I liked the writing and the novel, but I couldn't get past the detailed sexual contents of the diary.
But thanks netgalley for another advanced ecopy of a book.

I liked this book and the way it was written. Two girls Rheba and Jules, Rheba dies and Jules carries the burden of her death. Years later Jules is asked to come back to the little town and help find out what really took place. With the help of Rheba's she agrees to go back and help figure it all out. But will the truth help Jules deal with the past, or will it destoy her.
I thought the book was very wriiten and I like the mystery element. It was a book that I want to end as I wanted to know what really happened all those years ago.
Good book if you like mysteries and freindship tangeled together.

This book has a great premise: Julie accidentally kills her best friend Reba, during their youth and Julie is not held to account. As an adult Julie goes back to her hometown to help find Reba's diary and revisit her death. However, the execution of this novel doesn't quite do the premise justice. Specifically, the dialogue in this novel is unrealistic and clunky and the diary entries didn't feel authentic. These missteps make this book an overall pass, in my opinion.

I received an ARC copy from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.
I wanted to like this book, but the story line dragged, due to the fact that there was a good amount of retelling of the same plot line.
The characters were hard to connect with and not very like-able. I think part of that struggle for me, was due to the dialogue, and the way the conversations were written.

Thanks for the book. However, I found the book uninteresting. I couldn't buy the pov from a teenager. She seemed older.

The premise is very intriguing. The writing is excellent. The dialogue needs a little work. Overall a good book.

I was intrigued by the premise so I went in with high hopes. Harrigan overall seems to have a great talent at writing through vivid descriptions that really make you feel like you are there. The downside though is in her dialogue writing. She would be well deserved in having people act out her dialogue as though they’re in a play so she can hear how disparate and stilted it often sounds then rewrite once she can get it to sound like people are having a true conversation. As it stands now, if no setting was given and you just had people up on a stage using only her dialogue the play would crash and burn in dress rehearsals with theater goers demanding they be compensated for their time. I’m not normally so harsh in a review but it’s all the more frustrating when you have an author who so clearly knows how to write but fails in the endeavor of conversation and this somehow was not picked up in the editing process. It’s so unrealistic and socially awkward but if this is how the author meant it to be there is nothing within the context of the story that gives rise to explaining why.
Repeatedly changing perspectives can work, I’ve read a few books lately where doing this actually made the book absolutely amazing because it added a depth to the story that would not otherwise have existed. However, in Harrigan’s book it doesn’t quite give the same effect and in fact takes away from the story because it seems unnecessary to the point of confusing at times.
There isn’t very good characterizations either. I like being able to create a character in my head, especially if the book is turned into a movie then I can see how well the actor matched up to what I had but in this book there is little to nothing to give me a basis to work with. It’s hard to connect when you have nothing to hold onto. The way she writes her characters, you could just randomly pick people off Times Square and they’d all fit.

The diary inclusions need serious work. Harrigan was a teenage girl once, surely she remembers what she was like, what she would’ve written and how she would’ve described things but these entries don’t reflect that. I just don’t buy that these were written by a teenager in the midst of teen angst who is dealing with the emotional rollercoaster that is going on during this time in a girl’s life.

The way she writes about Reba’s view on the KKK seemed completely unbelievable especially since Harrigan is from the south and should know better. I’ve lived all over the world but went to high school in North Texas and learned about the KKK inside of my first few months. I highly doubt Reba, who has spent her life encased in this culture, would actually be surprised about anything to do with racism.

I think there is a lot of promise here but Harrigan needs a more strict editing process to clean up the dialogue and smooth out the fake realism.

Secrets of Southern Girls is both a coming-of-age story and a mystery of who did really kill a girl all those years ago. The interaction of people in that community, a small mill town in the deep south was nicely done. The small town politics, mentality, culture, ways of the world was a nice immersion into this part of the world and helped to show how the characters had grown up and experienced certain things in life.

I did struggle a bit with the many diary entries - the diary seemed to have been written with the idea that someone would use it years later to look for clues. But maybe I’m being too cynical. There was one angle however that I really didn’t like involving an accusation of one kind and I didn’t quite get where this fitted in with the story.

The setting of the book was evocative and there’s always something delicious about going back to a town you thought you’d left behind to discover something well buried and hidden...

Clare

Secrets of Southern Girls tells the story of a friendship between two teenage girls, Reba and Jules, who are growing up in the small mill town of Lawrence, Mississippi. Jules sees her friend as pure and innocent, oblivious to the secrets Reba is keeping from her. Secrets, which would surely destroy their friendship. But secrets have a way of revealing themselves in little innocent remarks, chance encounters, routines broken. Soon Reba’s worlds collide, ending in terrible tragedy – an event that will haunt Jules throughout her adult life. Too traumatised at the time, she has only sketchy memories of the incident, and guilt has been her constant companion since. With too many questions unanswered, she agrees to Reba’s old boyfriend’s request to look for Reba’s diary to be finally be able to find out the truth and put her demons to rest.

Secrets of Southern Girls is both a coming-of-age story and a mystery of sorts, as Jules (now Julie) is trying to find out whether she really killed her best friend on that fateful day decades ago, and the events leading up to it. Harrigan skilfully sets the atmosphere of the small mill town, and I got a good sense of the small town politics and relationships that shape the girls’ lives.

My biggest gripe with the book are the chapters that read “Reba’s diary” – it is a pet hate of mine when authors use the diary perspective in a novel, in a way no one would ever write a real diary. Reba is a teenage girl consumed by the lust and passion of first teenage love, and yet her diary reads like a literary work, dialogue and all. I was a teenager once, given to passionate and woeful outpourings into the pages of my diary (which makes me laugh today), full of my own importance and seeing my small problems as disasters of epic scale. This is what I would expect from Reba, who is so consumed with her first experiences with boys and sex that these form the centre of her whole universe. If you have to involve a diary, it would be better to offer small, cryptic excerpts in the style of teenage writing, and then flesh these out and explain them through narrative from Reba’s point of view. But titling whole chapters “Reba’s diary” just did not ring true. This may be petty, but it irked me, as did the constant chopping and changing between the so-called diary and Julie’s story, which made it a confusing read. Ok - rant over.

Secrets of Southern Girls is a slow moving story, with the mystery at its centre not quite compelling enough for me to keep me interested. Seeing that Julie’s main concern was that she was somehow involved in her friend’s death, I did not fully understand the importance of the diary to her – since her friend would not have been able to write about her own death from the afterlife, those final moments would still remain a mystery. That aside, I found it difficult to bond with either character, although Reba’s discovery of her own sexuality at times was sensitively drawn and authentic, especially in the scenes with Toby (who was by far my favourite character as he had the most authentic voice of all the characters – unlike the other characters, I was able to visualise him clearly). I was often confused by different characters’ motives for some of their actions, for example Nell, who held on to the diary knowing that there were at least two characters consumed with guilt due to unanswered questions – why? This outlines my quintessential struggle with the book: I found it extremely difficult to visualise or understand its characters. The often stilted dialogue and ambiguous motives and thought processes of all protagonists always seemed to keep me at arms’ length, and I never bonded with any of them. They just lacked spark. Seeing that this is Harrigan’s debut novel, these issues may be ironed out in future novels, so I will definitely give the author another go.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free electronic copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Loved the cover! This book id definitely great as i found it to be an amazing page turner.

The book is well written and a definite page turner. The plot is well developed howerver; the ending is disappointing but speaks to the character development throughout the novel. The themes of not really knowing those you love rings through as well as you can never go home again or leave the past in the past. An overall great weekend read for anyone that likes mystery.