Name: Tragedy Girl
ISBN: 9780738747033

Christine Hurley Deriso

"Seventeen-year-old Anne, grieving the death of her parents, thinks she has found a soulmate in her classmate Blake, whose girlfriend has died, until she begins to sense that something about Blake is not what it seems"--

Tragedy Girl

Laura

This book was fun to read, even though it did suck. You can tell this author is not at all used to writing thrillers. Tana French, she is not. I could guess exactly what happened by the third chapter. Nothing held my attention, not even the parts with the letters that I guess were supposed to throw us off the scent, so to speak, but they were so obviously filler. You can tell that Deriso thought that thrillers were just contemporary novels with the obligatory elements thrown in to make it a mystery, which probably explained why those elements were so cliche, like anonymous letters and “the body never being found”. A third grader could have read this book and realized that the boyfriend did it. She made it way too obvious from the get go, with him layering on the charm and then all of a sudden blowing his top. I recently finished In the Woods, by the aforementioned Tana French, and while I did kind of suspect who did it, the killer was still a fantastic subtle portrayal of a sociopath. The boyfriend was not. If this was a real life case, and I was watching it with my mom on the ID channel, we probably would have turned it off by the midway point. Hell, the ID channel probably wouldn’t have even bothered to make a show about it, since it has nothing that could be worth making a show about it, except maybe the whole letter thing (a missing body isn’t really that suspicious, especially in a seaside town. The ocean tends to keep its dead). Anne’s a dull main character by the way, and I’m impressed that someone as “brilliant” as she claimed to be needed a therapist and a best friend (with one personality trait- gay. Oh, the inclusiveness!) halfway across the country to spell out the weirdness about Blake. And they never even met him! I don’t get how trained police officers (and probably detectives as well) were so quick to write him off as a suspect. Lt Joe Kenda could probably just glance at Blake and tell the police to arrest him. But no, we need Anne to come in and save the day. There was a mean girl and some obligatory references to how hot the new girl (Anne) is from her adoring interchangeable friends, but they don’t really matter at all, do they? I liked the aunt and uncle though, and thought they were stand-up guardians for Anne, with all her whining selfishness. The writing was also bad- very simplistic for the most part, but with some big words and out of left field references to things like Occam’s Razor, that just made the whole thing feel confused and jumbled together. It was actually hard to believe that this book wasn’t a self-published novel, but it actually went through an editor. This book is good brain fluff and fun to hate read, but if you are looking for an actually good mystery-thriller, step far away from Tragedy Girl. 

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Tragedy Girl

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