

Not too far into the book we also meet August who was Reba's first love. He has tracked Julie down after over a decade, because he needs to find closure so he can move on. He thinks that closure will come through a journal Reba kept and intended to give him the night she died. He also believes that Julie has the journal. She doesn't, but she agrees to help him find it, so they travel back to the tiny Mississippi town that they both left behind years ago and never intended to return to.

I didn't find any of the characters extremely likable except for August, and that usually affects how much I enjoy a book, but this time around all the characters were so well drawn and I loved the way the story unfolded as every sordid detail is uncovered through journal entries and memories. My only real complaint is that the journal entries didn't really read as journal entries of a teen girl. They were written more like flashbacks.

Like I said, just about all the characters were hard to like, but we come to understand why they are the way they are, why they are so messed up, and so they grew on me despite the things they did and the choices they made. I was even able to empathize with Toby who was the most despicable character in the book to me. He was just so well drawn and his emotions felt so raw and real.

After finishing this I was left thinking about how we never can tell if we really know someone, and how profoundly the choices we make and the lies we tell can affect ourselves and others around us for years to come.

Beautiful writing and characterization, especially with Reba and Toby. Although Julie and August are the main leads, for me, Reba and Toby stole the spotlight. Toby is very unlikeable and does some crappy things, but is brought beautifully to life and you really feel his emotions. Reba, the sweet, innocent girl next door, is really not what she seems. Ms. Harrigan slowly reveals Reba's more complex character through the long-hidden diary.
A nice debut book, but could use a little help with some of the dialogue. An author to keep an eye on.

**Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley in exchange of an honest review.**

A fantastic book, so descriptive and evocative of the South. Julie believes that many years ago, as a teenager, she killed her best friend Reba. Now living in New York as a single Mother with her daughter Beck and still haunted by 'that night' Julie is shocked when she finds Reba's secret boyfriend August is in town and that he wants to speak to her.
August believes that Julie or Jules as she was known in her teens has Rebas diary and he wants to know what it contains in order to get closure on their relationship. He is shocked to discover that Jules doesn't have the diary and urges her to go 'home' with him to find out who has it and what it contains.
And so the novel divides into excerpts from Rebas diary and the present day where August and Jules are on its trail and discussing past events at the same time as Rebas diary reveals them.
No spoilers but I couldn't figure out what had happened and there was more than one twist in the tale.
It's a touching book that brought me to tears on more than one occasion. Highly recommended.

This is a nicely written story that revolves around guilt and reliving memories. It shows how events from the past can change you and can have an impact on you for a very long time.

Pros
Switch between now and then: The book has a lot of going back and forth; reliving memories and events from the past with Julie, August and Reba. It's slowly coming around what actually happened and you keep switching between the now and all those years ago.
Fluently written: This book is not hard to read. It's fluently written and that's why you can read it without much hard thinking, re-reading sentences or checking up on things. I was never struggling or looking up words, and English is not my native language. So its was a nice book for me.
Character development: Julie is very different now from how she was all those years ago. As a grown-up she is developing as well in this book. She is learning more about her past with Reba and this also has an impact on her for who she is right now. I liked Julie much better at the end of the book.

Cons
Didn't suck me in: The book never really pulled me in. I was kinda going along with the story, but I was never over-excited to read the book or to figure out what happened. I think the plot wasn't that big of a secret for me, so the book itself wasn't that mysterious.
Didn't pick it up: I was reading other books as well next to this book and I noticed that I read the other books more than this one. When I had to choose, I would rather pick up another book. Maybe this also has to do something with the fact that I wasn't pulled into the story.
Never felt real tension: Also something that I mentioned; I never felt the tension or the mystery behind the story. There were some revelations that I would never have guessed at the beginning of the book, but the real plot twist and the big reveal weren't that surprising.

It's a nice story about how you don't now everybody as well as you think. About carrying events from the past with you for the rest of your life. About finding the strength to forgive yourself. A decent book, 3 stars.

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read this e-book in exchange for an honest review. A debut novel by Haley Harrigan I found the story interesting but can only give it 3 stars. The dialogue has some trouble and it definitely needs more work. Julie Portland has secrets and must return to her childhood home to solve them by reading her friend's diary to unearth hidden truths. That part of the story drew me in but everything moved along too slow and just didn't flow well.

A well written novel focused on the long effects of lies. While I found that interesting and enjoyed the alternating flashback and current time. But it was hard to feel any real connection to the characters. I wanted to feel sympathy but just didn't.

There were things about this book that I liked and did not like. Julie Portland and Reba are best friends who grew up in Mississippi. A tragic turn of events causes Julie to leave town believing that she had committed and gotten away with a crime. She is called back to town by August, Reba’s first love and this sets up the story of finding out what really happened to Reba through her diary entries. Now, I liked the premise of the story, but the diary entries were not realistic to me. They didn’t sound like the thoughts of a child or teenager. This story started off slow for me, but I built up the interest in finding out what really happened to Reba.

Secrets of Southern Girls by Haley Harrigan.

I gravitated toward this book due to the gorgeous cover and the title. I am women from Oregon who has never left the Pacific Northwest. For some reason I am obsessed with authors from the South and to books about the South. A few of mu favorite authors are Mary Alice Monroe, Dorthea Benton Frank, Pat Conroy (RIP), and ... well you see where I am going right?
As soon as I was into the first chapter of Secrets of Southern Girls I knew I was not going to be getting much done that day. Yes, I said day. I finished it in one sitting. The writing is stellar. I wont waste your time with another review explaining the plot but I will tell you this.
Haley Harrigan expertly paced the telling of this story. I loved how the past was presented via Diary journals. You know from the beginning something horrible happened in the past of these once best friends but you are not quite sure exactly what or the circumstances.
This is a story of friendship. A deep and often toxic friendship between two young girls. It's about the roles we play in a friendship and how sometimes we box others into roles and wear glasses that only allow us to see someone for what we want them to be. Often ignoring purposely who some really is in our own selfish efforts to mold a friend into who we NEED them to be.
A great novel that I highly recommend to those who enjoy character driven stories.

Thank you Netgalley for the advanced copy in exchange for this honest review.

At the beginning there was a great deal of suspense in anticipation in solving this quirky mystery and I was pulled into the intrigue. However, it was way too long with way too much redundancy. The book also suffers from too many grammatical errors, especially in The dialogue. The quote from the character Brighton says it best: " Wow. That is one screwed up story." My sentiments exactly. In the end, it was just TOO quirky for this reader to care and I am sorry I wasted my time.

never finished this as I lost interest after the first few chapters. Maybe another time???

Dreamy, descriptive writing in this debut novel. Good plot - I enjoyed the diary entries which gave Reba's story from the grave. It took me some time to become interested in the story because the first part seemed a little slow, but then I wanted to know what really happened to Reba that night on the bridge. Did she commit suicide, did her best friend, Julie, push her, or did Toby cause the fall? A mystery and a coming-of-age story both. Congratulations to Haley Harrigan on her first novel and look forward to more in the future.

Thank you to Haley Harrigan and Sourcebooks Landmark through NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I thought this was an ok read, but I found the diary excerpts to be completely unconvincing and not at all the voice of a 17-year old. I also didn't feel much for any of the characters and didn't take to Julie very much.
But there was a good mystery at the heart of the novel and I liked the character of Toby who seemed the most 3-dimensional character in the novel.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

As a Southern girl, I wish I could say that I liked this book, but I just cannot. I loved the cover from the moment I saw it. It was so beautiful with the shades of purple and the two girls on the front that reminded me of my sister and me. I was also intrigued by the change in the color of the font. I wanted to find out just what secrets these Southern girls had.

I do think this story has potential; perhaps it’s just not quite ready for publication yet. Give it a good rewrite and it could be a decent story. I did like how the author told the past through Reba’s diary which held the key to figuring out the secrets of everyone (not just the girls).

Frist, the book seemed to drag. I thought I would never get to the end. Also, I really disliked Jules from the beginning. She picks up men for one night stands. Her only intention is to use them. When in High School, she was a party girl and drank quite heavily. She would drag her best friend to bars even though they are both under age even though she knows her friend does not want to go. She did not seem to appreciate her Aunt who raised her and was mean to her odd cousin Toby. After moving away, she pushed away the perfect man and did not even want her child when it was born. And maybe she didn’t kill Reba in the end, but she didn’t get help (and neither did Toby).

Moving on to Reba. She has everyone convinced that she is this perfect, angelic teenager. However, she hops into bed pretty quickly with August and then Toby even though both she and Jules dislike him, know he is a druggie and think he is weird. Then she lies to her family, best friend and boyfriend while continuing to sleep with both boys.

I also found it hard to believe that this good girl turned bad wrote down all of this in a diary that she carried around openly at school where anyone could have grabbed it and read it. When I was a teenager, I would never have been stupid enough to write these things down. If I did, I would have had that thing written in code or under lock and key.

Supposedly, family friend Nell has everyone’s best interests at heart. However, she has kept this diary that contains the answers, for years. She claims to “take care” of Toby now, but he is clearly tormented by Reba’s memory. This comes out in his artwork.

Everyone in this book is just so darn miserable. None of the characters can move on (except Jules’ Aunt Molly). It just left me feeling sad, especially for Jules' daughter, Beck. In the end, I gave “Secrets of Southern Girls” three stars. If half stars were possible, I would have given it 2 ½. It did have a bit of a twist at the end and has potential with a rewrite, otherwise I would have given it two. In the end, I think August and Jules deserved each other.

First of all, in my opinion, this book could have been much shorter. Parts of it dragged so much, that finally I started skipping the paragraphs and then pages and still didn't miss anything that was important to the story.

The mystery itself wasn't developed enough. From the beginning I suspected how it will turn out to be. It just wasn't something that I hadn't read before.

Characters.... I just can say, that all of them were boring and I couldn't care less what will happen to any of them. So much stupid decisions and some of their actions didn't make any sense.

Do not recommend.

This book started quite slowly, and because I forgot to read the blurb again before I started I forgot what the storyline was and didn't know what to expect! This is one of the best books that I've read this year (and I read a lot of books!). Despite the slow start I did get hooked and I was really interested to find out what happened to Reba and the story of 'that night'. I loved the writing style and the way the diary was written - I did get confused a few times because I wasn't sure whether I was in the past or the present but I think that was the way the kindle laid it out more than anything. I can't wait to read the next book by Haley and thank you very much for the chance to read and review this. I will be posting a full review closer to the release date!