Ruth Ware’s ‘The It Girl’ (Spoiler-Free Reaction) #theitgirlreadalong

I was supposed to read The It Girl, by Ruth Ware as part of the Tandem Collective international readalong, but I sort of got ahead of the assigned prompts. This book was hard to put down!

I knew I’d like it going in — I always love Ruth Ware thrillers for twisty, not-gory, page-turning suspense stories like One by One and The Turn of the Key. And I almost always love Oxbridge settings, too, like in The Maidens or Gaudy Night.  (One of the reasons for that is that I’m a state college grad, but I got to do a summer session at Cambridge, and yeah, living and studying in the gorgeous old buildings, taking a small part in some of the medieval traditions, was a really special time.)

The It Girl is told in two timelines, Before and After. In the Before storyline, freshman Hannah arrives from her state school, and finds Oxford full of freshman who were all the top of their year. Which, you know, is exactly what happens when you go from a state school to Oxbridge. Anyway. Fortunately, Hannah’s assigned a room in a set, two bedrooms with a shared common room, with beautiful, wealthy party girl April Clarke-Cliveden. Hannah is pulled into April’s circle, and they’re basically always drinking champagne and having wild times, when they’re not heads-down studying. It is Oxford, after all. Sure, April’s pulled some pranks on the others, and some of the pranks haven’t been completely fun for the victim, but it’s all part of the Oxford hijinks! Some of the pranks, comments and general attitude from April got so mean that I wasn’t fully sure why Hannah wanted to be her friend, but then, on the next page or the next paragraph, the champagne and fun was back on.

The dividing event is the murder of April Clarke-Cliveden, which separates Hannah’s whole life into before and after. At a party in their second semester, April went upstairs to change her clothes, and when she didn’t come back, Hannah went looking for her. Hannah found her roommate and bestie April dead on the floor of their shared living room. It’s a typical Ruth Ware murder, so it’s suspenseful because you’re desperate for more details and rereading for clues, but it’s not actually a gross scene. (That’s my favorite kind of thriller!)

In the After storyline, Hannah, now married and pregnant, begins to doubt her own memories and wonder if something else really happened. You can see how the trauma has affected her. She now works a quiet job in a book shop in Edinburgh. It’s pretty far from the path she seemed to be on in the beginning of her freshman year at Oxford. As she investigates, readers can see how the murder has affected the others in their friend group, too.

Although the murder’s already been legally solved in the After storyline, the convicted murderer has always insisted on his innocence. By the After storyline, he’s died in jail, still insisting that he’s not the killer.  Prompted by a journalist, Hannah begins to reexamine what she remembers and what else could have happened, because if the wrong person was convicted, that means Hannah’s memory of what she experienced is wrong, that her recounting helped put the wrong person in jail, and that the real killer is still free.

If you’ve already read The It Girl, and you’re dying to talk about the ending, great! Me too! I have a lot of spoiler-ific comments and reaction for The It Girl here. But don’t click that until you’ve read the book. You’ll want to discover this suspenseful story without any hints.

 I received a copy of The It Girl from Tandem International as part of the readalong. All opinions on my blog are my own. (Free books have never stopped me from snarking about a bad novel.)