Lovely Girls: A Thriller

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It's fairly mindless reading, but was enjoyable nonetheless and explores the mean girl trope in both adults and teenagers well. I thought the whole thing about these Queen Bee mothers teaching their daughters to be bullies because they didn't want them to be victims was an interesting choice. The show is loosely based on what happened after Beautiful Girls came out and how his friends reacted to a movie about their lives. Margot Hunt is the author of LOVELY GIRLS, THE LAST AFFAIR, FOR BETTER AND WORSE and BEST FRIENDS FOREVER.

From Perfectly Impossible author Elizabeth Topp comes an unforgettably searing novel about a band of mothers who are forced to reckon with themselves after the unexpected loss of one of their own. She starts to tentatively see someone, but she still is caught up in her dead husband and how their marriage turned sour.It’s theatre made by middle-class white women so naturally me and my middle-class white friends from girls school (I know) loved it because it spoke directly to the everyday sexism we’ve experienced. The main reason why I gave this 4 stars is that the book's ending came out of nowhere and didn't really feel realistic. I was pretty confident this would be a three star read until the last chapter and the way it ended makes me want to bump it up a half star. The story has Kate, a newly widowed mother and her teenaged daughter, Alex who have recently moved from their home in Buffalo, NY to the little oceanside community of Shoreham, Florida.

As it becomes harder for her to ignore the malicious undercurrent she senses among her new friends, Kate grows increasingly unsure of who to believe—and who to trust. It opens up with a dead body and then we hear the story from Kate's point of view and Alex's video diary. As we’re swept up in watching Kate and Alex acclimate themselves to Shoreham and its community just a little bit reminiscent of television’s “Desperate Housewives” (and maybe any of the “Real Housewives” programs you choose to name), those questions recede, only to reassert themselves and be answered as the novel progresses. Yet they still find themselves on Google asking; “I feel good when an attractive man compliments me, am I still a feminist?Snow plows were coming by, and I was just tired of writing these movies with people getting shot and killed. You will hopefully cringe at the unnecessary fatphobic comments that added absolutely no value to the story itself. A death introduced early in the book is clearly linked to the bullying, and it seems only a matter of time before Alex is either offed or held responsible when someone else is.

The interesting part about this book was that I wasn't exactly enjoying it and yet I couldn't put it down. In Florida, Alex makes instant enemies of three popular girls who catch her filming them on her phone for her video diary, which is part of her therapy. As the action unfolds, we learn more about Kate's complicated relationship with her late husband--as well as how Alex related to her father.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote: "What's nicest about the film is the way it treasures the good feelings people can have for one another.

However, she quickly realizes that the teen girls are not nice (in essence truly mean girls) and she realizes that the leader of the pack, Daphne, is bullying her daughter Alex. The chilling story of the abduction of two teenagers, their escape, and the dark secrets that, years later, bring them back to the scene of the crime. An electrifying novel about a woman in thrall to the exhilarating rhythms of Manhattan, lost in the dizzying promise of youth, and fatally naive to the dark pressures of fame. It is a quick read, almost to its detriment, but it will linger in your mind after you finish the final page. When it did finally reach the point, there was a climatic scene and then it just all wrapped up so easily, and so quickly.

You could tell they were best friends, but they all had stuff amongst them that was personal to each one of them". In this chilling story, a mother and daughter try to start over in an idyllic town only to get caught up in cliques, mind games…and murder.