Dana MeleRecensioni

I would give this book 3.5 stars*

I thought this was a super fast pace mystery that really hooked me. It def reminds me lot of both 13reasons why and pretty little liars. The mystery kept me engaged. I had a hard time becoming emotional invested in most of majority of these characters because so many of them were unlikeable especially the lead. But the mystery kept me so engaged. I thought the actions of the police made me so angry but I guess I could see that happens in real life at points. I do see the theme "every action has a consquence even if you don't notice the very similar to shows like 13 reasons why. I would def read more by this author in the future.

I would give this book 3.5 stars*

I thought this was a super fast pace mystery that really hooked me. It def reminds me lot of both 13reasons why and pretty little liars. The mystery kept me engaged. I had a hard time becoming emotional invested in most of majority of these characters because so many of them were unlikeable especially the lead. But the mystery kept me so engaged. I thought the actions of the police made me so angry but I guess I could see that happens in real life at points. I do see the theme "every action has a consquence even if you don't notice the very similar to shows like 13 reasons why. I would def read more by this author in the future.

After finishing a similar but much better YA mystery Thriller yesterday, this one’s flaws were glaring. I came into it feeling like I came in halfway through a movie and was missing some background. I didn’t understand or feel connection with any of the relationships (Friendships, familial or romantic) It felt like 2 kinds of mystery/thriller books down together. I didn’t feel like it all came together well at the end.

A boring and muddled murder mystery. The conceit is that it is a modern gender-swapped retelling of Hamlet but in a world like ours where Hamlet is also a famous play. Harper Hayes' father has been murdered, and his ghost -- attired in a Hamlet costume from his youthful performance of the role -- is haunting her to find out if her uncle or mother had something to do with it. Harper mopes accordingly as she fumbles slowly through her investigation. She suffers convenient memory lapses that make her a possible suspect also.

The Hamlet hook is not enough to overcome characters who are flat and lacking charisma. It seems like the plot here may twist away from the original, but as with a lot of murder mysteries I read, I really don't care whodunnit or who they dunnit to, so I don't feel much need to come back for future installments.

Summer's Edge was a very interesting story. And the turn it took was not what I was expecting.
Pure brilliance.
Full review to come...

Summer's Edge was an interesting YA horror thriller read! The story is told from three different points of view and dual timelines but it was still easy to follow along. The characters themselves are troubled, messy and sometimes a little dark teenagers! Ha sounds like all teenagers right! The pace is slow but there are plenty of twists and turns to keep you entertained! This is the kind of book that takes a patient reader. It's kinda like baking you add all the ingredients and then wait for it to cook and in the end you get a yummy treat! Well that's how this book is you get all of the twists turns and information and then it all comes together in the end! It's a good book to kick off the summer with!

teen fiction (private high school murder and suspense w/significant roles played by lesbian and bisexual female characters)

not too satisfying as a mystery, as the investigating main character gets sidetracked a lot--I'd say this is more of a murder/suspense, though there is a big reveal at the end.

3.5 stars

Thank you Putnam Books and Goodreads for the advanced copy!

While the story was pretty unbelievable, I enjoyed the characters and their circumstances. People Like Us takes place at a boarding school with four friends who are being targeted for bullying after the murder of a student. Reminiscent of Thirteen Reasons Why, the victim punishes the girls from the grave forcing Kay to solve the murder before her secrets are publicized. With short chapters, fast pacing, and quippy dialogue this is the perfect read for a summer day!

Probably more like 3.5 but rounding up.

I THINK I NEED THERAPY AFTER READING THIS. What a twisted sapphic mean girls murder mystery. I love a classic unreliable narrator and this was everything I wanted from this book.

Full review (probably) coming soon.

I really enjoyed this book. I read it in like one sitting. It was fast paced, (somewhat) twisty, and I just could not put it down.

It also definitely wasn't my genre. This book was hella enjoyable, but... personally, I didn't find it wasn't anything more than that. And I truly think that this was purely a personal issue. I just... couldn't connect.

So I'm having a bit of a hard time rating this one. I'm really torn between 4 stars and 3.5. I feel like I could easily justify either rating, but since I DO feel that it was largely because it's not my genre, and it WAS really enjoyable, I'm going to leave it at four for now.

All complaints aside though, I really did enjoy this book quite a bit! It was exciting and action packed and kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time! Also all the characters were great! Not super remarkable (or else I just have no memory... this is just as likely tbh), but well developed and fun to read about.

The plot was really good too! I can't really say much about it without spoilers, and also I suck at giving plot descriptions, so just go read the back if you want to know what the hell it's actually about. However, actual DESCRIPTIONS aside, I would like to talk about the plot.

It was REALLY good. While the characters are great, this is very much a plot driven book. And the plot shines. It's so clearly well thought out, and it's well paced and exciting and (fairly) twisty!
I really think the plot is where this book is strongest, so if that's your thing, I think you will love this book. I, however, prefer my books more characters driven. (And also I prefer my books to not be thrillers. So there's that.)

Okay, but I DID figure out who the murderer was. I spent probably the first two thirds of this book (look at me making up percentages because I actually have no clue!) with NO IDEA who the murderer was. But somewhere around the two thirds point (again I'm actually totally guessing on this percentage, lol.) I started to get suspicious, and by the time we actually find out... Yeah I was pretty certain already.

Still, the plot was NEVER boring, even after I'd figured the murderer out, and there was still some TWISTS that left me SHOOK.

Overall? This wasn't entirely my style, but it was hella fun, and I one hundred percent recommend it!

Kay is attending one of the last social events of Year 12 late at night. She and her friends decide to have a midnight swim in the lake surrounding her boarding school. But when they get there, they find the body of a fellow classmate floating in the water. This brings up a lot of Kay's past as she has to deal with the police, just like she had to when her brother and her best friend died. This is a story of lots of suspects and twists and turns as Kay is forced by a covert website to confront each of her "friends"secrets to try and uncover who the murderer actually is. There is a secret on again, off again relationship with her best friend, a possible link with her ex-boyfriend who slept with the murdered girl, the girl's boyfriend and other people who have motives and means.
I must admit I guessed who the murderer actually was about half way through the book. The ending is harrowing where Kay's past is revealed and made me feel a little cheated because you have invested so much time into the main character, that to find out what she did ( which makes her on par with the murderer) is quite confronting. It is for mature readers due to the LGBT relationship and the casual attitudes the teenagers have to sex, alcohol and drugs. It will be interesting to see what the students make of this book.

I really liked this one.

This book was very twisty, there were a lot of secrets and the killer really could have been anyone. Who knew an all girls school would have so many lies and corruption? Even Kay, the main character, had so many hidden depths that it was sort of hard to root for her. So many people died, got hurt,lied, cheated, stole,that it was hard to figure out who the good guys were, if there were any at all. As the story unraveled, it became clear that no one was innocent in this. I did like that we kept getting new information that had us guessing until the end.

Boarding school, catty girls, murder, mystery, revenge and awkward relationships, honestly that's my cup of tea.

I purchased this book to read. All opinions are my own. 🌟🌟🌟🌟 People Like Us by Dana Mele. Kay has a reputation to uphold. She must fit in her senior year, she must get that soccer scholarship, she must move forward. Until one night after a school dance a body is found, Kay is sent on a computer based scavenger hunt made by the murderer to keep herself off the list of suspects she must solve the riddles within. Soon though this hunt causes the athletics program to be cancelled and causes her world to collapse putting everything in jeopardy. Her friendships begin to fall apart, her reputation threatened, her past decisions continue to haunt every aspect of her world. Sometimes the friends you've kept close are the ones you've hurt the most and trusting others hurts. While I was able to figure out the who pretty quickly it wasnt until the big reveal I understood the why. Review also posted on Instagram @borenbooks, Library Thing, Go Read, Goodreads/StacieBoren, Amazon, Twitter @jason_stacie and my blog at readsbystacie.com

Oh ho ho what’s this? It’s another ‘horrible kids being horrible at boarding school’ book!! My freaking weakness of a book type (or one of many). “People Like Us” by Dana Mele was one of those books that I just randomly stumbled upon on GoodReads thanks to that site’s propensity to feature books on the side of your feed that they are trying to promote. Most of the time I ignore these ads, but on occasion I’m drawn in because of tantalizing covers or large words promising great things, usually of thriller kind. Knowing full well that I was pretty much taking a gamble, I requested it. When it opened with a bunch of boarding school popular girls finding a body, I was immediately drawn in. Because who doesn’t love a bit of salacious carnage to kick off a book? But as the book kept going, it became quite clear that it was going to be something we’ve seen before without pushing many boundaries inside of the genre.

The cast of characters is a pretty standard cast list for a YA thriller/mystery. Our protagonist is Kay, a girl who came to the prep school Bates Private School with two main motivations: to pursue a soccer scholarship for college, and to run away from a trauma from her past. She has a number of secrets she keeps from her other friends in their popular crowd, just as they have secrets from each other as they rule the school and sometimes torment other students. Unfortunately, there was definitely too much of her hinging on on this tragic and secret past of hers, and while it was slowly and carefully unfolded I never really found a moment of connection to Kay. While most of her relationships with her friends are pretty one dimensional, there are a couple exceptions to this: she is attracted to and perhaps in love with her best friend Brie, but their romance has never come to fruition because the timing has always been wrong (or Kay has been misbehaving in some kind of way). And along with Brie there is Nola, a classmate who has always been seen as weird, but may be Kay’s only hope in solving who is harassing her and targeting her friends. I really liked that Dana Mele treats Kay’s sexuality as just a fact of the story, and that all of these characters were fairly fluid in their sexual identities. But beyond that, none of them were particularly noteworthy or interesting. As Kay’s friends face their various consequences to being jerks, I never felt particularly bad for them, nor did I really feel a sweet satisfaction outside of a general ‘ha ha awful popular kids get what’s coming to them’ feeling. They weren’t likable, but they weren’t interesting enough to be fun to hate either. Too many of them were placed to either be non lethal body counts, or to make the reader wonder if they are the one who set it all up in the first place.

The mystery too was a little lackluster for me. There were plenty of red herrings the muddle the waters effectively, be it misdirection about the mystery at the forefront or the mystery of Kay’s past. But ultimately, I did kind of brush across the solution well before the solution was revealed, even if I didn’t let it stick in my mind. And by the time we did get to the solution, I didn’t feel like we’d come to a big revelation. It just kind of happened, and I felt neither positive nor negative about how it all sussed out in the end. There was one final twist that did shock me, though, which was a nice surprise given that I thought that I had everything totally figured out within that storyline. It’s the little surprises that felt rewarding in this book, but when you don’t find yourself as a ready very invested in the majority of the mystery, or the consequences that it is going to dole out of the characters.

So what made it so readable, perhaps you are wondering? Well honestly, I am always going to be a sucker for the boarding school brats being rotten to each other trope, along with the themes of the misbehaving idle rich getting what they so richly deserve. If you want a standard book within this trope and genre, “People Like Us” is going to fulfill that want and need because it is so by the book (as it were). It almost acted as a comfort read for me, in that I didn’t have to think too deeply about it and that I knew that bad people were going to have bad things happen to them. Sometimes all we want is a book that hits all the things that we want and to be able to just enjoy it for what it is, and I do have to admit that I got that from “People Like Us” when all was said and done.

If you are looking for a YA thriller mystery that reinvents the wheel, “People Like Us” probably isn’t going to be the read for you. But if you want that familiar comfort of a genre you’ve come to really enjoy without rocking the boat, it could be a good bet.

I went looking for a mystery suitable for my grade 8s but in my opinion this is just a little too trashy and mature for them. It is a whodunit psychological mystery thriller and you’re not sure who the killer is for quite a while but I had it figured out long before Kay did.
The thing that was hard for me to believe was how an athlete hoping to get a scholarship would lead such a reckless life. It just didn’t ring true for me.

This was definitely a twisted tale of teen-drama (to the extreme), relationships and MURDER! I love that the story had me speculating throughout! Everyone was a suspect! Well done!

#punkrocklibrarian #overdrive #audiobook

Trashy, soapy YA boarding school murder mystery. Tons of fun and perfect for fans of Riverdale and Pretty Little Liars.

When a girl is found dead at her elite boarding school, soccer-star Kay Donovan follows a scavenger hunt which implicates suspects increasingly close to her, unraveling her group of popular friends and perfectly constructed life.