I struggle to find anything complimentary to say about this book. I couldn't finish the whole thing as it was so poorly written, which was a huge disappointment as I had been looking forward to a young adult mystery novel. Instead it was sentence after sentence of disjointed, repetitive wording.

I really, really didn't connect with this book. The characters were written quite poorly and they were very one-dimensional.
I feel like the author doesn't really know how to write characters, and the book could have gone through a more rigorous editing process, considering that of the main characters one insists on telling the reader she's 'different' and 'weird' (think that cringey Jughead quote), and another, who is the mean girl of the story... well her inner monologue reads like a script for a Cartoon Network villain.

It was a DNF for me

DNF at about 25%, I only persevered as log as I did because I thought the plot sounded like it had promise. Sadly, the bad grammar was too much for me. This book felt as though it had never been touched by an editor, and the best plot in the world isn't enough to make up for constant tautology and sentences which simply make no sense.

The Dead Girl Under the Bleachers starts off with a murder, but we don’t know who. This book follows Laura, Rachel, and Scarlett. I thought this was going to be more mystery that leads up to this murder, but it was just really crazy mean high schoolers doing stuff. Scarlett is literally a psycho mean girl, while her friend Rachel won’t ever stand up to her and tell her she is a horrible human being. Laura, on the other hand, is the outcast of the school and has a seriously messed up home life.

I honestly didn’t like any of this book. The characters were very one-dimensional and annoying. I felt as though our three main characters talked and acted like kindergarteners. Scarlett was seriously just a horrible character from the beginning to the end and she could have had some redemption, but nope that didn’t happen. The pacing was super bizarre as was the writing style. I actually had to laugh out loud at some of the writing because it was just super unrealistic and took me right out of the story. The scenes were super short and half of them didn’t even make sense.

The mystery itself about which character ends up murdered and who murdered them was straight up unbelievable and dumb. I guessed who would get murdered about thirty pages in and figured out the killer quite early on. Honestly, the whole story was just all over the place and I hate being negative towards any books, but this was a train wreck.

The Dead Girl Under the Bleachers opens with the murder of an unnamed girl. We know this event is taking place late at night, before the weekend, and that whoever kills the girl blames her for something. Then we cut back in time to allow the author to build up to the why and where, and dropping little clues about the who.
I think the first thing to say about this story is it’s ridiculously over the top in content and style. The characters walking round in this book are, to put it mildly, deranged and if you were to experience just one hint of the craziness going on here you’d walk away. By the time we get to the end I was almost laughing at how preposterous this story had become.
Our story focuses on a trio of girls. There’s bitchy Mayor’s daughter, Scarlet, who is a bully used to everyone jumping to do her bidding just because. We have her best friend, Rachel, who doesn’t like her all that much but who recognises that small-town popularity has its advantages. Lastly, there’s loner Laura who used to be friends withRachel but who has kept herself to herself since her brother and father were killed in a crash and her mother has become an abusive drunk.
For reasons that make little sense - like much of this - Scarlet decides that she wants to humiliate Laura and tries to befriend her in an attempt to cause maximum hurt. In the process, Rachel and Laura become friendly again and start to unearth some awful secrets about those around them.
There are so many skeletons tumbling out of closets here that it’s hard to know which way to turn. The casual misogyny and use of traumatic experiences for entertainment seems callous - perhaps it’s meant to mean something, but it comes across as cheap. I find it hard to believe such things would take place without anyone being suspicious, but we do build to some answers and some of the worst things are dealt with.

Thank you to netgally and the publisher for this e-Arc. My review is not influenced in any way and all opinions are mine.

Sadly. I didn’t liked the book at all. I skipped a good 200 pages to find out who the killer was. That was literally the only thing that mattered to me.

The writing was really bad. I cannot believe that an editor didn’t got the grammar mistakes, and there were many. The characters were one faced and not rounded at all.

It was an interesting concept, but sadly it wasn’t that well executed.

Here are three girls, aged about 17, growing up in a small town, looking forward to party time as they graduate. But these three girls live in a town where buried secrets threaten to spill over and destroy their lives. Who will prove at the end to be the dead girl at the bleachers?

The characters of each girl is something of a trope: first there is Scarlet, the Queen Bee, who maintains her popularity and dominance through bullying and manipulating those adolescent fears of social rejection. There is Laura the social Outcast, who is now the rugged lone wolf. Then there is Rachel, the Follower, who ditched lonely Laura in favour of being securely within the Popular Set.

So it clearly follows that when Rachel turns to help Laura in her hour of need, there will be ructions and revenge on Party Night. Especially when all the town's skeletons in the cupboard also get ready to surface.

Overall, while there are tropes here, and it is to be hoped the Mean Girls don't latch on this on order to learn how to be Mean Girls, there are enough twists here to make this a thoroughly entertaining read. The writer does hint at what kind of dysfunctional background might lead a young person to bully, so this makes for a goo educational read too.

DNF at 36%. I hate to say it, but this book was awful. There were 3 main girls, plus their parents and there was simply no one that was likable or worth rooting for. I skipped to the ending to find out who did what to whom and the ending made it all worse. Not one character was worthy of or got any kind of true redemption. Every single person in this book could have used some therapy.

Pretty good story. Has plenty of twists and turns to keep you curious about what's going on. The writing is solid and the characters are vivid. So definitely check this out. Happy reading!

The novel starts out with a girl being killed under the bleachers at Craven Falls High, while the Homecoming dance rages on nearby. We don't know who is dead at this point, and the book rewinds to acquaint us with the POVs of three high school girls, Laura (the mouse), Rachel (the nerd) and Scarlet (the bitch). The story that eventually gets us to that night of the murder is by turns deathly dull and so convoluted it becomes confusing.
Firstly, this book is not a mystery, it's a full on soap opera. Also, there are some fairly horrific depictions of rape and physical abuse from a parent that were not dealt with deftly or sensitively at all.
Not great at all. If this was written in the 90s, it would have been a Point Horror!

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me a complimentary copy of The Dead Girl Under the Bleachers: by Donna M. Zadunajsky in exchange for my honest review.

I LOVED every part of this book. Right from the start I was hooked, I couldn’t out it down. The story begins with a murder at a high school and the reader will have to figure out who was murdered and why they were murdered.
You could easily imagine the girls in a high school and you can probably relate to at least one person there. There are many suspects and it keeps you guessing and changing your mind constantly. I was wrong with my predictions which was good as I HATE it when I predict the endings in books.
If you like mystery /murder mystery books then I would definitely recommend this.

‘The Dead Girl Under the Bleachers’ deals with the complex lives of teen girls. Donna M Zadunajsky shows how three girls juggle home life, school and friendships, while hiding painful parts of themselves. I wanted to like this book and I think it had so much potential but the characters felt like stereotypes. This book deals with abuse by family members and sexual assault but it just falls flat.

I have never read a book quite like this. It starts out with the dead girl but doesn’t really tell you who she is then it gives you three different point of views alternating each chapter. Not that this is bad because I did enjoy the book. Just be prepared to be surprised at the end at least I was.


#TheDeadGirlUndertheBleachers #NetGalley

The story aspect of The Dead Girl Under the Bleachers was not bad. The concept is interesting and the plot is twisty, keeping the reader on their toes until the very end, however, the writing is pretty bad. Someone please get this author an editor ASAP! I was thisclose to making this novel a DNF just based on the grammar alone, which is unfortunate because the story really is pretty good and deals with several topics that young adults need to hear.

I’m not a big fan of books told from multiple points of view, although I understand why the author chose to do so in this one. The format did allow for more suspense in this particular tale, however, the author does not do a good job in making the characters feel different. The language, observations, and actions feel the same for each character so it is hard to distinguish between them. None of them has a clear voice.

The grammar...oh the grammar....it’s bad. This book would have benefitted so much from a decent editor. I’ve listed some examples below just to give you a feel for how desperate the situation was...

“Large clumps of hail the size of marbles spit at us at all angles.”

“My brain was on overdrive and knew I would not get any sleep.”

“There was movement behind the curtains in the family room and knew someone was home.”

“I just wished that were true, but there was not reason to remanence over the lost time together, and we should just start over.”

“Whether she meant to her words stung, but I could tell she wanted it to just be us.”

“The luminous light accented the room.” (🤦🏼‍♀️Does anyone know of a light that isn’t luminous? Just curious)

“Let’s go get our bogey on,” (In case you’re wondering, they’re not golfing, they’re at a dance.)

“We pulled into the driveway; Lianne’s car was sitting by the garage which hadn’t been there when we left. (Wow, those construction workers must have moved swiftly to build a garage since you left!)

“How did someone live with a life so secluded with no one around?” 🤔

I could go on, but I’ll spare you.

I hate to give the book only two stars because I do feel the story itself deserves more, but it was just so painful to read the writing.

Please get this woman an editor. I think she could be interesting to read with some help.

Dead Girl Under The Bleachers, Donna M Zadunajsky. 3/5

Three dead girls. Three dead bodies. Popular Scarlet thinks it’ll be fun to play a game on Laura, a nobody at Craven Falls High, but the game unleashes buried secrets, secrets that could get somebody killed. Including herself.

Thanks to #NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for a review.

I love a good YA novel and I love even more when they cross into the thriller genre. It is a medium when done well, is absolutely brilliant. This is a good effort. A good story, handling wide range of issues and an fantastic opening.

The Dead Girl Under The Bleachers by Donna M. Zadunajsky

WOW is all I can say!! I absolutely loved this book! It kept me on my toes the entire time!! I can’t wait to read more from this author!

5 stars

I received an ARC of this book thanks to NetGalley and publisher Black Rose Writing in exchange for an honest review.

I really tried to finish this book but I just couldn't do it. The plot seemed fine but there were several glaring problems. The main one that turned me off were that all the characters were written incredibly flat. There are three narrators and they all talked in very plain sentences with little emotion (along the lines of 'Rachel was happy. Laura was her friend again. She had missed being friends.')'. The mean girl in particular was written like a bad caricature who just walked around hating people and thinking of mean things to do. This meant the book read as intended for a far younger audience than YA, especially with the main drama being the bully crying over someone taking away her best friend from her.

The other big factor was this book was in serious need of editing. Sentences would have far too many commas, crucial pronouns would be missing and it just didn't flow well. Another Goodreads reviewer has already made a comprehension list of errors so you can check that out if you're curious.

Overall, I am giving it two stars because I read the first 25% and the last 25% and the plot seemed fine, the two things I've mentioned were just too big for me to ignore. Maybe very young teenagers would enjoy this but there are far better examples of YA thrillers to read.

I had a tough time with this book. The characters were portraying stereotypical high schoolers at their worst, and there seemed to be several plot oversights (to the point where some events seemed so incredibly unlikely that it took me out of the story). There should also be some sort of trigger warning, due to the several traumatic experiences that two characters undergo.

Finally, the author uses the ableist slur "spaz," and also uses the term "pow-wow." I could not in good conscious recommend this book to any of my students, nor would I keep this book on my classroom shelf. While the premise had promise, the execution was lacking.

At the beginning someone is being murdered, but we do not find out who until later.....I thought i knew who the murderer was but i was completely wrong!.
Scarlet is the queen bee of Craven Falls High. When her BFF Rachel starts hanging out with Laura, all the drama unfolds. I cannot say too much without giving any details away.
I really enjoyed this book. It kept me guessing until the end. This definitely gave off a mean girls vibe. Thanks to NetGalley for providing me a complimentary copy of THE DEAD GIRL UNDER THE BLEACHERS by Donna Zadunajsky in exchange for my honest review

I received this ebook from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Have you ever heard of the sandwich method? It's used for giving a constructive criticism when you "sandwich" negative things between two positive things. This sandwich will be made of two super thin slices of bread and a lot of ingredients between them. Buckle up.

So, for the first slice of bread: It's the first book I got from NetGalley! Yay!

Okay, moving on. Now for the middle part.

Let's start with the basis for this part, the butter, that will, hopefully, help keep this neat and thick stack of ingredients together: I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE to believe that this book was touched by a competent editor. I just refuse. I'm not saying this because of things like "There was barely any suspense" or "The characters were cliche and unlikeable" (both of these things are true, BTW) but because of the staggering amount of grammatical mistakes and weird syntax gymnastics going on in the book. I won't list all of them here, but on my Kindle I have marked 152 (one hundred fifty-two) fragments that made me lose it just a little. Please keep in mind, that these are just fragments that I felt absolutely compelled to highlight. There were more that I didn't mark because I just didn't feel they were as atrocious as the others or because I wasn't 100% sure they were grammatically incorrect, but they just looked clunky and awkward.

- switching the subject in the middle of a sentence but not putting a new pronoun: "I tapped the end of my pencil on the notebook sitting in front of me while perched at my desk in my bedroom". So, the notebook was perched at her desk? "There was movement behind the curtains and knew someone was home". ??? "grateful that the weather had been cooler lately and could wear a sweater" I didn't know that weather could wear clothes.
- using two 'but' in one sentence: "I chuckled over this idea, but I've never killed someone, but Laura deserved everything she had coming" "but I wasn't sure if I had heard her right, but it sounded like 'whatever'" "but I wasn't part of the Sawyer family, but could I be?"
- narrator contradicting herself in the span of one sentence: "I couldn't be living this but I was." "She knew that it was best not to talk to me unless I acknowledged her first, but I guess she didn't get the memo". So did she knew it or not??? "Maybe I had imagined it all, but I hadn't".
- sentences that SCIENTIFICALLY don't make any sense: "[Books] scattered around me as if the gravity was sucked out of room". If the gravity was sucked out of the room, wouldn't the books stay, you know... afloat? But what do I know, it's just a Science 101. "After Monday had passed, Wednesday arrived" Ma'am, you seem to have lost one day. Where is Tuesday??? I'm not even sure if it qualifies as scientific, but holy fox! "It was as if there were no moon in the sky, not even stars. I didn't know what that meant. I wasn't into astronomy or anything like that". I mean, I don't have a degree in astronomy, but no moon and no stars visible might mean that the sky is overcast??? Just an idea. "JJ always carried a flask with him filled with vodka, which was odorless". Listen, I'm not a drinker, but even I know that vodka does indeed have a smell and it's quite a strong one.
- double negatives: "I don't say nothing to him". Yeah, I know double negatives are a thing in AAVE, but this book is not written in AAVE.
- wrong usage of words and phrases: "Out of this small, unpopulated town". According to Merriam-Webster, unpopulated means: "not populated, not occupied or settled, not inhabited". I'm pretty sure that Craven Falls is inhabited, based on the fact that, you know, the main characters live there and that's where the plot takes place. "This was my queue to find out who she liked". Honey, you meant 'cue', not 'queue'. "it felt good. Rejuvenated" You meant 'rejuvenating'? "zipper hidden from the naked eye". 'Naked eye' means that you're not using any magnifying glass, microscope, etc. I doubt Laura had to use any of these instruments to find the zipper.
- bizarre usage of continous form: "I gathered my things and stood, walking out of the classroom". So she stood and walked out of the classroom at the same time? Because that's what this kind of continous form used here would imply. "'I enjoyed being with Laura last night, but she doesn't want to hang out with me.' Wondering why this bothered me so much. 'Give her some time". This kind of continous form was much more prevalent and was bothering me SO much. You can't just stick a sentence with a verb in continous form with no pronoun and no 'to be' particle.
- purely nonsensical sentences: "Dead was an understatement" I mean, being dead is pretty zero-one situation. Either you're dead or not. "If it were my house, which I'd never throw a party" I have literally no idea, what does it mean.
- overexplaining: "Scarlet to me was the Wicked Witch of the West, like in Wizard of Oz". You don't explain your references. Also, I'm pretty sure almost all of the readers will know who Wicked Witch of the West is. "she sometimes beat me home, but not always." Ummm... yeah, that's what 'sometimes' means.
- just purely grammatical mistakes: "What I should do?" It's 'What should I do?'. "I treated her bad at school today". For goodness' sake, 'bad' is an adjective, so it cannot describe a verb. What should be used is 'badly', which is an adverb.
- switching from past tense to present tense and vice versa; it only happened a few times, but still. Control your tenses. "A blast of cool air pushes me back and I almost lost my grip on the door handle". "I go to shake my head but stopped myself".
- tautologies: "Yes, granted, it was dark outside". In this case, 'yes' and 'granted' are interchangeable, you don't need both. "Hoping with all hope" I mean, seriously? "evil villain" Villains are, by definition, evil.
- weird interpunction: "Damn' it!" "Do you know where Appleton's live?" "I looked over at Scarlet, she seemed oblivious to everything around her, including what Kyle had just done?" Why the question mark at the end??? "We were, mostly a happy family"
- nonsensical similes: "'Shit, shit, shit!' I said, swearing like a comedian on stage". ??? "Minutes seemed to tick by slower than a snail on speed" ???????
- sentences that just are all over the place: "Had I been too blind to see beyond my popularity at school, which would end as soon as Scarlet told everyone that I'd been hanging out with Laura, but I didn't care anymore" "she's friends with the daughter of the two people she killed". Yeah, good luck deciphering this one. The first 'she' refers to Scarlet, the second 'she' refers to Scarlet's mother and the two people that were killed are Laura's father and... brother, so don't ask me why Laura is called here their daughter.
- wrong collocations: "He's hot looking". You can be either hot, or good-looking, but not 'hot looking'.
Furthermore, sometimes the writing looked as if the author was desperately trying to meet a word count - describing every single action of the characters and repeating the information we already had, also look: 'overexplaining' and 'tautologies' above.

Okay, now for some other elements of the book
- the plot is salvageable, it was interesting in some places and had some nice plot twists, but the book would need to be rewritten in its entirety in order for the plot to shine.
- the characters are very cliche. Mean girl, a poor outcast, former best friend who now is best friends with the mean girl, the mean girl's douchebag of a boyfriend. Oh, and the evil stepmother and the father who cannot see how the stepmother is manipulating him - these two tropes were pushed to extreme, with both of these characters killing their (step)daughter. Seriously, did the author's father remarried and she still has trauma or...?
- the 2/3 of the MCs are unlikeable
- we get barely any thought process of the MCs, even though we get a 1st person narration from all of them. They say many things that make no sense and they jump to conclusions faster than you can shout "Worms for brains!" Laura wants Scarlet dead because she thinks that Scarlet knowing the truth about her dad and brother's death is just as bad as Scarlet's mother killing them. Scarlet wants Laura dead, because she thinks that Laura killed Kyle, despite having literally no evidence to support that claim. Worms for brains, I'm telling you, worms for brains.
- the setting is super basic. Your typical high-school-in-a-small-town drama.

My advice for the writer? Read books in the same genre, e.g. books by Karen McManus or even the Truly Devious trilogy by Maureen Johnson (even though I gave only 3 stars to the latter) to see how to write books in this genre. Or just to see how to WRITE books.

Okay, so now for the upper super thin slice of bread. I've been recently wondering what constitutes a book bad enough for me to give it a 1 star rating. Now I know!