The Cheerleaders by Kara Thomas

Challenge #41 ~ “A book from the 2018 Goodreads’ Choice Awards.”

thecheerleaders

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

My opinion in three sentences:

It’s a premise you’ve probably seen time after time, with some tropes that are pretty common in YA fiction, but The Cheerleaders has its own deserved and strong position among the best of its contemporaries. A juicy mystery that, for once, has a realistic share of hurdles in accessing “previously unknown” data, and despite this gradual release of information (and the occasional flashback to the incident) the solution isn’t distinctly predictable. There are some elements to characters and relationship that crop up, grating on the nerves and feeling a little off-key, but they don’t serve to be too negative to the whole experience.

(Without spoiling anything) the best bit:

I wasn’t entirely sure about the odd chapter that flashed back five years to the protagonist’s sister and her perspective – they felt like a bit of a cop-out – but Thomas kept their use in moderation, amplifying their effect, and the final of these was the most emotional chapter of the entire book for me. It was something a little different, and it worked very powerfully through careful use.

A warning for the book:

Rather than the protagonist, I felt myself favouring more one of the side characters – Ginny – just because the main perspective got a little dramatic at times. The desperation, the upset, the frustration are all things I understand – they’re a realistic representation of what the character’s going through – but at times she seems to blow things out of proportion and spiral into a series of feelings with no real motivation (or at least a vague one that isn’t really explained until later in the book, or at all in some cases). The slow development of the reader’s understanding is key to drawing out the mystery, but equally with such an emotionally-driven character’s voice dictating the narrative, this vagueness can alienate the reader (particularly where the mystery is only just beginning).

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