The Dead Girls Club follows protagonist Heather. In the past she and her best friend Becca and two other friends made up The Dead Girls Club. I liked that the four childhood friends would share ghost stories, play bloody Mary, and try and scare each other. I felt like those moments are relatable on some level to all girl childhood friendships. This added to the story by making the characters in their past forms feel real. At some point Becca shares a story of The Red Lady. The girls start to perform rituals and begin believing that the red lady is bringing things on them. It goes to far and ends in tragedy. Becca is dead and her mother Lauren is found guilty of Becca's murder. Now in the future Heather receives a package with Becca's best friend necklace, the same necklace that was around Becca's neck when Heather killed her. Heather unravels to find out who knows the truth about what really happened to Becca that night. I found myself enjoying the parts that were written in the past. The characters felt more nuanced. When I was reading Heather's life in the future, it felt like her character was not deep enough to feel believable. Overall, a decent read.

I really enjoyed The Dead Girls Club. It was exciting and kept me interested the entire way through. The only thing that I really didn't like about the book is that it never stated if the red lady was real or not. I know it was probably meant to leave it to our imagination, but it's one of those things where I really just want to know. Overall, the book was great and very well paced. I will definitely be reading this book again!

Dead Girls Club by Damien Angelica Walters, coming December 2019, is a supernatural thriller starring protagonist Heather Cole. If you like spooky, creepy, suspense  - this one is for you. 
Let me address the style of this writing, which by far and away won't appeal to every reader, but will be an absolute delight to those who like an "in the mind" stream of consciousness flow. This story feels entirely inside of Heather's head, and as the narrator you either learn to trust her - or not.  Not to get too psychological here, but you know how the truth has three sides? yours, theirs, and the actual truth? Well, with Heather we are sure  to at least to get one good side. 
In terms of plot, Heather has kept a really dark secret for nearly 30 years, and suddenly now with the arrival of a little silver BFF necklace, that secret threatens to destroy the life she built for herself. As I read, I kept thinking - this is very much a concept of, "I know what you did last summer." But, I promise that is where the similarities end. This story has its own plot, pace, and conclusion which has nothing to do with masked boogie men. 
When Heather receives afore mentioned necklace in the mail; a necklace she hasn't seen since the night she killed her best friend Becca, she comes to the conclusion that someone else knows about that night, and that someone is probably out to get her her. Logically, that is a super sound conclusion, and my recommendation to Heather is immigration. I hear Finland is nice. 
I won't go into any spoilers since the books isn't even published, but highly recommend for a cozy fall/winter read with a nice blanket and glass of red. This book story has much more to offer than a mere ghost of two, not that that's a bad thing either. Enjoy book worms. 
Dead Girls Club, by Damien Angelica Walters - published December 2019 wherever books are sold. 


Thanks to Crooked Lane Books for the ARC and to Netgalley #partner

A complicated plot with a few unexpected twists.
The story is haunting and scary, the unraveling of a mystery that lay dormant for decades and that could cost everything to our main character.
The Dead Girls club starts as a rendering for all the lives lost by the senseless actions of serial killers. The fascination with the macabre that plagues the life of young Becca, and the love for mystery and horror that her best friend Heather has.
How to discern fact from fiction when you are an impressionable teen.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Crooked Lane books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was a fairly enjoyable and quick read. I wanted to find out what happened and it kept me reading. The characters were all very relatable and the girls reminded me of myself as a teenager. The story follows a few of the girls through time to explain what happened to Becca, the friend that died when they were young. Suddenly Heather is getting reminders of Becca as an adult and has no idea what is going on.

This kept me guessing! Great read.

Something with the writing style was off for me. I didnt like how loose the plot was. The main character had a weird fascination with gory death and reading horror stories. When the main character, early on is introduced as a psych doctor I was sort of shocked. Pretty disappointed

The Dead Girls Club was exactly the page-turner I needed right now. It was well paced, suspenseful, and just twisty enough to keep me engaged in the story. It had well rounded characters and an entertaining plot... everything I wanted from a thriller.

What a fantastic book. Really got into this one. Characters are well formed and the storyline keeps you focused. Wish I could have read it in one sitting but really enjoyed it

The Dead Girls Club is a story of Heather, who after 30 years since she secretly killed her best friend, Becca, a package arrives at her house with Becca's necklace she wore the day she died. The chapters cover Heather's childhood events leading to the death of Becca, and follows Heather today, trying to uncover secrets of the past and who is seems to know her secret.

The story was well paced and has a few twists and turns. But I just wasn't enthralled with the story. It had some grittiness, but I just couldn't get into it. The characters didn't contain enough depth for me, and the present time setting didn't feel fleshed out as much as Heather's childhood timeline. I can see how others would enjoy the book, but for me, it was just decent.

Thank you to Damien Angelica Walters, the publisher, and NetGalley for the ARC to review.

“Ghost girls” travels back and forth in time between now and the late early 90s when Heather Cole and her 3 friends were obsessed with ghost stories, breaking into empty houses, and summoning spirits... like the one of the Red Lady. One of those friends is brutally murdered at the hand of the Red Lady. Adult Heather has to answer for it when the past returns.

This story scared me, and had me sneaking away to read more. I, too, am a child of the early nineties and I loves the nostalgic feel. Reminded me of Bloody Mary, and made THAT story feel a little too real.

The ending came on strong, and left me satisfied, though a little sad. Scary, but not too scary. Not all questions are answered — which is a good thing!

The Dead Girls Club, by Damien Angelica Waters, is a supernatural thriller that hits shelves December 10th, 2019. The Dead Girls Club follows Heather, who kicks things off the story by receiving a mysterious envelope which contains one half of one of those super-popular-in-the-90s “best friends forever” broken heart necklaces. The problem is, it’s her best friend’s half, and the last time Heather saw it was the day she killed her BFF back when they were twelve.
We then spend the rest of the book along for the ride as she gets more and more mysterious clues sent to her and dissolves into more and more of a panic trying to figure out who knows her secrets and why they’re coming after her now. We also intermittently flash back to her childhood to unravel the mystery of how and why she ended up killing her own best friend, getting a closer look at our titular friend group nicknamed “The Dead Girls Club”—AKA a group of preteens obsessed with serial killers, murders, and ghost stories.
So, the usual.
Two things really caught my attention and drew me into this book: the overall synopsis, of course, and more notably because it was billed as being similar to A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. Two which I have just one thing to say:
NAH.
Nah, girl. Not at all. It seems like publishing companies these days are always overselling things with these bold-faced lies in the form of “comparisons”. (Like every YA fantasy is the “new Harry Potter”, amiright?)
I absolutely loved A Head Full of Ghosts and thought it was really well written, unique, and interesting. I felt…differently about this The Dead Girls Club.
My overall feelings about this book were kind of just…meh. Very middle of the road. It had some cons, it had a couple pros, and nothing really tipped it in either direction for me. The plot is nothing really groundbreaking. It’s a concept we’ve seen plenty of times before in everything from cheesy Lifetime movies to Pretty Little Liars to I Know What You Did Last Summer. (In fact, with the group of four female friends, one dead girl, and the past mysteriously creeping back up, I actually got some major PLL vibes from this, but maybe that’s just me. In the early days of that show, my best friend and I would have weekly “TV dates” to watch the new episodes and scream about how they didn’t make any sense, so perhaps it’s just stuck in my head.)
I started off on the wrong foot with this book, because I really didn’t like the writing at the beginning. We kick things off quickly with Heather getting the envelope containing Becca’s necklace (Becca being the dead best friend) right away, but then things progress so quickly that it doesn’t really have a natural, readable flow and takes on more of an “and then, and then, and then” quality. Then I went home, then I made dinner, then I showered, then I went to bed. IT was really clunky and I didn’t enjoy the writing at all for the first few chapters. This is a little snippet of the MC/narrator talking about her husband:
“…Our first date. A coffee shop. Him with an espresso, me with a latte. Almond biscotti and blueberry scones. Knuckles brushing together. Knees nudging under the table. Ten minutes in, wanting a second date. Hoping he did, too.”
Gah. I just don’t like it. It all felt rushed and felt like the author just wanted to really quickly dump a lot of obligatory background info on me and then move on, instead of working things into the story more naturally as we went or actually just building up this character and her life. Like, “Yeah, yeah, here’s some background, who cares what this character’s life is like, all I really want to talk about is murder.”
Also—and I’ll warn you, this is probably nitpicky—but she also overuses a writing convention which is one of my pet peeves, and that’s when people describe people or things by saying “all” and then making a list of a couple of random qualities. Like these two examples from the book:
“All long hair, cleft chin, and lean muscles.”
“All dirty blonde hair, narrow hips, and American Eagle jeans.”
I don’t know, something about this particular turn of phrase just bugs the ever living hell out of me. Maybe it’s because the use of “all” implies that the three things you just listed are the three things you think are significant about this character—hair, hips, jeans. That is all they are reduced to. Or maybe it comes across as lazy. Either way, I’ve always thought that if you’re going to use this in your writing, you should use it once; but this author used it over and over again (more than just the two noted here) and just…meh. I got really tired of it.
Another thing that bothered me was Heather’s job and how this was represented. She’s supposed to be a child psychologist, but the way it’s written is more like a very basic shell of what it sort of seems like a child psychologist might do. Since she seems to spend most of her time at work screwing around and researching people from her past in an attempt to catch whoever is harassing her, the only sessions we see—other than a group session where Heather is so bad at her job that she tunes out while one girl beats the shit out of another one—are these brief glimpses of sessions with a little girl named Cassidy, who talks about her life in terms of “princess stories”, and the whole thing just seems so stereotypical and generic and Heather only achieves basically tuning the girl out (this seems to be a pattern), slamming drawers loudly enough to startle a child who clearly already has some major trauma, and then sending her to the corner to color. It didn’t make her any more likable or relatable as a character (at some points I wondered if the author was even doing the whole Girl on the Train/Gone Girl unlikable main character schtick, but it wasn’t done well enough for me to be able to tell if it she was intentionally unlikable or somewhat lazy writing just made her seem that way) and it felt more like filler than anything.
The only other purpose it served was to have the same little girl find a drawing from Heather’s childhood which had been anonymously mailed to her by her torturer. (Which she found when Heather literally left the session to get some notes on a totally different patient from her receptionist, after actually taking a call during the appointment, as well. So professional. Can someone get this little girl a new therapist, please?) After finding the drawing, Cassidy makes some comments on it which are supposedly so enlightening for Heather and serve to illustrate how kids think so much differently than adults about “monsters” or things coming to get us—but it still just kind of feels like a cheap shot to further Heather’s mystery and not really build character or her world by showing us what she does for a living. The whole thing only resulted in freaking the little girl out even more, in the midst of her therapist TOTALLY NOT LISTENING TO HER about how she is clearly being abused by her stepfather.
Okay, I need to chill.
The good news is, the book does redeem itself once we get more into the meat of it—the murder of her best friend, the bad things that happened when they were kids, their ghost stories they used to tell, Heather trying to hunt down who is sending her the items from her past. Once we get into it, that quick pacing actually starts working well for it and we get to move along through the story and try to solve the mystery along with Heather. I thought it was a pretty interesting story about the girls when they were young, kind of bringing to the page the vibe of modern day news stories where kids stab their friends in the name of Slenderman (a case which Heather actually references more than once) or something else fictional. It also brings to mind the debate about the power of the human mind and manifestation—whether we really do possess the power to think things into being, and if we believe them enough, are they real?
Additionally, there are some very real, very heart wrenching portrayals of how mean young girls can be to one another, which successfully ratchet up the tension and actually make you feel for the young versions of the characters (I liked kid Heather a lot better than adult Heather).
There were also a few really adrenaline-heightening moments as Heather sneaks around playing detective, like when she breaks into a friend’s office and gets busted by the receptionist, or when she’s confronted by the head of a Neighborhood Watch program while she’s creeping around a suburb. These moments largely come from Heather just doing reckless and dumb things, but there were certainly a few moments where I was thinking, well now what are you going to do? So it is some what interesting to follow as she tries—often unsuccessfully—to sort things out on her own without the help of law enforcement.
I didn’t love the ending, but it also didn’t quite go where I thought it was going, so I guess I have to give it that. I just didn’t think it was that great of an ending. Once again, just kind of meh.
Rating wise, I’d give this 2 ½ or 3 stars. Probably 2 ½ because it would be right in the middle of the road which is all too accurate to how I felt about this. Again, I didn’t dislike it. I just didn’t like it all that much. I found it kind of enjoyable, sort of something to pass the time, but also kind of forgettable. It would make a quick read if you’re just looking for something murder-y to kill time with. By no means do I think it warrants the comparison to A Head Full of Ghosts, and isn’t nearly as successful at blurring the lines between the supernatural and the thriller elements. The fact that there’s a ghost story involved with both and it alternates between adult versions and childhood versions of the main characters are really the only things the two have in common, in my opinion. Writing-wise, they are by no means equivalent.
But this book releases on December 10th, so if you want something to breeze through and pass the time while you’re snowed in and you feel like solving a sort of cheesy, Lifetime-movie-esque mystery, then it may be worth checking out. Or pick it up as a holiday gift for your murder mystery loving aunt who needs to break out of her James Patterson/Lee Child/Dean Koontz shell. Perhaps you’ll find it much less meh than I did. I definitely think fans of Pretty Little Liars or similar franchises would find this right up their alley!

I probably should have read the blurb a bit better. Supernatural is just not really the genre for me and I didn't enjoy this book as much as I have others.

So detailed and amazing. I finished it in one sitting. Amazing attention to detail. Love, love, love this story and the characters.

Great thriller. Kept me guessing. Will definitely be adding to my collection. Looking forward to reading more from this author.

3.5 stars!!

Mysterious. Thrilling. Suspenseful and downright creepy at times! I'm very thankful to NetGalley for giving me a ARC to read and review, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

Heather was a perfect protagonist for this kind of book, though frustrating at times, but it was hard to not get tied up with how her story was told. We get flashback of little Heather with Becca and her other friends and their secret club that traded murder stories. And then we see adult Heather who seems to be haunted by Becca or someone else- who knows what she did to Becca.

The Dead Girls Club had the perfect plot and I loved the dynamic of the younger girls and how it was told, though I did still have questions that were unanswered I did like the ending.

Longer review to be on my blog this Monday!

Red Lady, Red Lady, show us your face...

In 1991, Heather Cole and her friends were members of the Dead Girls Club. Obsessed with the macabre, the girls exchanged stories about serial killers and imaginary monsters, like the Red Lady, the spirit of a vengeful witch killed centuries before. Heather knew the stories were just that, until her best friend Becca began insisting the Red Lady was real—and she could prove it. That belief got Becca killed.

It's been nearly thirty years, but Heather has never told anyone what really happened that night—that Becca was right and the Red Lady was real. She's done her best to put that fateful summer, Becca, and the Red Lady, behind her. Until a familiar necklace arrives in the mail, a necklace Heather hasn't seen since the night Becca died. The night Heather killed her.
Now, someone else knows what she did . . . and they're determined to make Heather pay.

Oh man, this was such a spooky, unsettling story! Wow is all I can say, you need to pick this book up and read it!!

#TheDeadGirlsClub #NetGalley
Pub Date: 10 Dec 2019

Wow. This one was definitely edgier than I expected. I would say this supernatural suspense really boarded on horror and was good enough to keep me up at night!! This one was pretty darn scary and I really felt like I was on the edge of my seat for a good bit of it.

The only negative I really had was that it was hard for me to connect with the protagonist for the beginning of the novel. Once it got rolling, I really did empathize with her and thought the story was captivating enough to keep me on edge! Really suspenseful and fun!

I had high hopes for this book and they just fell short. I wasn't the biggest fan of the writing style and didn't enjoy the plot as much as I hoped.

This book is a twist on the classic story told by an unreliable narrator, and I think the author spun it with great success. From the beginning, I can see that the reader might be inclined to question the judgement of Heather, a psychologist who claims she murdered her best friend, Becca, when they were teenagers. Heather has grown up and hidden her secret past from everyone she loves, until it comes back to haunt her in the form of the necklace Becca was wearing when she died. Who could have sent Heather this necklace? Has her well-guarded secret been discovered?

When the author takes us back to the time surrounding the event, we learn that Becca and Heather were part of a “Dead Girls Club” in which macabre stories of true crime and lore were shared -- stories that include the legend of the Red Lady, a witch who began haunting the girls of the club following a ritual in which they called her spirit. Could it be that the Red Lady killed Becca? As I watched Heather grow progressively unstable, I also followed the unexpected twists and turns that led to a satisfying conclusion.

I received a DIGITAL Advance Reader Copy of this book from #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review of #TheDeadGirlsClub

REVIEW
The Dead Girls Club by Damien Angelica Walters
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Thank you for the early release of the ebook Netgalley
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Release date 12/10/2019
Review also on Goodreads and Instagram under Bookish_Pineapple

https://www.instagram.com/bookish_pineapple/

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45701350
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This book was not at all what I expected. The build up took me a little bit to get into but once I did, I didn’t put it down. I finished this book in less than a day. Forgo laundry and dishes. This was much more important.
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A story of preteen friends and imaginations. Stories you tell to make things seem better or deflect from what’s really going on. We’ve all done it. Our monsters are not as scary as the ones we make up. Our saviors are not as close as the ones we believe in. Friends are there until the end. And sometimes even after.
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A disturbing but enticing witchy supernatural-twist your mind-mystery. Find out what really happens as you are enveloped into the past through flashbacks. What you think is not what happens. Kept me on the edge of my seat until I was finished.