The Girls Are All So Nice Here by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

The Girls Are All So Nice Here
by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn
Published March 9th 2021 by Simon & Schuster

Two former best friends return to their college reunion to find that they’re being circled by someone who wants revenge for what they did ten years before—and will stop at nothing to get it—in this shocking psychological thriller about ambition, toxic friendship, and deadly desire.

A lot has changed in the years since Ambrosia Wellington graduated from college, and she’s worked hard to create a new life for herself. But then an invitation to her ten-year reunion arrives in the mail, along with an anonymous note that reads “We need to talk about what we did that night.”

It seems that the secrets of Ambrosia’s past—and the people she thought she’d left there—aren’t as buried as she’d believed. Amb can’t stop fixating on what she did or who she did it with: larger-than-life Sloane “Sully” Sullivan, Amb’s former best friend, who could make anyone do anything.

At the reunion, Amb and Sully receive increasingly menacing messages, and it becomes clear that they’re being pursued by someone who wants more than just the truth of what happened that first semester. This person wants revenge for what they did and the damage they caused—the extent of which Amb is only now fully understanding. And it was all because of the game they played to get a boy who belonged to someone else, and the girl who paid the price.

Alternating between the reunion and Amb’s freshman year, The Girls Are All So Nice Here is a shocking novel about the brutal lengths girls can go to get what they think they’re owed, and what happens when the games we play in college become matters of life and death

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Review
3.5 Stars

Ambrosia Wellington is going to be an IT girl in college, she just knows it. She's spent all her time and money studying the other half, except she landed the good girl roommate and within a week she knows she's being left out of things by the others in her dorm. Enigmatic and boy popular Sloane "Sully" takes her under her wing though, taking her to all the parties and getting her access to all the boys. This is all she wanted.

Ten years later and Ambrosia has left the mean girl days behind, so far behind she pretends they never happened. Her husband knows her as the studious girl, but an invite to her reunion is about to unveil all her secrets. What did Amb do at Wesleyan College and who else knows about it?

The other girls may have been nice, but Amb sure wasn't and Sully was even worse. Laurie Elizabeth Flynn took me back to college days, in my case I loved my sorority and college experience, but Amb's choices her freshman year are things she could never come back from. I felt for Amb through out the chapters told from her past perspective, her eagerness to fit in is so relatable, but adult Amb is a hard character. She hasn't matured at all and what little remorse she does feel is so quickly pushed to the side in favor of a "friend" who left her in the dust. While the book is very new adult in the drama of the past, the present chapters holds all the thrill. I liked not knowing who was out to get Amb and Sully, each little incident building up to the secrets the girls hold tight to, but there were so many holes and the big reveal lacked the shock factor I really want out of a thriller read.

The Girls Are All So Nice Here is full of very realistic incidents. It's a fiction novel, but the choices the girls make as college students are choices we see young adults make every day. College is freedom and what some people do with that freedom is shocking. Laurie Elizabeth Flynn delivers a thrilling novel about women and revenge.