From Alexa Donne, YouTuber and author of Brightly Burning, comes a prep school thriller filled with college admission scandals, intrigue, and mean popular girls in the vein of Gossip Girl. Donne, widely known and loved for her YouTube channel and sci-fi romances, tries her hand at a whodunnit in this YA thriller.

At elite prep school, Claflin Academy, the Ivies aren’t just Ivy League colleges, they’re the five-member popular girl clique who will stop at nothing to get into their Ivy League schools, which are designated by queen bee Avery because “friends don’t compete with friends.” Scholarship student and the Ivies designated UPenn applicant, Olivia, knows better than to break the rules, but when she gets into Harvard and queen bee Avery doesn’t, she knows she’s in trouble, especially when another Ivy crosses Avery and turns up dead. Amid scandal, murder, and secrets galore, Olivia is looking for the truth behind the murder, but in doing so, she must confront the terrible things she and her friends did to get into college and decide where she really wants to stand.

As a big-time and somewhat picky fan of mysteries, there are four things I look for in a good murder mystery:

The story can surprise me in some way, whether by the killer reveal or another twist;
All the puzzle pieces fit together by the end;
There is a decent amount of realism in law enforcement and legal matters;
The detective or sleuth character uses cool skills and not just luck to uncover the truth. All stories with female detectives who discover killers by being kidnapped need not apply and should maybe have their feminism cards revoked.
The Ivies does hit the majority of this criteria well, but where it doesn’t drags down the other good points into a rather disappointing whodunnit.

The Ivies did surprise me with multiple red herrings, it kept me guessing between three candidates for the murderer and each nugget of intrigue was nicely explained by the end. Not only who was the killer, but the secrets that the victim and all other suspects were hiding, plus even the legal realism was pretty on the nose. Minus a reasonable suspension of disbelief for a teenager amateur sleuth, The Ivies shows realistic legal consequences and police investigation. This realism is stretched only a reasonable amount to create more for our sleuth character, Olivia, to do, which leads to my main complaint about The Ivies: as a main character/sleuth, Olivia falls so flat the whole book starts to fall apart.

Olivia is a tough character to connect with, and at times so inconsistent she’ll make your head spin. She wants to claw her way to the rich and privileged position her friends are in, yet she’s constantly criticising them for their privilege. We never even understand why she wants this. She’ll lecture on the virtue of gender equality in the ordering of Starbucks drinks, but is ignorant enough to ask her Canadian classmate if there are journalism schools in Canada. From the prologue to the final lines, I wasn’t sure what made her tick. She was so back and forth I couldn’t get invested in her.

As an amateur sleuth, Olivia is also pretty bad. Writers of amateur sleuths need to create circumstances where readers accept that the protagonist shouldn’t call the cops or a lawyer. On this, Donne does a pretty decent job, but what makes an amateur sleuth great is a character that has unique skills or knowledge that allows them to see things the cops can’t. Olivia doesn’t have any of this. She is, of course, a student journalist, but she doesn’t just lack cool skills, she is frustratingly terrible at sleuthing. She misses most major clues, finds most of her leads through her sleuthing buddy or dumb luck, and her plans for catching a suspected killer lack the ingenuity I long for in a good amateur sleuth.

Olivia is also constantly having to be rescued, and she still misses the mark until people are confessing their misdeeds to her face. She is presented as a scrappy, highly intelligent character, but the evidence of her actions argues otherwise. Her spinning moral compass is also giving me motion sickness.

The closest The Ivies gets to a savvy, quick-under-fire girl detective is Olivia’s friend Avery. The queen bee herself is an unforgettable love-to-hate character, who I was rooting for even when I wanted to smack her. Also of note in the supporting cast is Olivia’s love interest and fellow teen sleuth, Ethan, the Canadian kid who’s really nice. He’s another student journalist with a desire to crack the case and questionable motivations. Plus, he’s Canadian, and have we mentioned he’s Canadian and therefore nice? His first few scenes will make every Canadian reader roll their eyes and want to send Rick Mercer to Claflin Academy for a reboot of Talking to Americans, but despite this shaky introduction, Ethan turns into a complex and interesting character.

Donne also mentions the COVID-19 pandemic in The Ivies as a past event, despite the fact that the main action takes place in December 2020. Acknowledging a major global event like this is a tough call to make, however on this, I think this was the wrong call. Mentioning that Olivia and her classmates were doing online school for the pandemic as a distant thing from last year when they’re now at the end of 2020 only dated the author’s knowledge and drew attention to all the facts that are now so obviously wrong. No one wears a mask, people are going out to eat, travelling, throwing giant parties, and no one is social distancing. There is no way Donne could have known what December would look like when she wrote this, but these inaccuracies will only make the book look sloppy as it ages and instead the timeline should be ambiguous. Acknowledging world events is great, but when it comes to the pandemic, it’s just smarter to wait until it’s in our rear-view mirror and authors don’t have to take a shot in the dark about what teens’ experiences will look like post-COVID.

Alexa Donne is a talented writer who builds a compelling world at Claflin Academy with an intriguing mystery that is, sadly, told by a frustrating main character. Combined with some execution issues, The Ivies is bingeable but too disorganised to merit a reread.

“The Ivies” by Alexa Donne is a prep school murder mystery. The Ivies, a group of five girls who run the school, are reminiscent of the Plastics in the movie “Mean Girls”, except these girls are out for blood, literally, in order to ensure their spots in the Ivy League universities. Olivia, the main character, is one of the Ivies because she participates with their schemes,but she never quite fits in since she attends the private academy of Claflin on scholarship. These girls will do anything to be accepted into Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc. Then one of the girls is murdered, and Olivia must clear her name all the while unearthing the malicious schemes and bribes that her friends created.

Donne highlights the extreme competition that exists to enter the top universities. One can see how wealth equates to power and how our society allows for college admission scandals to exist. This is an entertaining and suspenseful read. Readers who enjoyed “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” will also enjoy this book. I will definitely recommend it to my high school students.

The Ivies is a WILD ride. I was intrigued from the start and once I started it I couldn't put it down.

The mystery was filled with twists and turns. Based on the new information presented by theories of who the killer was shifted back and forth multiple times, usually circling back to the same people. I love mysteries like that. It made me think and try to piece together all of the information like I was trying to solve it right alongside the characters. I also loved the slew of unreliable characters, even the main character Olivia.

I would definitely recommend this to fans of Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Lairs, Truly Devious, and dark academia.

The main reason why I picked this one up was because I heard it was for fans of Karen M. McManus and I love her work so I thought Id pick this one up. I don't normally like boarding school books but this one was pretty decent. The mysteries that were throughout the book kind of added a fun element and I found myself trying to solve them alongside with the main character but at the same time I found the main character to be a little bit two dimensional so it took me out of the story a bit. Overall, a decent read but not a new favourite for me.

The Ivies are a group of mean girls at a wealthy prep school in the northeast who engage in acts of sabotage to secure coveted spots at Ivy League schools. Olivia is both on the inside and on the outside. She's an Ivy technically, but she's on a scholarship and is frequently left out of the innermost dealings of the wealthier girls. But a betrayal among the group results in murder, and Olivia is the only one who seems interested in getting to the bottom of it. Plus she has a better shot than the police at infiltrating the Ivies' deepest secrets. Can she manage it without divulging her own?

THE IVIES is a fun murder mystery that will surely entertain fans of Pretty Little Liars and Gossip Girl. It's scandalous, murdery, and escapist, while also tackling issues that affect high school students in a very real way. It takes the pressure of college admissions and dials it up to 11. It also touches lightly on class and race in a soft critique of how they affect opportunities for young people.

While the author clearly knows a lot about college admissions, this story keeps mostly to the superficial and has some uneven pacing. However, it delivers exactly what it promises: a scandalous, murderous romp. It's a fun and frothy read!

This book was full of Twists. Alexa's change in character made me continue to second guess my own predictions and theories. Definitely a good read - worth checking out!

Twisty, complex, a little creepy, and a whole lot of fun. This book is for anyone who likes dark academia, cut throat boarding school mean girls, and a satisfying mystery. Highly recommend!

“Harvard is great, but please don’t murder anyone for it.”
— 𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝐼𝓋𝒾𝑒𝓈, Alexa Donne

We all know college admissions can be cutthroat, but Olivia Winters never expected anyone to actually die.

See, Olivia is one of the Ivies, a group of girls at an elite Massachusetts boarding school. They do whatever they can to assure their admissions to the Ivy League college of their choice, which means sabotaging other students. But when Olivia’s friend and roommate Emma is found murdered the day after Early Decision announcements are made, Olivia has to find out what happened to her. The deeper she goes into the investigation, the more she realizes she didn’t know her friends at all, and the killer could very well be someone close to her. She has to be careful, or she could be next.

I’m pretty neutral in my feelings for this one. The mystery element was fun, the setting creepy but believable. Olivia as a character is shady, but not as shady as her friends, so it makes living inside her head for the entire book relatively easy. I wasn’t blown away by this, though. It was exceptionally predictable at times, and I didn’t really identify with any of the characters. To be quite honest, it gives me some serious 𝒜 𝒢𝑜𝑜𝒹 𝒢𝒾𝓇𝓁’𝓈 𝒢𝓊𝒾𝒹𝑒 𝓉𝑜 𝑀𝓊𝓇𝒹𝑒𝓇 vibes, which made it feel more like a rip-off than its own story. But if you’re into that sort of thing, check this one out when it hits shelves May 25th.

𝕋𝕙𝕒𝕟𝕜 𝕪𝕠𝕦 𝕥𝕠 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕡𝕦𝕓𝕝𝕚𝕤𝕙𝕖𝕣, 𝕒𝕦𝕥𝕙𝕠𝕣, 𝕒𝕟𝕕 ℕ𝕖𝕥𝕘𝕒𝕝𝕝𝕖𝕪 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔸ℝℂ 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕠𝕡𝕡𝕠𝕣𝕥𝕦𝕟𝕚𝕥𝕪 𝕥𝕠 𝕣𝕖𝕧𝕚𝕖𝕨 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤 𝕓𝕠𝕠𝕜 𝕓𝕖𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕖 𝕡𝕦𝕓𝕝𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟!

I am between 3.5 to 4 stars, so per my review policy, I will bump up to 4 stars. I will also disclose that I consider the author to be an online friend, so take that as you will. That being said... this was super fun! It took me a little bit to get into the flow, but once I did, I really enjoyed the "chatty" quality of the writing and I ended up getting swept up in the drama & intrigue of an elite boarding school filled with entitled students who will do WHATEVER it takes to get into their dream school. I think part of the fun of this plot is that it is extreme but... not that extreme. All in all, I think this is a really enjoyable version of a YA thriller with a solid ending and a nice tone of age-appropriate cynicism/snark

I have read all of Alexa Donne's books and I love her writing style. For her first book outside of the sci-fi genre, I was a little concerned I wouldn't like it because thriller isn't a genre I read in regularly.

This author's strengths hooked me into a genre I tend to find tedious and paranoid and made it a truly enjoyable experience. A murder set in an exclusive school during one of the most stressful times of the year with tested friendships and relationships.

The questions of what will we do to get ahead and just how well do we know our friends are prominent throughout the book.

Each character was solidly written and had a distinct enough voice that I could easily tell them apart. The descriptions were great, very vivid. All in all a fairly decent book.

A four star read, thank you to NEtgalley and the publisher for access to this title.

This book is all about how far 5 girls will go to get into an Ivy League college. They each have a grocery list of bad things they’ve done to sabotage the competition, when one of them dies, it’s impossible to know who would commit murder just to go to a college?
Will keep you guessing until the end.
This book has it all: friendship, betrayal, rich, poor, love that turns to hate.

This book was not what I was expecting!! I expected a predictable Gossip Girl kinda story, but what I got was so much more. The Ivies are a group of girls who go to an elite boarding school. They are all slated to attend one of the Ivy League Universities, and they are willing to do anything to make this happen. Steal. Catfish. Lie. Hack. Murder?

Olivia is in scholarship, but has been taken in by The Ivies. When one of the Ivies is found murdered, Olivia is determined to figure out who did it. Can she do it without taking her “friends” down, or will she be also be a victim?

I loved how just when you think you have everything figured out, another twist is thrown in. I wasn’t a fan of all the language used. I felt it could have been majorly toned down.

Gossip Girl meets Veronica Mars with a dash of Private, THE IVIES starts with a group of friends competing for spots in their dream Ivy League schools, and ends with a twist-filled murder plot. I enjoyed the characterization and murder investigation itself, but it seemed like most of the interesting parts happened off page - the ruthless lengths the girls went to in order to secure their legacies. In a way, this book read like the fourth book in a series rather than a standalone, and while the action and plot was all self-contained, I kept wanting to know more about what happened before the story got started. Instead, we get the impact of all the things they did, but no build up of how it happened. It's a narrative choice for sure, and the book is still a fun read.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House Childen's for sending me this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. A group of five prep school girls will do anything to get into their school of their dreams. Each one of them is gunning for a specific Ivy League school; Harvard, Princeton, UPenn, Columbia, and Yale. After one of them turns up dead, Olivia is determined to get to the bottom of it, unearthing secrets that should've stayed buried.

I don't normally do thrillers, but this book was so enjoyable and I loved every second of it, the plot twists were well developed and I never would've expected them.

THE IVIES is a creepy thriller about a group of girls who would do almost anything to gain admittance to the Ivy League...maybe even kill one of their own. The plot is full of twists and turns and had me constantly guessing the answers - to which I was wrong every single time (in a good way). Read it if you enjoy A GOOD GIRL'S GUIDE TO MURDER or TRULY DEVIOUS.

I’ve been getting a little more into thrillers lately, so I was delighted to receive an ARC of The Ivies from Turn the Page Tours in exchange for review.

There is so much to love about the concept. The Ivies are a group of prep school friends notorious for their sabotage of classmates in the name of college admissions. Enter Olivia, a scholarship student that the Ivies have adopted. When Olivia’s roommate and prominent Ivy member Emma is murdered, Olivia sets out to prove she and her fellow Ivies aren’t as guilty as they seem. It feels very much like Gossip Girl meets Pretty Little Liars, and I am a big fan of both of those shows, so I knew from a few chapters in that I would love this.

I enjoyed the idea that someone might start a friend group purely for academic sabotage. A little larger than life, I liked how it offered a fantastical vehicle by which to explore the very real pressure of college admissions. Olivia is a very voicey character, and for that reason, it was a pleasure to be inside her head. I laughed out loud at several points of her snarky commentary.

The main strength of this novel is its plot. It sucked me in from beginning to end in a labyrinth of secrets and clues unearthed at a rapid pace. I intended to chip away at this one slowly, but ended up finishing the book in a number of days. All of the plot twists made perfect sense in the context of the story, so nothing felt like it came out of nowhere. (That said, perhaps their were a few too many clues dropped, since I am terrible at guessing twists and did manage to call a few ahead of time. Do with that what you will.) Additionally, when the killer was finally revealed, I liked what his/her/their monologue offered as a commentary on society in its current state.

The main reason why I gave this 4 and not 5 stars was that I felt the character development was lacking. Olivia begins the story as an outsider longing to fit in, but feeling like the world of the wealthy will never open its doors to her no matter how hard she tries. She joins the Ivies because she recognizes in some sense that she has to be willing to scrap her way to the top, since people will not hand her things. This results in some bitterness on her part. However, after following a novel’s worth of secrets and realizing just how insidious the schemes of the rich can be, she ends the story in much the same place. I didn’t feel like the events of the story particularly affected her in any way. She didn’t conclude that excessive wealth leads to excessive selfishness and corruption, but on the other hand, she also didn’t conclude that there was more to the people inhabiting the world of the wealthy than the label of selfishness with which she views them all. She sees herself as more justifiable than the Ivies in her actions, even though she shares their motivations and takes part in her own schemes. This could have provided an opportunity for Olivia to realize that, despite their class distinctions, she is, in many ways, the same as the people she paints as immoral, or on the other hand, to decide what truly sets her apart from them and what kind of person she will be as a result. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded which direction Donne took with it, so long as Olivia learned something from the events. But instead Olivia remains unaffected. She ends the novel still feeling like an outsider with luxury as her ultimate aspiration. (In a similar vein, another thing I struggled with was that Olivia complains frequently about being poor, when in reality she is solidly middle class and just lacks the excess luxury of the 1%. In that sense, she is guilty of the same navel-gazing as her wealthy friends, and yet she is never self-aware enough to see it.)

Overall, I enjoyed this book immensely. As I said, the plot was absolutely riveting. This is a book that demands to be devoured, and I would highly recommend it to lovers of YA thriller!

P.S. For those of you who’ve read it, “I’m a feminist, you know” had me cackling. 😂

2.5 Stars. A girl who goes to an elite, hyper-competitive, East-coast boarding school investigates the murder of her classmate.

If you like ABC Family and the CW, then this may be a good fit for you.

I'll start with what worked for me. The story was fast-paced and gripping, which I liked. The subject matter was unique and compelling; I, personally, haven't seen any teen thrillers written about competitive college applications (and I've read quite a few thrillers), so it was refreshing to see a new face in a familiar genre. I liked that it revolved around spilling the deep, dark secrets of the "top clique" at the high school.

As a side note, I mentioned this above, but it is still important to be aware that this book clearly draws a lot of inspiration from television teen dramas. It even explicitly references the CW a couple times. This means that the teens are very dramatic and very "adult" (often to the point that it's an unrealistic portrayal of actual teenagers... but that's more a fault of the genre, rather than the author). So if that's not your cup of tea, maybe bring your plate to a different barbecue.

And now for the reasons why this book barely breaks 2 stars for me. First, it's predictable. There wasn't a single twist or reveal that surprised me. Most of the "big reveals" were easily observable from the very beginning. Although I will concede that I may have set the bar too high in that department (since I do read thrillers so often), it was still disappointing that there wasn't a single thing that caught me off-guard or made me second-guess myself.

Second, there was basically zero character development with the main character. Some of the side characters changed over time, which I appreciated, but the main character stayed the exact same. She started out the story as the "poor girl" outsider who is desperate to shed who she was and become like the glamorous Ivies, no matter the cost; she ended the story as.... the "poor girl" outsider who is still desperate to shed who she was and become like the glamorous Ivies, no matter the cost. She spends the whole book playing into the popular girls' twisted mind games and then, in the end, instead of learning from her experiences, she just keeps trying to play the game, even after the Ivies have taken their ball and gone home for the night.

The main character is so desperate and always tries to believe that the popular girls really are her friends and they really will accept her, even when it is abundantly clear to everyone else that they never will. It was so dissatisfying. She never gains any real friends, she never becomes anything more than a tag-along, wanna-be afterthought, but worst of all, she never just walks away. She couldn't just let go of the petty, high school drama and become something more than a ruthless, prep school mean girl. When given the chance to reflect and choose a different path, she actively decides not to. Instead, she becomes fake and spoiled and mean. It was so disappointing because it could have been so much better.

Interesting thriller about what lengths prep school teens will go to in order to make it in to their Ivy League. I wasn’t super surprised by several of the twists, but it kept me reading.

As an adult, I’m a little unsettled at how focused they were on the age of consent being 17 to make the career counselor not a pedophile. I would have liked to see that considered a little more seriously.

As a lesbian, I did like that Avery ended coming out as not straight because at first I was a bit confused when she dressed as Lexa otherwise for the party. That said, be prepared for another not straight character being homophobic to hide being outed. Overplayed.

Something to hand to fans of Pretty Little Liars.

This book was a ton of fun! I thoroughly enjoyed my time reading it as I did with Alexa Donne's other two novels. I've been reading a lot of thrillers lately so I got my hands on this book at the perfect time! There was a bunch of twists and turns throughout this book that kept me guessing all the way through. It is a murder mystery at a boarding school with a group of mean girls involved. These girls will do anything to get into an Ivy League school and their vibes reminded me a lot of the girls from Pretty Little Liars. These mean girls are obviously super unlikeable at first, but what was surprising was how I grew to respect one of them by the end of the novel. I never thought that would happen to be honest and it was quite satisfying. At first, I had no idea who the murderer was, but towards the end of the book I had a solid theory that ended up being right. Alexa added a few twists that made me question my theory a few times though so it still was a satisfying conclusion. I definitely recommend giving this book a try!

I've been looking forward to reading this since it was announced, and I was not disappointed!

The Ivies are a group of girls at an elite private school that will do anything to get into their dream colleges. They've been sabotaging their classmates with schemes that vary from petty to psychotic. The Ivies work together to help each other get into their dream colleges, but they will screw over anyone else to get what they want. When one of them ends up dead, everyone in the school becomes a suspect because of all the people they hurt over the years.

This is a whodunit mystery with several twists, some related to the murder and some being your garden variety friends-backstabbing-friends kind. The twists prevent this story from succumbing to sagging middle syndrome. And despite the dark subject matter, there is a lot of humor. The narrator, Olivia, is quite funny, and this book has as much drama and cattiness as you would expect from a book about high school students participating in the ultra competitive college admissions game.

Olivia has a little bit of a blind spot when it comes to her own heinous actions, which all conveniently take place before the book starts, and we don't actually see the horrible effects of her actions, we just hear about it. Maybe that's for the best, because I really liked Olivia, and I'm not sure I would have liked her if we'd been introduced to her earlier when she was still sabotaging people. The writer hits the sweet spot of giving us a very flawed protagonist who has done terrible things, but who is very likable and easy to root for.

This story feels like Mean Girls meets Pretty Little Liars. I loved it and didn't want it to end. While reading it, I thought to myself that I could definitely see this getting picked up by Netflix and becoming a series. Had it ended a little differently, I think there would be room for future stories with this cast. The ending/epilogue showcases the downside of too much ambition, which is essentially the heart of the story, and was also a reflection of the classism that exists throughout the whole novel. A part of me wanted to see more justice for all of the shady people in this book, but the author chose to go with a more realistic ending which still felt very satisfying to me.

Definitely check this out if you love a good murder mystery. And if you are a fan of Pretty Little Liars, this is a must read!

* thank you to NetGalley and Random House Children’s/Crown Publishing for the eARC for review.