I didn't finish this book. It wasn't because of bad writing, there were times when the writing really sucked ( no pun intended ) me into the story , but there were also parts that just refused to hold my attention and I would find myself wandering off, and because I listened to the audio, I would have to go back and rewind to find my place so I could hear what I missed. There were also times when I had no idea what was going on in the book.

I am a very visual person, and I love books that have probably overly descriptive descriptions, I like to be able to visualize the surroundings, the people etc in my head, i found that hard to do with the part of the book I read.

Also. I know this is fantasy, but some of the parts felt unbelievable. Yes, I know it doesn't have to be believable, but...I don't know, even for fantasy it seemed farfetched for me. Maybe this is why I don't like fantasy, I have a hard time...Im a skeptic I suppose. It also just felt messy.. I had to stop

What did I like about the book? I loved the cover, maybe I judged it a bit by that, and you what they say by judging a book by its cover. BUT. I do that a lot, I am a sucker for a pretty cover. Some times it works out, sometimes it doesn't. I also really liked the narrator, they had the perfect voice for this book. So, yeah. It wasn't for me, but I def recommend reading it, I will never not tell someone to read a book, books are subjective and a lot of you out there will love this.

This book was very intriguing, and something that I would have made my entire personality as a teenager. I thought the beginning was intriguing, and the end left me thinking for days afterward. However, the middle fell a little bit flat for me. I found my mind wandering elsewhere and then completely losing parts of the plot. I think I was probably meant to feel more scandalized than I was (like I said, 15 year old me would have eaten this up!).

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a honest review.

If you enjoy dark academia filled with intense angst and morally complex characters, *Boys With Sharp Teeth* is perfect for you. I was genuinely so excited to see that I received the eARC. The cover of the book in addition to the blurb immediately drew me in. I downloaded the audio within the first 30 minutes of getting the notification.

The Narrator does a great job, she fits the characters vibes wonderfully. You really get the dark, tortured vibes from them. She has a great gravely, angsty, throaty dark voice that fits the MFC perfectly.

Jenni’s writing is spot on for anyone craving dark academia and paranormal!

This story took me by surprise in the best way. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I ended up really enjoying it. We follow the main character as she steps into "Jamie's" identity at an elite boarding school, navigating her new fake life while getting drawn into the intoxicating world of the main squad—an obsession she never saw coming.

The ending was a little predictable, but overall, it was a great read. I can't wait to see what else this up-and-coming author puts out!

Boys with Sharp Teeth sounded fantastic because I do love morally gray/black characters, murder mysteries, and the paranormal, but this just turned into an utter mess.

The gritty and evocative writing in Boys with Sharp Teeth is notable but I felt the story simply didn't feel fresh.

Readers follow Marin James as she infiltrates an elite school to avenge the recent death of her cousin. With a fresh look and an airtight backstory, she begins to navigate the dark and dangerous world of Huntsworth Academy. There she will meet friend and foe and quickly learn that she herself might be just as dangerous as the murderers she's come to kill.

I was taken with the lyricism of the writing, it's philosophical and intimate. I just felt that in a world laden with dark academic stories, this one was wasn't a standout. The narration was notable though, and I did feel as though the choices the narrator made for each character were nuanced and thoughtful.

I enjoyed my time reading it but I do think it will quickly be forgotten.

Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an e-arc in exchange for an honest review!

This is a book I'm going to think about for awhile, mainly because even after reading it I'm not sure how I feel about it. I love books about terrible people doing terrible things to each other, but thus somehow fell a little flat. I wish the supernatural elements were included earlier and were more drawn out, I think this story would've benefitted from being a duology with more elaboration and world building. The writing itself was gorgeous and the narrator was incredibly expressive.

I DON'T GET IT.

And while dark academia is my favourite subgenre, I also just don't think I'm the target audience here. This is angsty. This is poetic. This is deep romantic feelings for fellow teens whom you've known for fewer than 2 weeks.

...There's also very little that actually happens, so as a plot-driven reader I felt lost the whole time. I'm also not sure it's really about characters either. It's mostly about vibes.

This book feels made for the Stephanie Garber girlies who want their metaphors to have fewer cupcakes and more musk and teeth and gravity.

I will at least grant them that there's some actual academia and classes happening here, but it also made me feel SO OLD that I'm sitting here while their Philosophy/English class is using The Matrix to discuss their deep discussions about the human condition. Wild.

Audiobook Notes:
The audiobook was really well executed and very pleasant to listen to.

I am so glad that I listened to this as an audiobook. I thought the narrator was wonderful and really put me into the dark academia vibe of the entire setting. I really liked the general idea of the story but there were a couple places where it dragged and I lost focus. Overall those the ending was really good and I enjoyed it a lot.

Jamie (née Marin) has enrolled herself with a fake check into the prestigious Huntsworth Academy where her security guard cousin died. She can’t believe his death was an accident and is dead set on finding his murderers. Soon Jamie is thrust into a world unlike she’s ever known with careless rich people abusing drugs and alcohol, not caring who they hurt in the process. She’s quickly entangled in Henry’s web, but there’s also his best friend Graves and the sweet and innocent headmistress’s daughter, Bas, who demand Jamie’s attention, but which one is the murderer?

I have a love-hate relationship with purple prose. As someone who’s an English teacher and by default a lover of the English language, I find purple prose a beautiful way to construct sentences, However, it’s a slog to get through and relies heavily on telling rather than showing. In addition to suffering from wildly unlikable characters, this book’s cardinal sin is that nothing much happens in 400 pages. And I understand that this is more a character study than anything else, but you gotta give us something, Also, can I seeth about how I h I hated the so-called love triangle. Abhor! I had such high hopes for this book (super rare to find a character called Jamie these days) and what with this delicious cover! Unfortunately, I didn’t vibe with this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this ALC. Jennifer Pickens was a great narrator, but this book was not for me.

I'm sure this book is for someone, but it certainly was not for me. I'm sorry to say it, but it felt like a wannabe Secret History with tarot cards and a haunted mirror. I just really didn't understand or like any of the characters, and the plot didn't feel cohesive. None of the characters' decisions made sense to me, and the main character was awful at pretending to be Jamie. I thought she was supposed to hate all her peers, but she drifts between loving and hating them every page. This was a very strange and not very sensical read for me.

I read the ebook along with the audiobook, and it appears the audiobook is a later version/draft of the story, which I did prefer to the ebook version. The narrator was good, but I'm confused why we only heard the southern accent once...but that is likely just a detail I missed.

I do think if you enjoy YA dark academia mixed with paranormal elements, a murder mystery, and complicated relationships, this could be the book for you.

Thank you NetGalley for the ebook and audio ARCs!

Boys With Sharp Teeth

I had high hopes for this boarding school revenge book, but I was left unsatisfied by Boys With Sharp Teeth.

I’m going to date myself with this analogy, but readers of a certain age will understand exactly what I’m talking about when I say that BWST reminded me of a Christopher Pike novel. Basically, in every Pike novel, things would start out like standard teen horror novels but slowly devolve into madness and things would just get WEIRD.

And that’s exactly what happened here: our intrepid protagonist infiltrates an exclusive boarding school to find out what really happened to her cousin. She’s got a fake name and a fake check and she’s looking for answers. Everybody is super serious about everything, from philosophy to partying.

But things start to get WEIRD. I’m being deliberately vague to avoid spoilers but there’s a mirror and there are pacts and the whole thing takes place in a span of weeks but it feels like months.

There was a coed dorm. I went to boarding school and yes, it was at the turn of the century, but members of the opposite sex could only come over at specific times and doors had to be open AND there had to be 3 feet on the floor. I could believe in a coed dorm with single-sex floors, but coed suites sharing jack-and-jill bathrooms is just silly.

Sadly, I did not enjoy Boys With Sharp Teeth.


I received an audiobook ARC from Macmillan/NetGalley

This was not for me.

Initially I was hooked, but I quickly lost interest. The prose seemed so long winded and was just trying too hard to be atmospheric and dark. I didn’t care for the love triangle or the relationships at all. There was way too much telling and not showing.

2 Stars
This started off promising - the premise was intriguing and the first few chapters pulled me in but as it went on I was just so confused by what was happening and I found this hard to follow (and I still don't even understand what happened to Sam lol or even Jamie aka Marin). I wanted more Dark Academia than I got and I couldn't connect with any of these characters or the romance in this (and also why did this feel like it was a whole school year and not just a few weeks lol).

Thank you NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC!

Audiobook review. I am writing this through watery lashes and the highest hopes for MORE gripping my heart. The vice grip this haunting book had on me is not one I’d ever really experienced before.

It held me by the throat as I simultaneously devoured it while telling myself to slow down so I could savor it. I wanted to unravel the mystery as soon as possible but never wanted it to end. It was agony and frustration and yearning and rapture.

The prose was absolutely stunning and titillating in a way that was SO intellectually stimulating. The characters and their struggles burrowed so deep into my heart that I fear I will never be the same again.

Jennifer Pickens, the audiobook narrator, did a phenomenal job with bringing this story to life. The details from the whispers to the emotions were so vivid and the transitions, pacing, cadence, and tone were on point.

The fact that this was a debut author is incredible and it makes me feel like luckiest ARC reader out there. Jenni Howell has made an instant fan in me and I genuinely recommend this book to all who would listen. It is my top read for the year and will forever be in my favorites.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio and Netgalley for sending me an early copy of this audiobook! All opinions are my own!

I wish I knew how to feel about this book. I think I was expecting it to be more on the supernatural side, but that doesn't really come out until far too close to the end of the book for my liking. Then I thought it would be more of a regular murder mystery, but the supernatural aspects came out just as I resigned myself to being without them. I kept getting confused on where this was going and what the vibe of the story was supposed to be.

I really did enjoy the characters and thought they were relatable and loveable/hateable in all the right/wrong ways. I just wish I had gotten a little more understanding up front along with the more mystical aspects a lot sooner. It kept losing my attention and then regaining it when I realized just how lost I was. I really wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.

This book was such a wild and captivating read! The story was dark, gripping, and filled with an eerie, almost hypnotic energy. The writing was immersive, and the characters were unforgettable. It kept me hooked from start to finish, blending mystery and emotion in such a unique way. Loved it!

Howell does an amazing job of crafting an atmospheric tale! The prose in this book was just gorgeous. If you like dark academia with a bit of horror dashed on top, this is for you.

*Thanks to Net Galley and Macmillan Audio for audiobook for review*

The narrator did a good job maintaining the atmosphere of this twisty dark story of revenge. Our main girl goes into the Academy with a new name for vengeance for her cousin and the beginning of this had me on the edge of my seat. The middle felt like a fever dream that the narrator guided me through. The end, however, was underwhelming. What should have felt like an explosion lacked the dramatic atmosphere that happened during an earlier car scene. I would still recommend for fans of darker teen shows, but as someone who loves The Raven Boys the dynamic of relationships does not compare.

There seems to always be a fascination mixed with hatred for the rich prep boys who think they are above everything. That is true for this book as well. Marin/Jamie is on the hunt for the killer who murdered her cousin Sam. This book did not go as I expected. Which I am glad for. I was worried that it would be typical, girl falls for bad boy (two in this book, Henry and Adrian) and dives into the darkness, becoming unraveled and losing herself in her search for justice. It took that and twisted it much farther and while I got a bit bored and confused in the middle with Marin jumping from one boy to the next, it got really dark and really fulfilled the title, but not in the way I expected. Very morally grey characters (except maybe Baz) and a nice touch of the paranormal but also tragedy.

The narrator did a good job of voicing Marin and really brought her character and this academy world to life. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me the chance to listen to this audiobook.

Jenni Howell writes such delicious atmosphere. There's something very sharp about her prose. On a sentence level, this had me on the edge of my seat. The plot and character arcs were muddy, but the writing alone kept me going. I can't wait to see what she does next!