I wanted to like this book I really did. I just felt it was pretty boring and quite hard to even motivate myself to finish it :( the only positive was that it was an easy read to ‘concentrate’ on whilst my brain was occupied with grief and heartbreak. I will give it a positive that I didn’t guess how it would end, which always good / tricky in this genre

An enjoyable book with great writing. It reminded me of an all girls version of The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley which I loved. It was a fun read but I struggled to connect to any of the characters and felt the book dipped a little in the middle.

Would recommend and gave a 3.5

Opening line, “Like most clusterfucks these days, it starts with a group text.” And I kept reading.

The Girl’s Weekend by Jody Gehrman is a suspense novel about 5 college friends reuniting for a weekend at the home of their controlling friend, Sadie, a successful children’s author. It seems like Sadie has it all, but does she really?

I liked the cast of main characters, each of who have their own secrets. One owes Sadie a lot of money, one who learns that Sadie is going to expose her secret in a new book she’s writing, one whose pregnant and fears Sadie will take over once the baby is born, and one who has a competitive history with Sadie. The guessing game of who-done it was well played out through the book.

I enjoyed this book, but it wasn’t a “wow” book for me. Still, the mystery itself was a good one, and the conclusion was respectable.

Thank you to NetGalley, Jody Gehrman, and Crooked Lane Books for the chance to read and review this 3 star ARC.

After trying to get out of a girls weekend with some old friends, June finds herself on a trip to Sadie's her biggest competition/friends house who is married to an old sweetheart of June's. After some shakiness happens they finally get to enjoy spending some time together with far too many gin and tonics and got lost in the night, when everyone is waking up in the morning they realize that Sadie is missing and there is blood on the wall. The girls can't seem to remember what happened the night previous and start to wonder if they have been drugged, no one can seem to trust eachother because no one has any memories whatsoever until June starts to get small flashbacks of the night. The story has some twists and turns but has the typical "police saves the day" type of feel to it at the end, a good read if you like mystery thrillers!

5/5 stars, WOW
this book was so good.. It was about old friends having a reunion trip after not seeing eachother for awhile and trust me it was one they wont forget i could not put this book down every chapter was so good and the characters were so good.. The main character was one of my favorite characters that ive read in a long time. She was great.
It touched on so many different things and a few secrets and it had some scandal however i was expecting more secrets but this book was amazing.
I look foward to reading more from this author.
Also i kept wanting to know who was guilty and i had my prediction from the start and it turns out i was right however this book was so good and if you like books that are about a few friends going through some stuff and a messy weekend read this book asap!

This books starts strong. I was impressed when I began reading it. But the story quickly became predictable. The suspense was lost and I was not as interested as I had been in the beginning.

I still think it’s a good read, but I hope to see more from this author that sustains suspense and has a strong, twisted end.

I like the concept of a female cast with history between them. It added a lot of layers to the story (some which I wish were gone into a bit more) and I think having a lot of varying personalities kept the story moving at a fast pace. I will say the book did lull a bit towards the middle with the "collective amnesia" and it was a bit frustrating as a reader to muddle through a bunch of "I don't know" and "I don't remember" for a large chunk of the book. The ending did surprise me, but I wish there was more to it to wrap up loose ends. I also would've liked to hear at least parts of the story from Ethan's perspective and I feel like some opportunities were lost there.

Always a fan of a good girls reunion premise, I was really interested to start this book with the added mystery/suspense element.

It's a quick read, and I mostly enjoyed the 2nd half, but I think I would have abandoned the book before that point if I hadn't received this ARC from NetGalley and owed them a review.

I couldn't find anything to like about the characters, and beyond not understanding why they would even want to get together for a girls weekend (since they seemed to really dislike each other even in college), there were so many problems with the details of "the morning after" that I got hung up on and frustrated with. For example, if the girls suspected they had been drugged with the alcohol that Kimiko brought, why didn't they explain why pregnant Amy had "snuck" a drink until more than a day later as the story unfolded? And why were the girls so quick to dip into the same bottle the very next day? I also couldn't buy into why these women thought it was a good idea to withhold the information that they suspected they had been drugged from the police. Maybe if the characters had been in their early 20's when they would have had less life experience I could have believed they could be so foolish.

I suspected early on who the culprit was because I thought that character would have been pushing the police harder to find Sadie unless guilty herself...oops, spoiler!

I try to be more generous with my "stars" because it was an overall entertaining read, but unfortunately the inconsistencies surrounding Sadie's disappearance and the supposed "drugging" of her friends left me really annoyed and I had a hard time pushing past it.

Thank you to NetGalley who provided me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Girls Weekend by Jody Gerhman was a study in female relationships and the cost of secret rivalries and triangulations in a close-knit group.

The beginning certainly hooked me with old college friends meeting up to celebrate a new baby, a weekend in a mansion in the PNW with a famous woman named Sadie who clearly was the ‘frenemy.’

In any group of women I’ve ever been in a swan emerges. Someone who seems to get everything they want with a snap of their fingers. I related deeply to this situation, as I am a split between Kimiko’s rebellion and June’s vulnerability, not Sadie’s iron will and the pretty princess aspect, but I know her well and avoid whenever possible.

The mystery begins about 35% in and I already knew from the blurb that something bad was about to happen. There was plenty of set up and connections made to keep me wondering who was behind the bizarre events.

Ethan comes off as handsome and slightly mysterious initially, but it’s clear that he likes to play with fire and is selfish and immature.

Leo as the mystery man was a welcome addition, as I wondered a few times what his real role was on the MacTavish estate and if he was someone’s sidepiece?

When someone goes missing, there was a slow down in the pacing when June began constantly mulling over whom, what and where. It cranked things down for me and the story felt less realistic, as I can’t imagine anyone having logical, and well drawn out conclusions after what happens.

That complaint aside, I was compelled to know who dun it at the end. I had my money on someone, but I was wrong and was very glad that I kept reading.

As a reader, I would qualify this novel as more of a mystery and women’s fiction than a thriller, as it delved more into relationships and feelings than a typical thriller does. This is a positive thing and I would like to see more of this in similar books in the future. I will certainly be reading more of Ms. Gerhman’s work, as it felt very relatable to me.

My appreciation to Netgalley and Crooked Lane Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The beginning of this book was amazing. I was extremely engrossed in the story and the writing was full of suspense. Towards the middle of the book I started noticing that the story became predictable and I was able to figure out what would eventually happen in the end.

I wish the ending could have been thought out a little more. All in all the book was fairly good.

Sadie is the quintessential mean girl.
What seem like nice gestures from her are anything but. She controls and dominates everyone from friends to family to staff and expect them all to bend to her every ridiculous command.
So when Sadie goes missing and there's signs of foul play, it's no surprise. Everybody present had a motive to do her harm, but which one decided to take it that far?

It took awhile for this story to really go anywhere and even then it seemed to drag on.
This was (supposed to be) a classic whodunit tale. There were so many characters and therefore a lot of suspects, however, the conclusion was glaringly obvious early on.
Sorry to say I just didn't find myself enjoying or investing in the writing style, the storytelling, or the characters.

Thank you to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for an ARC in exchanged for an honest review.

This book was pretty good. I didn't like the characters personalities much but the writing was well done. I figured out the ending ahead of time but that could be a result of me reading a lot of thrillers. It was still an okay read for me.

These characters are super unlikable. I had serious problems with many of them. Yet I kept reading. I thought that the plot was kind of thin, yet I kept reading. I kept waiting for the book to get better for me and it really didn't, if I'm being completely honest. I feel like this book had a ton of potential, but for me, it really just kind of fell flat.

I wanted to like it more, but I just really didn't. I finished it though so there's that. I just thought it could be a lot better.

I really was looking forward to reading this book after reading the description. A girls weekend resulting in murder? What's not to like! Unfortunately, I felt the story dragged on a bit and lagged. The premise was good but it seemed to take awhile to get there and because of this I felt that the ending was pretty predictable. In general was a decent mystery and "who done it".

We all have that girl from high school that we think got everything we ever wanted. The perfect job, the amazing husband, the big house. For June Moody that girl was Sadie. They were friends in college where June thought she had all the time in the world to write the great American novel. Ten or so years later she hasn't done that. Instead her friend Sadie from college wrote this amazing young adult book that launched into a blockbuster hit movie. Not to mention Sadie married Ethan, a man June was in love with, but turned down because she didn't want to be tied down. Now Sadie has invited everyone to her house for a Girls Weekend and June is drug along, despite her jealousy of Sadie making her not want to. But one morning they wake up and Sadie has vanished and there is blood in the hallway. With no memory of what happened the night before they must try to piece together what happened to her. And it appears June isn't the only one that would have reason to hurt Sadie.



I was really looking forward to this book. Alexa Donne said great things about it on her channel when she read it. And I did like somethings about it. I really liked the representation of Young Adult in an adult book. I went away with wanting to actually read Dakota's Garden. I liked the friendship between June and Em. I liked June overall, except for when it came to Ethan. And for the most part, the writing was good and the flow was decent.


There are several things that bothered me about this book. Ethan being the first thing. I didn't like his character and I didn't understand why these girls like him so much. I didn't like several of the characters, but that didn't ruin the book for me. What ruined it was knowing exactly who did this and why before Sadie even went missing. This book was incredibly predictable for me. For someone who loves mystery and thriller as much as I do, I knew exactly what happened when this character started talking and the things that they said. I wish it would have been dialed back a bit, because if it had been and I couldn't have guessed, it would have been an amazing twist.


I gave this book 2\5 stars. Where there were somethings I liked about the book, the predictability wasn't something I could get past.

While this DEFINITELY wasn't a book you could stop reading (what's next?! what's happening?!) and there was a very satisfying amount of catty behavior, many of the post-possible-crime actions didn't ring true. Really, the women all just claimed "memory loss" and never once sat down to reconstruct what few memories they did have? And pretty much every male was lusting after the main character? Still, those points aside, it was quite an enjoyable read.

OMG YES!!!! Literally the perfect girls weekend novel fo read. With it being very creepy at the same time... I will honestly say I did not see the ending coming. I don’t want to give away any spoilers but dang! Y’all need to read this one ASAP.

Solid feedback but not over the top - didn't wow me like I had hoped. It wasn't anything different in the thriller genre but still worth reading for a good thriller book-craving. The characters were a bit flat IMO.

The story line is what made me want to request this book. This author is new to me. This is a story of old college friends that haven't been all together in a few years. June has always felt that Sadie had everything. That is the start. Then we throw in secrets, old flames and too much drinking. I found the book to be slow at times. I didn't fully engage with alot of the characters.

You ever read a book where the characters are so annoying and make stupid decisions that you know will end bad but you can’t do anything but watch?

Yeah, that was this book. It was like a train wreck in slow motion. I didn’t like or relate to any of the characters. At times, I forgot they were women in their late thirties... they acted like teenage girls. So much petty jealousy, comparing of lives, and secrets.
June, the main character, talks about how they were the best of friends and had so many good times together and yet, I didn’t actually see that during their girls weekend. Could be that there were years of separation and a murder happening but still.

This book was a fast paced thriller. I did like the storyline. The writing was smooth and flowed very well. About half way through, I did guess who the culprit was. It wasn’t overly obvious which I appreciate but also kind of expected. The ending left you with a bad aftertaste. Mental health was an issue I wish could have been expanded on a little more but it was still an interesting and quick read.

Thank you to Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley for the digital arc.