★★★☆☆ (3.5)

Something about rich, privileged teenage girls getting wrapped up crimes amidst sun-soaked settings is so pleasing to me (fictionally speaking, of course.) This is like 90210 but a White Lotus setting.

Bess is sucked into Joni's life, her teenage best-friend, after ten years of not speaking and asked to lie to the police for her. What follows unravels Bess' coming to terms with what happened that summer when three friends went to Greece and only two came back.

I did really enjoy this - I was hooked reading it, and it was super easy to keep track of the dual timelines. I think for me, I got a bit sucked into it being more of a thriller than it is. There's no big twist or shock reveal. The second half is much more introspective for Bess and how she finally faces what happened ten years and what that means for her now. It's not to say it was bad, just not the path I had been going down for the first half of the book.

Fabulous - I couldn't put this down, and I'll think about it for a long time.

Joni and Bess are friends with a history - a very dark history. A story of rich kids, privilege, youthful trangressions/innocence, death and loss, mental health, family and friendship. I loved the perspective of Bess especially as she was so introspective and self-aware. Very literary and beautifully written, and I'll keep my eyes peeled for more books by Ella Berman.

Thanks so much to the publisher for the chance to read this book, I really really loved it.

I sat down to read this for ten mins, and when I looked up, I was half way through.
Obviously it was more than ten minutes later, but it's a big testament to the readability of this book.
The words just flowed. I was fully sucked in.
The last third , not quite so much.
However, it was a book that I enjoyed immensely.
The character studies, and power plays of these two/three women as adults/teens .
How a tragedy has affected everything they have done since.
Very well done.

I really enjoyed this book for the first two thirds or so but felt that the ending was a bit of a let down. Joni is a far more interesting character than Bess, but that is not necessarily to the detriment of the book, and I predicted the twist coming early on but enjoyed it nevertheless. However, I felt that the conclusion was unsatisfying - without going into spoilers, I had hoped for something that felt a little less neat. I’d recommend this book to twisty thriller fans but perhaps not anyone else.