I’ve been reading a lot of thrillers recently, particularly the manipulation suspense in You Are Not Alone, Pretty Things, Confessions on the 7:45, The Better Liar, and other psychological thrillers.

Beware That Girl is about two girls at a Manhattan private school.  Kate is a scholarship student with a traumatic past. She talks a lot about how she’s learned to manipulate from her experiences at previous schools, but in practice, a lot of her manipulation is getting her work done very publicly and saying thank you to all the adults.  I wanted to know about all her previous schools and why she left so many times, but it seems like she went wherever she was offered a one-year scholarship. Kate’s also weirdly sneaky and underhanded about things that she could just ask about, there’s a lot of suspense about stealing a key to break into an office to look at the DSM pysch book… when you could just google that and then clear the browser history.

Her classmate Olivia knows the social, style and academic laws at Waverly.  She’s returning to redo her senior year, after mysteriously leaving school in the middle of the last school year. The two girls become friends, first because Kate plants herself in Olivia’s path and uses what she knows about Olivia to manipulate her way in, but later they begin to have actual things in common. 

There’s a bit of lifestyle porn in this one, with the extremely luxurious habits of Gossip Girl, which always adds to the unreality. But when a charismatic development director joins the school, and immediately recruits both girls, and some of their most diversely photogenic friends, to a special committee, there’s an upsetting undercurrent in their beautiful upscale school life.

Secrets build and tensions mount, until the ending goes implausibly over the top. But by that time, I was completely sold on these girls and so interested in what would happen next, that I was fine with some of the, uh, less realistic turns.

I’m writing this in week 10 of covid quarantine, and I’ve just noticed that all the books I’ve enjoyed recently are all about discovering what could possibly come next. (My Dark Vanessa, One By One, Wild Game, Year of Wonder are very different genres and styles, but all with a sense of unpredictability and tension. Recently, when I’ve not been very interested in a book (The Other Bennet Sister, Jo & Laurie, an usually large number of DNFs on Netgalley), I’ve complained that it dragged. Every day is the same in pandemic lockdown, and I feel extra sensitive to stories that move quickly and take me somewhere else.  Beware That Girl definitely moved quickly, set between an upscale prep school and Chinatown markets in Manhattan.