Dangerous Girls

by Abigail Haas

[Leah]

When I heard Abby McDonald had written a YA thriller, called Dangerous Girls under the pseudonym of Abigail Haas, I was desperate to read it. I thought it sounded fabulous and I was so curious as to who had really killed Elise. The UK cover is really awesome – jet black, with bright writing and broken glass and having been struggling to read Chick Lit recently, I decided that I needed a change of pace, a change of genre, to read something a bit more unexpected so I decided to give Dangerous Girls a whirl.

Dangerous Girls is an amazing novel. It’s the type of novel that totally screws with your head and your mind, but in the best way possible. I don’t read many thrillers, but when I do I like them to be pacey and unforgettable, and Dangerous Girls is definitely that. It zips along and it’s written in such a distinctive way that I’ll have trouble forgetting it. I loved how Haas set it up so the novel flits backwards and forwards and practically sideways. It’s not told in a linear fashion, but instead we can be reading about Anna in prison, and then we see how Elise and Anna met, before jumping to their first few days in Aruba. It’s really clever, actually, and it keeps the plot moving at all times, as little tidbits are revealed about Anna’s relationships; with Elise, with Tate, and new information pops up every now and again and just when you think you’ve got it, you realise you haven’t.

What surprised me most about Dangerous Girls, is that the characters aren’t really the most likeable you’ve ever met. They’re actually quite mean, especially to each other. They’re basically all typical rich kids who turn on a dime, who don’t care about grassing on the other person if it saves their skin. Typical rich kid stuff, too much of Daddy’s money means they’re not held accountable for squat, which made Anna’s ordeal all the worse, and made me DESPISE Tate. Despite, I tell you. Anna’s ordeal was horrific, the stuff of nightmares, really, and I felt Haas described it so well. I felt for Anna, so much, and I just thought how I would feel if I was thrust into a situation like it (PANIC, PANIC, MORE PANIC!!!!). Anna was such a mystery, because like it’s pointed out throughout the novel, she’s amazingly calm. Yes, she has outbursts of anger that any normal person would have, but there’s almost a sereneness to her that I don’t think I’d have in that situation.

The ending of Dangerous Girls is NUTS. Seriously nuts. So nuts that I had to get official confirmation from Abby that the ending I thought I’d just read was indeed the ending I suspected it was. Seriously, it will screw with your head and you’ll wonder if you read it right. I know who I suspected for the ENTIRE novel, like right from the off, and to suddenly be confronted with this new person as the killer threw me off guard. I was CONVINCED I had it correct. It just made me sit back a sec and just go “whoa”. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t exactly out of left-field, and it was always a possibility, but it surprised me, and I don’t get surprised very often at all. This is a must-read for any thriller fan, because it’s gritty, it’s real and it shows that paradise can all too quickly become hell on earth without you even knowing it. I sincerley hope Abby goes down this road again because she’s a damn good thriller writer (to be fair, she can do it all – YA, thrillers, Chick Lit novels, she’s a triple threat) and the world needs more head-twisty thrillers like this one.