Review: What Happened to Lucy Vale by Lauren Oliver

Lauren Oliver’s What Happened to Lucy Vale is a sharp, unsettling, and deeply original novel that blends ghost story, coming-of-age drama, and psychological suspense into one unforgettable read.

Rachel Vale and her daughter, Lucy, arrive in Woodward, Indiana, and move into the notorious Faraday House—the same house where, sixteen years earlier, a girl disappeared and her mother was found dead. Almost instantly, Lucy becomes the subject of fascination, suspicion, and gossip. The town, already steeped in rumor, turns her life into spectacle.

What makes this book stand apart is the inventive narrative structure. Parts of the story are told in a collective “we,” voiced through a Discord server of local teens who comment, speculate, and judge. At first, the shifting perspectives feel chaotic, but soon each voice becomes recognizable, and the chorus of online chatter reveals just as much about the storytellers as it does about Lucy. It’s a brilliant way to explore how stories spread, mutate, and take on lives of their own in the digital age.

Oliver doesn’t shy away from heavy themes—herd mentality, rumor as truth, and the way small towns can devour outsiders. Yet she also manages to thread humor and biting satire throughout, capturing the absurdity of teenage bravado and the cruelty of groupthink without ever losing the emotional weight of Lucy’s story.

The setting of Woodward is richly drawn, almost a character itself, with its buried secrets and simmering tensions. And Lucy—complex, frustrating, vulnerable—feels all too real. Just when you think you understand her, the story shifts, forcing you to reevaluate everything you thought you knew.

At its heart, this is a book about the danger of narratives—who gets to tell them, who gets silenced, and how quickly perception can eclipse truth. It’s chilling, timely, and thought-provoking.

What Happened to Lucy Vale is not a straightforward mystery but something bolder: a mirror held up to our own culture of judgment, rumor, and voyeurism. I closed the book unsettled, impressed, and already wanting to reread it.

Brilliantly written, darkly funny, and painfully relevant—this is Lauren Oliver at her best.

I loved the storyline and the characters it kept me wanting to see it through to the very last page thank you for this read

Thank you to NetGalley for providing this ARC. 

I was really excited to start this book because the description sounded so, so intriguing! Unfortunately the actual execution of the book didn't grip me. 

The book was overlong and really, really boring after a while. 

The discord server gossip and the we chapters was an interesting idea, but made for a weird reading experience. 

I think this would have been a good book if it was a hundred pages shorter.