OMG, the plot twist at the end!! I would give this book to any teen looking for a great, dark thriller. There are certainly a lot of twists and turns that kept me reading. I had chills. I never saw the ending coming, which I LOVE in this kind of thriller!!! Great book- like "Gone Girl" for the slightly younger crowd.

Thanks to NetGalley for the chance to read an E-ARC of THROWAWAY GIRLS in exchange for my honest review.

I read all of Throwaway Girls in one weekend. I was drawn in by Caroline’s voice and complexity (plus, I love a good queer MC), and after we started to learn more about the mystery, I couldn’t put the novel down. Important message. Flawed, relatable narrator. Tons of twist and turns. I’ve already recommended this book to a few of my students.

I really wanted to like it. The main character was unlikeable, very little redeeming qualities other than she is smart. The interaction between Willa and Livie was confusing (until it is explained in the end, but I felt it distracted more than helped). I figured out who the guilty party was 70% into the book. The character keeps degrading the fact that she's affluent and that her parents ignore her, but she takes advantage of that.

Throwaway Girls is a novel that manages to keep you reading while giving missing women a voice. Caroline is heartbroken after her girlfriend breaks up with her and her best friend goes missing. Caroline is bereft in a town steeped in wealth and privilege but with adults that don’t understand her. Her mother actively rejects her sexuality. With a mistrust for adults Caroline goes looking for her missing friend Madison. She finds secrets hidden in every corner of life.

Andrea Contos writes a novel that every girl and woman should read. Actually everyone should. It’s socially aware but still leaves you reading it in one sitting.

***Thanks to NetGalley and Kids Can Press Publishing Company for providing me an ARC of THROWAWAY GIRLS by Andrea Contos in exchange for my honest review.***

4.25 rating

This book was a very intriguing thriller and mystery about a girl whose best friend has gone missing. While out searching for her friends she finds out that another girl in the nearby area has also gone missing, but because of her class and socioeconomic status, has been disregarded by the local authority. This book explores issues about socio-economic status and lgbt issues.

Writing:
“Everything started with the body at the edge of the lake. I know that now. But back then, all I knew was the rush and gurgle of water where the stream fed into the lake, the gentle sway of yellow irises as the wind lifted their down-turned petals. And the way the body’s legs bobbed in time with the lap of water against the shore, like part of the girl’s spirit was still trying to run from whatever had brought her there.”
-I mean come on! This is such a good opening and made me very interested.

Pacing:
-This entire book was hard to put down

Characters:
-I might not have liked the characters at all times, but I still really enjoyed reading about them and their lives/struggles

-I will recommend!!

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC!

This book gave me some lovely Lovely Bones vibe with a boarding school vibe and I'm all here for it. I think the atmosphere was wonderfully written and the storyline was gripping. I especially liked the sections in between chapters where you're not entirely sure whose perspective you're reading from.

My main issue with this novel is the characterization of Caroline - I wanted more of the storyline of her going to conversion therapy camp (perhaps next novel?) but I do understand that this was more focused on the throwaway girls and how people forget about them. I think this book definitely brings up a very important issue of police overlooking certain types of girls because they know nobody is looking for them.

Throwaway Girls is a fantastic debut. It's well paced and full of twists, a few you won't see coming. It captivates you from the first page with it's strong characters and intriguing plot.

Great writing and strong voice. Recommend if looking for a story that is as captivating as it is well-written.

I couldn't finish this I found it boring and confusing. The characters weren't interesting and I didn't enjoy the plot

(3.5/5 stars)

First of all, this book melded entertainment and an important, timely message about societal judgement, which I appreciated. Throwaway Girls is a thriller about the girls who get written off, the ones no one tries to find. It's a really great idea as well as a fresh one. That I loved. I also found the representation of POC and LGBT characters to be refreshingly casual and integrated, rather than included as a token minority. This book is full of righteous anger and comments scathingly on what our society values over it's members. The scariest thing is how real it is.

The story itself begins when our protagonist's best friend disappears and she, in the process of trying to find her, unearths a greater mystery of girls vanishing from the area. It wasn't a particularly gritty or violent thriller, but I found it engaging and each chapter (from about 50% completion onward) made me curious to learn more. It just didn't sink its claws into me as much as I would have liked. I was intrigued, but wanted to be enthralled.

There are two narrators to this book, the start of one POV uses "chapter x" and the other uses a title. Even with that distinction, I found the dual narration to be a bit confusing and a weak point in the book. It was hard to know why we were learning certain things and even, at times, who the other narrator was. All is revealed (no spoilers) but it was something that took me out of the story.

I thought the author did a good job of creating a cast of very believable characters. I could imagine them among the real high schoolers, waitresses, and parents the populate our world. The protagonist, Caroline, was clever and sad and bitter. She was a good hearted but also dishonest and a difficult friend to have. I'll admit that she was not the always most enjoyable person, but I understood her and she proved to be a damn good sleuth.

This was one hell of a debut! I’ve been in a reading slump for the last two months and I couldn’t put this book down. I cannot wait to see what this author does next.

It’s exactly what I needed. I somewhat guessed the twist near the beginning but I wasn’t bothered. Sometimes I like knowing and I am glad it wasn’t some “random out of the blue character never introduced before now” kinda deal.

The characters felt real and strong and flawed and I loved Caroline.

There is some of the usual teenagers running around solving puzzles without telling the parents but you’ll come to realise the grown ups aren’t exactly doing anything.

I really enjoyed the book.

This is one twisted story that I devoured so fast. The author is a poetic thriller writer. I found myself pausing to soak in her words and phrasing. I liked Caroline right away with her sarcasm, determination, and passion to find the truth. She takes matters into her own hands. While there is a slow burn investment of the story, you will find yourself consumed by the emotion and the relationships as well as the desire to give justice to others who have gone missing. I couldn't believe how everything came together in the end.

'Throwaway Girls' is more than a mere young adult mystery novel. As the title suggests, it is a book with an important message to send about how the criminal justice system -- and society itself -- fails so many missing young people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, highlighting how the disappearances of some (usually white and middle-class) girls attract media attention and candlelit vigils, while others are forgotten. It had a believable setting that felt eerie and gloomy from the very first page, an original plot, and some "oh!" moments as I put pieces of the novel's mystery together alongside Caroline, but ultimately, I found myself unable to get properly emotionally invested in the characters and found that the ending fell a little flat for me.

Even so, this isn't one to pass up. Flawed, forthright protagonists like Caroline are always interesting to read about in YA lit, and this is a well-written exploration of privilege with a resolution that I didn't see coming!

Can I just say wow? This book had me hooked from the beginning. I couldn't put it down. Caroline was a great protagonist and I really felt for her. The writing was excellent and enhanced the mood.

Sometimes you just need to get lost in a good mystery/thriller. Andrea Constos provides just that in this enticing novel. I would have given this 4 stars, but there were many times that I got confused in the writing. This might have been due to the review copy, but regardless, when the book switched to the voice of an abused child, it was not always obvious.

The book tells the story of Caroline Lawson. She is just trying to survive the last few months of high school so she can get the hell out of her hometown and her parents who believe in conversion therapy for gays. Her girlfriend recently left her and she is struggling to hang on, so when her best friend also goes missing, she has to figure out why. The thing is that Caroline was leading a double life. She was the perfect prep-school kid to her parents and hanging out with her girlfriend at a bar not far from town. When her friend goes missing, the only clue left for her is a matchbox from said bar, a bar her friend isn't supposed to know about, with a phone number.

Most of the book deals with the mystery of finding out what happened to Madison. But interwoven with that is what happens to kids who aren't from well-to-do families. Other girls have gone missing as well, but the police have written them off as runaways. This book shines the light on the issue of "throwaway kids" who get abducted partially because no one is going to look for them.

If you are a fan of thrillers, this is a good book to read, I just hope the final layout makes parts of it clearer.

While I admit I struggled through the first 40% of this book, the second half really picked up steam and had me racing through its pages. That being said, I’m usually an avid fan of mystery teen fiction, and LGBTQ representative characters, but I’ll admit that Throwaway Girls fell a bit flat for me. One major issue I had was the unrealistic self destructive nature of the narrator and ultimately the lack of development of any of the additional characters, especially the missing girls. I found myself more invested in the unraveling of a mystery than in the safety or return of the missing girls which seemed the opposite of what the author was trying to suggest. Also, while I appreciated the author’s focus on class differences, particularly in reference to who falls between the cracks of our justice system, I thought it was a huge disservice to both herself and her readers to not address the issues of race in our justice system and to veer away from characters of color in general.

All that being said, if you found yourself drawn to Throwaway Girls, I definitely would still give it a chance! Ultimately this novel was not quite for me but still carries a great thriller plot that’ll have you wanting to read until the end to unravel what happened to these throwaway girls!

Thank you to Netgalley, Andrea Contos, and KPC Loft for the advanced read of Throwaway Girls!

While I'm not usually a fan of mystery/thriller-style novels, this one caught my eye, and I'm very glad that I picked up this book. It follows Caroline, a soccer player at an exclusive private school, as she investigates her best friend Madison's mysterious disappearance. With help from her friends Jake and Aubrey, along with many other people she meets along the way, she uncovers an unsettling pattern of young girls going missing with no real investigation from the police. As she digs deeper into the lives of theses girls, she realizes that it's up to her to find the truth and help Madison before it's too late for her.

This was a very enjoyable read! I quite liked the protagonist, as she felt like a relatively realistic teen to me. There was some amazing bi rep in this book, which brought me so much joy, and the relationships between the characters were complicated and messy, just as real relationships are. Willa and Caroline's relationship was particularly lovely to read about because, while it was heartbreaking, it was also hopeful in a strange sort of way. I found Jake's character to be a bit off-putting though, unfortunately. He just didn't click for me, and I didn't love some of his comments, as they came off as fetishizing Caroline's bisexuality. Aside from Jake, though, I thought everyone else was extremely interesting and quite well-developed.

The plot of this book was well done and was paced very effectively. It is a relatively short book, which meant that there was always something going on, which I really enjoy in a book, especially a mystery like this one. While you do have to suspend your disbelief a bit that a teenager would be able to do all of this, it's not so jarring that it makes the whole book seem implausible. The mystery itself was very compelling, and the more we learned about it throughout course of the novel, the more invested I became. The ending was a twist that I did not see coming and I think that it was quite well done. I also appreciated the lack of gore in this book. While for some people that may be a positive, I'm not one to enjoy graphic depictions of realistic violence, especially towards young girls, so I'm really glad that the author did not go into detail about what the girls who were kidnapped suffered.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys thriller-style stories but does not enjoy the gore/graphic violence that often come along with them. It's a quick and relatively easy read that I think most people will enjoy.

I love mystery stories. All good stories are intrinsically mystery stories so actual mysteries are like a good book on drugs. Throwaway Girls is a unique, gripping, Q U E E R mystery that keeps you gripped until the end.

Told through the perspectives of MC Caroline and an unnamed mystery girl, Throwaway Girls analyzes self identity, the familial pressures, and the different ways girls are treated because of their social standing and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

When Caroline’s best friend, Madison, goes missing Caroline is determined to find her. The writing by Contos was easy to read and kept me guessing up until the end. This book also addresses social and racial differences and how that plays into crimes and life. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a page-turner!

This is surprisingly intriguing, promising YA Debut thriller.

In the beginning it started a little slow and I had second thoughts if I should skip it or keep on reading. I’m happy to decide resuming my reading because the mystery part of the story hooked me. I kept guessing and changing my mind about whodunit.

We also have likable heroine Caroline trying to find herself in high school jungle, counting the days till the graduation ( only three months left to keep her head high and getting out of trouble) But graduating and earning her freedom got more complicated because her friends Madison is missing and she already owed her too much. She gotta find her which forces her to wear Nancy Drew’s shoes and conducting her own investigation. And her suspect list is growing bigger at each day including their teacher Mr. McCormack.

Things I liked: Caroline’s loyalty, determination to find her friend, even though she is not ideal heroine everybody adores; she has her own flaws, secrets and she keeps lying to protect herself. The mystery and the hinted romance parts were also quiet lovable qualities of the story.

But at some parts, writing was a little bumpy, sometimes I question whose narration I was reading but conclusion of the story is well-developed so I didn’t have a problem if a book ends without making me irritated and having more questions than I started my read. I got my answers and satisfied.

I’m rounding up 3.5 stars. It was great beginning for the debut author and I loved to read more of her works.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Kids Can Press /KCP Loft for sharing this ARC copy with me in exchange my honest review.