Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for providing me with a copy of Emily Layden’s novel, All Girls, in exchange for an honest review.

When a scandal from 1995 surfaces and threatens to damage the reputation of Atwater, a prestigious all-girls boarding school in Connecticut, the current students are left wondering who they should trust. All Girls is set during a single school year and each chapter focuses on a different student, high school girls with different dreams and personalities, all trying to navigate the complications of adolescence.

As the girls are being dropped off at Atwater in the fall, they encounter a series of yard signs alerting them to a rapist living on campus. In 1995, a student named Karen Mirro was raped by a teacher and subsequently expelled from Atwater based on an unrelated incident, with no repercussions for the rapist. Now in her late thirties, Mirro has brought a lawsuit against Atwater, and although none of the students firmly know which of their teachers is a rapist, the rumors run rampant and distrust is high.

The school year proceeds with its usual traditions and events, as the administration struggles to keep the lawsuit on the down-low, including none of the staff being removed from their positions. The student paper tries to publish an edition regarding sexual assault and they are barred. Just as the signs mysteriously appear, so do other reminders of the case, such as flyers and unusual artwork. Atwater is awash in the mysterious identity of both the rapist and the person calling attention to Mirro’s case. But even more, the girls all worry if their beloved school, which is steeped in their identity, would protect them if they were in Mirro’s shoes?

I was initially drawn to All Girls because the blurb likened it to one of my all-time favorite novels, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep. I can see the reasons for the comparisons, but All Girls was especially timely due to recent revelations about my high school years.

I graduated from a prestigious arts high school in 1995 and during my time in school, I did not realize boundaries that were being crossed between teachers and students. Sure, I saw things that seemed borderline inappropriate, but like Layden’s characters, when you are a teen, sometimes the lines are very blurry. Since graduating, I have heard stories from close friends of very, very inappropriate behavior towards them from some of our male teachers. More than one story, more than one teacher, and certainly more than one female student being affected. It hurts to realize this was happening and that friends were hurting in silence.

All Girls highlights an issue that has been raised recently among my friends, that there has been a shift in the current generation. Mirro was of my generation, which now I realize, we didn’t feel that we had the ability to speak up. She files the lawsuit decades later, because now, during the “me too” movement, she feels like she has a voice. The current Atwater students may still have some uncertainties regarding boundaries and inappropriate behavior, yet they are also raised during a time when they know the power of their own voices. They know that it is vital to hold Atwater accountable for protecting its students.

Layden’s novel took me right back to my teen years, not that I attended a boarding school or grewup with social media, yet the teen emotions were similar. I enjoyed how she framed the novel with focusing on a different student for each chapter and how the book took us through a single school year. I liked having different voices tell their experiences of Atwater and Mirro.

I’m in my early 40’s, and I feel that hindsight gives me a different perspective then if I had read All Girls during my teen years. I have a stepdaughter who will soon turn fourteen, and I couldn’t help but see her in a few of the younger characters, particularly cringing with some of the cruelties that the girls inflict upon each other, hoping that she will make true friends and that her “bad decisions” are mild.

All Girls is poignant and beautifully written. I highly recommend it and I look forward to reading Layden’s future works.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC of this book.

When I heard the description of this book, I said to myself oh no, not yet another girls school book. Yet, it was not. This book was very different. It follows a group of 9 girls, who find out that when you're young, the world is yours for the taking, but in reality, not everyone makes it unscathed. This book resonated with me in a different way...more of how you're told many things that life can offer, then the ice cold slap of reality hits you in the face.

I could not get into this book unfortunately. The premise about a rape allegation at a boarding school initially had me interested, but I found myself bored and waiting for something bigger to happen and more to be revealed.

So first, I am kind of a sucker for boarding school settings. Something about be a public school student all of my life and not going away to college I guess. I find the traditions and life fascinating and Atwater in Connecticut, was a great place for a story. All Girls takes place throughout a school year in 2015 and is told from the perspectives multiple students in chapters titled by school events. The book opens with the incoming students coming across a hundred signs placed to be seen from all of the approaches to campus. These signs state "A Rapist Works Here" and it's the opening salvo of a year where a mysterious someone (or someones), push the school to confront and answer for a 1995 incident where a former student reports a rape from a teacher she was having a consensual affair with. She ends up getting kicked out of Atwater while the teacher is apparently still there, 20 years later. There is a lot of teenage angst and young women facing their sexuality in an environment which positions itself to support them, but really does not. The mystery at first is who the teacher is that the school has protected for so many years and then it becomes the identity of the person pushing the school to step up through various rebellious acts. The story is intriguing but the challenge with the book is that there are so many perspectives that it becomes jumbled and hard to follow which makes it hard to care about every character. All Girls is billed as a Young Adult novel and it would be good to read and discuss with older teens. It's a coming of age story in the time a few years before the #metoo movement got started, and is topical and relevant, but it didn't quite come together for me as much as I wanted it to.

This was an amazing collection of the girls' stories and journeys throughout their all-girl school. I really felt like all of them had so much emotion and tragedy in their experiences that I was connected with all of them by the end of the book.

Thank you so much to Net Galley for my advanced readers copy. I really enjoyed this one.

The opening chapter was very engaging. I think my expectation was too high after that. The rest of the book was dry and dragged on. There were a lot of characters to keep track of.

I received the galley from NetGalley.

Academia novels are definitely up there among my favorite types of novels, however this one missed the mark. Maybe it was the pacing or the characters. For whatever reason, I just couldn't find my groove with this book. I did finish it but it was a little difficult to get through. I'll definitely give this author another chance in the future but this one didn't really meet my expectations.

I reviewed this title on my blog and will provide the details directly to the publisher in the next round of this review process.

This book had an interesting premise and I was hooked. However. I felt like there were too many different characters to keep track of. In the end I felt let down by this book.

Thank you to the author and the publisher for this opportunity to read an advanced copy of All Girls by Emily Layden. I really struggled with how to frame this review. This first reading I did of this title, I only made it about a third of the way through before I gave up trying to connect with the characters. Every April I try and read primarily YA books just to avoid missing some of the great work that’s being written and published for this age bracket, and so I wanted to give All Girls another go (this time with an audiobook simulcast, if you will). I’m still struggling with how to review this story. Overall it is so well written and interesting, but I kept feeling like each individual character was such a stereotype they all felt flat to me. The topics covered are heavy and serious and necessary and the author handled those each in what I felt was a responsible way, but for some reason I just couldn’t plug in to this one. Having said that, I think the target audience of young(er than me) adult women will mostly like it.

This was a timely and interesting read. I really enjoyed the structure, where each chapter is devoted to a different student at the prep school. This gives the reader an interesting perspective on each student's story, but also, indirectly, through other stories we've encountered and their perspectives on the key adults at the school. This was well written and thought-provoking. Recommended!

Well, this fell flat. I thought this would have some potential bases on the synopsis and opening chapter. However, it all went downhill from there. It was all over the place too many characters with their POV throughout the chapters. It was hard to follow and got really confusing. Then it just never went anywhere. No build up. It was very anticlimactic.

I really had high hopes for this book. The opening chapter grabbed my attention and I really though it was going to be intense.
I feel that the message the author was trying to get across was missed due to, basically, too much going on. Too many point of views and too many stories.
Also, there didn't seem to be any climax... I waited... and waited... but the story fell flat.

I really wanted to like this book! But, wow ... the author made it so difficult! In a book about an all girl prep school, how could you really go wrong? Well ... you could make each long, agonizing chapter about a different girl! I have never been more confused about who the characters were in a book before - and I've read *thousands* of books. I got about 25% of the way through this one and basically ended up skimming through to the end. I am one to always stick out a book until the end, but this one was just impossible to do that.

This review was also posted on Goodreads.

I'm going to start out by saying I really loved the idea of this book. In the midst of #MeToo, it was a very timely novel. With that being said, it was a bit difficult to follow. There were just so many different characters and viewpoints that things easily became tangled.

We open up the book to a scene of one of the girls heading off to her boarding school, only to pass signs on the way there suggesting that one of the teachers is a rapist. This caught my attention immediately. However, throughout the book, it almost didn't even stay in the forefront of the story.

What you mostly get from this book is a lot of coming of age, what it means to be female type of writing. While this isn't a bad thing, it would have been a lot better if I could connect with some of the characters. I wish I liked it more.

Sadly this was a DNF for me. It had such a strong premise and plot from reading the synopsis. It had great character structure and details about each character. I like reading about the different interactions between the characters and the relationship between each student and the boarding school.

However I made it about 30% through and still was waiting for something to take off, something to really hint at the actual plot and dilemma/thrill of the story. It was very wordy and focused a lot on Macy and her IEP, her learning struggles, and her own anxiety. However it just really tied to her past and her current class/the initiation. It didn't feel like it was connecting to the purpose of the story though.

All Girls is an engaging, detail-oriented book about students at an all-girls prep school. It feels like a self-contained community where the smallest thing can create the biggest stir. In the background of each story is the sexual assault allegation that comes from a former student against a faculty member. This book is told from many different perspectives that all connect to each other. At times, it was pretty difficult to keep the narrators straight. I appreciated the variety but wished there were fewer narrators just for clarity.

All Girls is a tough read, tackling topics that can be hard to handle. I thought the author did an excellent job of creating a story that focused on sexual assault and the impact on the students and the school. There are quite a few main characters, so it can get a bit difficult to follow if you don't like having that many MCs. I thought this was a strong story with an important topic, and I'm glad I read it!

I will give credit to this book and that it takes place in a school setting. I really enjoy school setting books. I'll be honest this review will be short. Why? I didn't particular care for this book. This is a very slow paced book with no actual excitement that I could find. I wish it moved a bit faster. :( Over all I felt like I was reading a YA novel instead.

This was a book with n interesting premise and solid writing that lacked cohesion to drive the story. Multiplie points of view that ultimately dilute the strength of the whole.