Title: Reckless Girls

Author: Rachel Hawkins

Rating: 3.6/5

Genre: Thriller/Suspense

Hey hey, it’s MJ, 

            There are for sure going to be spoilers in this review so if you don’t want to know anything about it, I would skip this one. 

This book started slow, I am not going to lie, I finished it in two days though and the second half went from 0 to 60 in like ten pages. 

So we start on Maui with Lux and her boyfriend Nico who seem like a really solid couple, Nico is hired to charter a boat out to a deserted kind of spooky island and they go with Brittany and Amma. It’s a lot, like so much. They meet up with Jake and Eliza on the island and they party for like a week or two. Some stuff happens and then like everyone is dead. It shifts between ‘now’ and ‘before’ and all of these timelines and story lines all weave together. Everyone has something to hide and that is made clear throughout the novel itself. 

Going from 0 to 60 so quickly made it a really slow build, I wasn’t really sure if I liked it until about page 200 or so out of 309. Like I feel like a lot of it was a little cliché for a thriller novel, I am not saying that’s a bad thing but everyone is sleeping with everyone, it’s kind of like Clue but with a lot more swearing. Like there is so much swearing in this book. I swear a lot in real life but not in writing, there is just something really permanent about it that I don’t really like. 

I can see this for sure being made into a movie, it feels very cinematic and that is really cool. The imagery was really good but I was left with questions, so many questions. 

(HUGE SPOILER!!) For example, how didn’t Amma recognize Eliza as Chloe, did she change her look that much? I was really confused by that when it was revealed unless I just missed the part where she realized it was her and never said anything, I was confused. 

I just wasn’t surprised when Nico kind of turned into a not so nice guy, I liked him at the beginning but when you get all of the “Now” perspective from one character you don’t get to know what everyone else is thinking. All of the “Before” perspectives were from different characters but the “Now” was all from Lux’s point of view, it was an odd shift from knowing how everyone got there to just knowing one person’s thoughts and feelings in the present tense of the book. 

The ending for sure left me unfulfilled it was very odd, everyone but Lux dies and she just leaves, like she killed two people and then she just goes and doesn’t look back. Everyone kills someone and it’s just a little odd and everything at the end happened really quickly. I really did feel like the book gave me a little bit of whiplash.

I liked it though, do not get me wrong, I was gripped and I read all of it in two sittings, I would call it a beach read because you can get through it so fast. If you like an island thriller where literally everything goes wrong, I would totally recommend this one for you. 

The “In The After” epilogue was a little weird and honestly it left me with more questions, like what’s going to happen to Caroline? It’s implied that it’s Lux that she goes off with but that’s where it ends. It left me with more questions than answers about the book itself and it was kind of thrown in there for me, but most epilogues are. 

I liked the book, it was a pretty good book, I cannot be upset about it, I would love to see it as a movie because I think it would be fun. I know that this was the best choice for me this month with Book of The Month and I will be looking forward to next month’s choices at the end of this month.

I am only going to tag the current year’s posts but you can click on the “book of the Month” tag and see what I read last year.

I will be back later in the week with another post so until then I hope that everyone stays safe, happy, and healthy.

-MJ