'A chilling and eerie tale of monsters, teen angst and small-town America for fans of Stranger Things, The Thing, and the 1990s. Three girls went into the woods. Only two came back, covered in blood and with no memory of what happened. Or did they?
'Being fifteen is tough, tougher when you live in a boring-ass small town like Little Hope, California (population 8,302) in 1996. Donna, Rae and Kat keep each other sane with the fervour of teen girl friendships, zine-making and some amateur sleuthing into the town’s most enduring mysteries: a lost gold mine, and why little Ronnie Gaskins burned his parents alive a decade ago.
'Their hunt will lead them to a hidden cave from which only two of them return alive. Donna the troublemaker can’t remember anything. Rae seems to be trying to escape her memories of what happened, while her close-minded religious family presses her for answers. And Kat? Sweet, wannabe writer Kat who rebelled against her mom’s beauty pageant dreams by getting fat? She’s missing. Dead. Or terribly traumatised, out there in the woods, alone.
'As the police circle and Kat’s frantic mother Marybeth starts doing some investigating of her own, Rae and Donna will have to return to the cave where they discover a secret so shattering that no-one who encounters it will ever be the same.'
I have a fair few books sitting on my reading pile, books that I've picked up to review long enough ago that by the time it's come to actually sit and read them I've kind of forgotten what the blurb was. This, often leads to pleasant surprises when I delve into a book that I sometimes don't even know the genre of. I agreed to review them, so I know that they at least sound like something I'm going to like. Girls of Little Hope might be the best time I've ever had with having picked up a book I've wanted to read and having forgotten what it's going to be about, and going into it without any foreknowledge is absolutely the best move to make. So, if you want a fantastic, surprising experience go grab a copy now and stop reading this review; otherwise, keep reading to find out more.
Girls of Little Hope begins with one of the most frightening experiences that a parent can go through, as three teenage girls vanish from their homes in the small town of Little Hope in the mid 90's. After being gone for three days, two of the girls, Donna, and Rae, return naked and screaming for help on the outskirts of town. Their friend, Kat, is still missing though. The girls seem to have little to no memory of what happened to them, and are unable to give the police much information to work with in their search for Kat. However, it's soon revealed that the girls are hiding something, and that more than they're letting on happened out in the woods.
As Donna and Rae try to fit back into their old lives after having gone missing, the rest of the town concentrates on trying to find Kat. Kat's mother, Marybeth is determined to find her daughter, and begins to suspect that the other two girls know more than they're letting on. With the search continuing to bear little results, Marybeth starts to take matters into her own hands.
The first half of Girls of Little Hope is a fairly normal mystery thriller story. Three girls go missing, two come back; where's the third girl? It's the kind of story that you've seen a dozen times before in film, TV procedurals, and in crime novels. Some folks have a secret, and that secret will come out. And, because I'd forgotten everything I'd read about this book I assumed that this was what the book was, that it was going to be fairly normal. And I was very much enjoying that.
The book spends a great deal of time letting you get to know the three girls, how their friendship formed, how they relate to each other, and why they feel like misfits in their quiet, sleepy community. Their characters becomes a huge focus, and you end up getting dragged into the story of Rae and Donna trying to put their lives back together. I loved seeing the relationship that Donna had with her dad and how past trauma's had formed a unique family unit; and resulted in a young girl determined to rebel against a system and way of life that she saw as unjust. This also acted as a strong counterbalance to Rae, who on the outside seemed to have the perfect life with parents, a sibling, a decent house, and a strong religious community around them. Learning that this was a thin veneer, and that Rae is living in an abusive household made you come to care about her very quickly.
We even learn a lot about Kat, even though she's not present in the narrative, thanks to her friend and mother constantly thinking about her, and small snippets taken from the pages of her diary. It's interesting to see the two sides of Kat that we get via this method. Her mother builds a picture of her sweet daughter having lost her way in her teens, turning her back on her beauty pageant hobby and, in her mothers view, wrecking her future prospects by gaining weight to rebel. Meanwhile, via her friends and her diary we see that Kat is flourishing as a teen, embracing parts of herself that she loves and wants to nurture, and that her gaining weight isn't some tragedy, but her creating an armour for herself.
As the book goes on we're given a number of possible suspects for who might have tried to harm Kat, there are ideas of where she might be and what might have happened. One of them, the first to be dismissed and the one that seems the most outlandish, is part of the account Rae tells Donna as she begins to remember part of what happened to them. That Kat was attacked by a monster in a cave. This is clearly the ravings of a girl going through trauma, some kind of false memory her mind has created to protect her from the events that really happened. There's no way that this crime story would take a hard turn halfway through with monster... right?
I won't say much about what happens in the latter half of the book, except that this interesting character driven mystery quickly changes tone in one of the most surprising and shocking ways. At least shocking when you've forgotten that the blurb mentions The Thing. The latter half of the book becomes an incredibly tense and frightening experience at times, and it's genuinely hard to try to predict the twists and turns that the authors are going to throw at you next.
Speaking of the authors, this book is written by a duo. I've read some books by dual authors where you can see the seams, and you can see very different styles from chapter to chapter when the authors split writing duties. But with Girls of Little Hope you'd be hard pressed to find this, and if you didn't know that it had two creators you'd never know. The two of them work very well together, and have clearly spent a decent amount of time working out how to work together in a way that serves the narrative best.
Girls of Little Hope is a hugely enjoyable experience. If you can read it not knowing that there's more here than it first appears all the better. It's like the literary equivalent of watching From Dusk Till Dawn and not knowing that this movie about a couple of criminals becomes a vampire horror half way in, or watching Predator thinking it's just going to be some macho action movie. Keep as much of what this book is about as quiet as you can, but try to get as many people as you can to give it a try.
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