Title: Dead Girls Society
Author: Michelle Krys
Genre: YA suspense/mystery
Published: November 8th, 2016
Source: ARC from Publisher
My rating: 5 stars
I got an email from the publisher asking if I'd like to participate in a tour for this book and another. The other one is a middle grades book, so isn't my normal read, but they did send me an ARC of it as well. This book sounded really good, and actually I was definitely pleased at just how good it turned out to be!
The main character is a girl named Hope. Hope has cystic fibrosis, which means she spends a lot of her time out of school because of how easily something can keep her from being able to breathe, how easily she can get sick. When the story starts, she has gotten a text from some number that she doesn't know, and it is an invitation to participate in some kind of secret group. It will require her to sneak out of her house late at night, but after being stuck at home, and her best friend Ethan seems to be moving on with a girl at school, she decides it is worth it.
When she gets to the meeting place, she sees 4 other girls, ones that she doesn't think she has anything in common with. There are instructions there for each of them, they must participate in dares. Whoever makes it till the very end will win a lot of money. If they fail a dare, they will be cut out of the competition. If they cheat, tell anyone about the activities, or even just quit, they are threatened with punishment. Each of the girls, other than Hope, seem to have something in their past that the person who is running this whole thing knows and is holding over them as blackmail.
The dares are dangerous as you'd expect. A couple girls get really hurt, and there are several times that Hope almost doesn't make it. In fact the person behind it all decides that she's cheated, and her punishment is something that affects her whole family.
Not only is she dealing with this society, but she's also worried about losing her friend Ethan to this other girl at school. But then a really popular, cute guy picks her for a project partner when she goes back to school, and he seems to really like her, and be interested in her. But Ethan tells Hope that he doesn't trust this guy.
In the end it will boil down to who is really behind the dares, which of the girls in the group are up front about what they are hiding. Hope will have to find out if her friendship with Ethan can survive her wanting more, even if he seems to not see her that way. She also needs the money to help her family, and is unsure if this new guy is really what he seems to be.
The book was a really good, quick read. I didn't make too many notes as I updated on Goodreads. Probably because it was so good I didn't want to stop to take the time to do that. I enjoyed the New Orleans setting since I was just down there the first weekend of October, and what was kind of funny was that I actually was reading another book at the same time that took place in the city. Anyway, I highly recommend this, and I will definitely be purchasing it for the school library where I work. I liked the characters a lot, you had the main character with a debilitating disease, you had gay characters, there was a suicide that was a big part of the story, and other many other types of characters. Below is the schedule for the blog tour if you'd like to check out some other posts on the book!
