I wanted to like this book, but it was a cliche, and I could barely bring myself to finish it. I was given this book for my honest review.

Boarding school mean girls, drama, mystery, twists and murder! An enjoyable YA read. The friendships in this book remind me why it is so hard to be a teen.

Try as hard as I could, I struggled to get through this book and had to tap-out at 38%, and even that was a struggle. The characters are flat and lifeless, I could not connect with any of them, not even Kay. I felt like I was reading a less entertaining version of "Pretty Little Liars Goes to Boarding School", and I couldn't even rally to get to the unraveling of the mystery. This was a serious dud for me.

Boarding school bad girls, scholarship students, classic mean girl, it's all right there, and it's all pretty common. Nothing too new or exceptional here, but still an entertaining ride.

When a body is found in the lake of a posh boarding school, Kay Donovan's cool, mean girl reputation is put at risk. Kay finds herself being blackmailed by the dead girl and she scrambles to complete a complete a list of tasks in order to preserve her own secrets. Full of plot twists, and characters you'll love to hate, this is fun, page-turner of a thriller.

This book did not disappoint the plots twists and turns kept me reading! I could not put it down and I still can not believe the ending I did not see that coming. Highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a twisted plot.

People Like Us is young-adult novel that sets out to unravel a mystery at an exclusive boarding school. This title contains explicit sexual content and teenage sexual references.

A young adult mean girl mystery!
Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Group for the opportunity to read and review People Like Us by Dana Mele!
Kay and her group of friends find a body floating in the water when they go on their annual Halloween night jump in the lake. They realize that it’s a classmate and it looks like she’s slashed her wrists. Kay and her group of friends act entitled and insensitive. They also seem to be untrusting and possibly untrustworthy. They are the embodiment of mean girls. Kay is the main character dealing with death in her recent past and guilt about those deaths. Since she started attending the Bates boarding school, she’s truly become spiteful and petty, making decisions from bad to worse. When murder occurs, Kay is forced to step back and evaluate her actions, who she is and who she wants to become. There’s a bit of a twist and the bulk of the book deals with Kay’s background and her relationships with everyone, from family to friends to acquaintances. A young adult mean girl mystery, 4 stars!

I thought this book started out really strong but hit a wall in the middle and fizzled out from there. For me, Kay was never a sympathetic main character but too weak to be the anti-hero. The tangle of weird hook-ups and romance sprinkled through the book didn't fit with the plot threads. I also have an issue with the uber-wealthy giving up and withdrawing from school with a simple "I know you are doing x" but no tangible proof. It doesn't fit with the atmosphere Mele built at the boarding school. It was easy to see the resolution from the time the blackmail started and I was disappointed the ending was so predictable.

A mystery/thriller for the ages! Filled with hard to like characters and a mystery that had me guessing until the very end, teens will easily become engrossed as they put all the pieces together.

Mystery
14-18
So I guess boarding school murders are a thing! This is my second review for today, as I couldn’t help bundling these together given their plot similarities. This one is set in the U.S., on the east coast. Bates Academy is a boarding school for privileged girls from elite families, with a scholarship program that gives Kay Donovan a spot, despite her humble background. As this is her big break, Kay befriends the right group and despite a habit of stocking her closet with borrowed clothes she “forgets” to return, her sharp wit and withering comments quickly earn her a coveted spot in the leadership clique. Now in fourth year, the girls put on the Skeleton costume dance for Halloween, and the book opens as the dance ends and the girls meet at the lake for the annual skinny dip. To their shock, they discover a body in the water, a student named Jessica Lane. But it’s not the first body Kay has seen, or even the second. It’s a secret she has kept at Bates, but someone has found out. When Kay gets back to her room after all the police questions, she finds an email sent from Jessica’s account, threatening to reveal all and ending her dreams of a soccer scholarship unless Kay follows through on revenge instructions against the girls who made Jessica’s life miserable at Bates – all of them Kay’s friends. It’s a mash-up of Thirteen Reasons Why and Pretty Little Liars. I found the plotting strong enough to keep young readers guessing, with lots of twists and turns to keep track of. Kay is an interesting protagonist; she is bisexual and Mele includes mild descriptions of Kay’s intimate encounters with girls and boys. Kay’s back story is slowly unveiled, right to the very last page, and while she is a tough character to like, I stayed engaged through to the end, and loved the cliff-hanger. But overall the writing falls short. Kay is not a sympathetic protagonist at all; she is a hardened and distant teen, which makes it hard to like her, and that’s always a problem in YA books. Additionally, her poor judgment grows irritating for this adult reader, along with the complete lack of any adult involvement – how do Kay’s parents not find out that their daughter is a primary suspect in a murder? Seriously. But for fans of the genre, this is a better choice than S.T.A.G.S. My thanks to G.P. Putnam’s Sons Publishing for the advance reading copy provided digitally through NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
More discussion and reviews of this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35356380

I'm between 2 and 3 stars, but not really because of the book itself, more just personal style preference. This book did everything right for drama-loving-suspense-needing reader - I read this book FAST, mostly because I knew it wasn't my favorite, BUT, I also needed to know what happened. I glazed over a lot of the plot, as it was not always useful/relevant/interesting/original. None of the characters were endearing or anyone I wanted to know more about - they all sounded like miserable teen girls I made huge efforts to avoid in school. It read like some kind of formula fill-in for mystery and YA-drama ... boarding school, check; girls SO deeply connected to their friends they'd do ANYTHING, check; mysterious didn't-fit-in past combined with trauma, check; homosexual are-they-friend-or-do-I-love-them-love-them vibes, check. Perhaps I'm being a little harsh, but unoriginality sort of bugs me and feels more like a waste of time - there are SO MANY BOOKS out there! (Also, does anyone REALLY have this kind of intense friend relationship? Is it something only born of boarding school situations out of some kind of necessity?)

As for marketing, this book could definitely be described by publishers as the "Thirteen Reasons Why"/"Gone Girl" Mash Up for Teens You Didn't Know Existed.

All I can say is that this was a very unusual, bizarre, and suspenseful book that kept building until the very end.

Strictly for fans of the genre, this One of Us is Lying knock off suffers from subpar writing, particularly in terms of characterization and dialog. Nevertheless, the story moves fairly swiftly and there is appeal here for those who seek this sort of thing out.

Note: I received a free copy of People Like Us by Dana Mele from NetGalley a very long time ago and then forgot that they'd sent me a free copy until I checked it out from the library. At that point I decided to bring it up on my Kindle as well and I realized that it's a good thing I hadn't intended on reading the NetGalley version because it was formatted horribly and was basically unreadable. (Though I'm sure they would have happily replaced it if I had noticed it before and requested a new copy.)

So People Like Us is set in a boarding school where, in the first chapter, a bunch of mean girls, one of which is the protagonist Kay Donovan, find the dead body of a classmate floating in the school lake. Not too long after the discovery of the body Kay finds an email, from the dead girl, leading her on a computer-coded scavenger hunt, targeting a handful of girls that treated the dead girl like crap and may have had a part in her death. These girls are Kay's friends and she starts to worry because it seems like she's more connected to the dead girl than she thought, connected enough that she looks very, very suspicious.

People Like Us was a fun romp of mean girl cattiness and twists and turns. There's friendships that turn into more, there's jealousy, and bitchiness and self discovery. No character was really black or white, they all had reasons and excuses and history that made what they'd done understandable though not right. 

And it was also a book where I wasn't entirely sure how reliable the narrator was considering the things she hid from herself and how and when her secrets were revealed. (Unreliable narrators can just be so fun!)

All in all it was a little cheesy but I actually liked it.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It is going to make a great addition to our library collection.

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley for an honest review.

Even with the story being a bit all over the place with the plot and characters, but I still really enjoyed it. Kay's character was a bit hard to get a feel for at first since we learn about her past little by little throughout the book. However, that didn't really bother me as it might some people. The dynamics between all the characters kept everything interest, as well as confusing at some points. I loved the ending, especially the twist we learn about Kay. It made everything all the more grey and uncertain.

I wanted to like this a lot more than I actually did. The narrative style is very cold and distant, and while I understand that as a stylistic/character choice (because Kay, our main character is very distant herself), it left me feeling unconnected to the characters and not worried about them being in peril. Aside from that, I also felt like the mystery was extremely easy to guess. I can’t say why because spoilers, but it just seemed very obvious to me. If you’re new to the thriller/mystery genre, it might still work for you, but it just didn’t for me. I also thought the reasoning behind the murders and framing was a little meh.

Saying all that, I still compulsively read this. Once I started, I didn’t really put it down and it does have a lot of potential. I’ll definitely be checking out more from this author. While there are no labels (unless I’m forgetting something?), there is a sorta love triangle between two girls and a boy. Kay has feelings for both her ex-boyfriend and another girl. This isn’t a main plot point, but it was nice to see. So I do still recommend this one even if it didn’t personally work that well for me.

I was so excited to read this book and it just didn't do it for me. The writing was sub-par and some of the passages and conversations didn't even make sense. I got lost trying to follow the story in some places. And the characters... oh my God these characters are detestable. I didn't have any connection to any of them, I didn't care if they lived or died and I honestly didn't care about any of them. The only reason I saw it through to the end is because I wanted to find out who the killer was, and even that left me wanting more of an explanation. The wrap up wasn't wrapped up enough and a supposed "huge twist" was thrown in that wasn't fully explained. I think this could have been an awesome book, but it needed a little more tweaking before hitting the shelves.

<blockquote><i>”Maybe my brain is broken, or my heart is rotten. I want to be a good person who only says and does good things and loves good people, but I don’t and I’m not.”</i></blockquote>
Have you, dear reader, seen the wildly popular cult classic 1988 film <i>Heathers</i>?? Did you maybe, just maybe, think it was missing something?? Maybe something, a little, I don’t know,,,, <i>gay??</i> We’ve all been there, and if you’re in that same boat I would love to invite you to come read <i>People Like Us</i>. It’s the <b>sapphic Heathers/Mean Girls mashup that we’ve all been waiting for. </b>

<i>People Like Us</i> reminds me a lot of my all-time favorite thriller, [book:Prep School Confidential|13411546], and not in a bad way. The two go hand in hand when it comes to <b>convoluted plots and interesting characters</b>, plus I absolutely ADORE boarding school mysteries. It’s my guilty-pleasure genre, and the fact that this one has sapphic girls in it???? dude <b>I was sold before I even read the blurb.</b>

✲ <b>The Concept</b>
Honestly, the idea of “revenge blog that forces you to blackmail others before the clock runs out” <i>seems</i> like an idea that would be overused in YA lit, but it’s really… not? Or at least from what I’ve read. The concept was unique and not really like anything I’ve read before, and I think a lot of readers will find this novel refreshing.

✲<b>The Writing</b>
Though it wasn’t technically the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read, and sometimes I got lost (especially in the transitions between flashbacks and present time – though that could partly be due to the format of the eARC), for a large majority of the time the writing was easy to follow and kept me intrigued. In fact, the easy-flowing writing style is probably why I stuck around for the last half of the novel, and boy am I glad I did.

✲<b>The Characters</b>
I AM SO SAD THAT MY SHIPs DIDN’T BECOME CANON. NEITHER OF THEM. I’m not going to say who the ships were because, like, spoilers, but the ending was honestly <b>so satisfying</b> and fit how the story was progressing <b>so well</b> that I’m not even mad about it.

<i>People Like Us</i> is a <i>perfect</i> example of how to write a complicated, flawed protagonist. Kay was awesome, and all the dynamics and relationships between her and the people around her were so convoluted and amazing. She was by no means perfect – and at times I even wanted to yell at her, but she had a good heart and wonderfully toed the line between hero and anti-hero.

Brie was another favorite of mine, along with Nola. This book is chuck full of strong women and I am HERE for it. Like [book:Prep School Confidential|13411546], <i>People Like Us</i> features characters that remind me a lot of the Gallagher Girls series, but for an older crowd.

However, besides our main trio and Spencer, Kay’s ex, the other characters of the book just all blended together in my head?? I think that a lot of them should’ve been more three-dimensional, even the ones that were only present in the first bit of the book. There’s nothing worse than a plethora of background characters that all blend together in your head, and, unfortunately, this book fell into that pattern.

✲<b>The Plot</b>
Now this is where my opinion gets kinda messy. I was absolutely and completely lethargic for the first fifty percent of this book. I could not physically or mentally bring myself to care about the story. I thought that the plot moved too fast (a rare complaint?), and I thought that the list would be build-up for something bigger but it kind of,, wasn’t?? the whole plot revolved around the website, for the entire book. I was hoping for something more. While I liked it better when things slowed down in the second half, the first half made me want to DNF. To be honest, I probably would’ve if the writing hadn’t been so easy to follow.

But don’t get me wrong, the second half of the novel (or, maybe, the last third of it) made up for the first part. Once the story really got into the meat of the mystery, I became engrossed and couldn’t put the book down.

Also, I still feel so cool that I was able to guess the murderer. I never <i>ever <b>ever</b></i> guess those kinds of things right and I guess this is what it feels like to be one of the cool kids. God bless.

To conclude, while it does have its flaws, <i>People Like Us</i> is a promising debut novel full of interesting characters, an interesting and well-thought-out concept, and easy to follow writing. I look forward to reading more by Dana Mele.

p.s. holy crap, that <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/videos/132025-people-like-us-teaser-trailer-1">book trailer</a>?? please give me a people like us movie. It’s what we deserve.