I had a hard time with this book because Mary frustrated the hell out of me. I'm all for unlikable characters but she just didn't click with me. Dang's writing is propulsive, she covers a lot of interesting topics here and I liked the slow burn of the story so give this one a chance - it could have been me just being nit-picky. I'll definitely read whatever Dang writes next.

Thanks to William Morrow and NetGalley for a copy to review.

The debut novel by Catherine Dang was a slow build that started out with a good, grabbing narrative, but slowly dwindled for me. I struggled to connect with “Ivy League Mary,” as she was referred to in her small town of Liberty Lake. Once chubby and awkward, we now encounter Mary when she returns home a thinner, prettier version of herself after being kicked out of Cornell for some unknown reason. She now works in the local grocery store and seems to slog through life.

When Social Media star Olivia, once Mary’s bestfriend, goes missing, Mary inserts herself into uncovering the truth of Olivia’s disappearance.

Mary was a hard character to like – she was awful and an unreliable narrator – which made it challenging for me to really connect with the book. I found myself having to keep going back to remind myself of plot points.

I think I got the ending of the story, but the author didn’t provide much to make me sure I really got it, which was a little disappointing. I felt as if I was left with more questions than answers.

Unfortunately, this one wasn’t for me, but I look forward to seeing what Dang has coming next.

Thank you to Netgalley, Catherine Dang, and William Morrow and Custom House for an advanced copy of this book.

There were many great features of this book. It included a diverse set of characters, but also includes the casual racism of a Minnesota suburb. It featured a main character who was not immediately likeable, which I enjoy, and showed the variety of ways in which future expectations are turned upside down in an instant. I believe this was the author's way of helping the protagonist come to terms with her disappointment in herself. I appreciated this as well.

My small beef with the book is that none of the "adults" in Mary's life seemed to be able allow Mary the space to advocate for herself either at school or at home. She probably needed a great deal of self promotion to get into an Ivy League school. I feel like Mary's apathy was her anxiety and depression - super common in college and with high performing students. But authority figures around her didn't respect her enough to give her the benefit of the doubt in any situation. I couldn't tell if this was an admonishment of mean girls or Ivy League schools, or just authority in general.

Nice girls that aren’t so nice. Kicked out of school for fighting Ivy League Mary is back in her home town and working at the local grocery store. The same day she returns her old school friend has gone missing. Previously another young girl from town was missing but no one cared because she was from the wrong side of town and was a young mom. The story has plenty of twists and is a fast read.
Thanks you Netgalley for a copy in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts are my own.

Mary has been kicked out of Cornell for assaulting a freshman student. Sent home to a disappointed dad Mary is beyond embarrassed as she feels like a failure by coming back home to small town Minnesota.. Mary doesn’t want to see anyone from her past because she knows they will all ask why she’s home, and considering she was a “big deal” since she was accepted to an Ivy League school Mary doesn’t know how her being home can be explained. Mary’s dad however has other plans and tells Mary she has to get a job as soon as possible.
Olivia and Mary grew up as childhood friends, however by the time they got into high school they had gone on separate paths with Olivia being extremely popular and Mary falling into the background. Olivia has become a social media star since high school and goes missing almost as soon as Mary comes home. While Mary no longer has a connection to Olivia she is intrigued by her case and believes her disappearance is connect to the disappearance of DeMaria a local Black girl who hasn’t received any press. The police has basically pushed DeMaria’s case to the back burner and insists she’s a runaway ,but her mom feels different. Olivia’s case gets a lot of press as most missing white girls do, but Mary is on a mission to prove that Olivia and DeMaria’s cases are connected. Looking into these cases gives Mary a sense of purpose and helps her get her mind off Cornell. Mary has struggled with mental illness, and hopes working on these cases can take her mind off of her depression and mental breaks.
Mary starts working at the local grocery store and sees Dwayne her former classmate and football star, Dwayne is the Assistant Manager of the grocery store and Mary feels he’s hiding something as he was in college on a football scholarship, so why is he now home? Dwayne was connected to Olivia at one point, but what about DeMaria, she seemingly doesn’t have any connection to Dwayne so what is he hiding? When a body washes up near Dwayne’s apartment, Mary wonders if he knows more than he is alluding to. Mary is on a mission to figure these disappearances out no matter who the culprit is, but will she push through regardless of the toll these cases are taking on her mental health. .

Thank you Scene of the Crime, William Morrow and NetGalley for this ARC

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the chance to read this book. A bit slow paced, hard to like the protagonist at times but worth reading to the end.

For me this was a slow build and I had difficulty investing in the conclusion of the mystery. The main character was hard to connect with.

Oh poor Ivy League Mary, as she was called in her small town of Liberty Lake, for being the smart chubby kid to get accepted into Cornell. Mary once in Cornell thought she would transform herself and became thin and thought she was going to go places. However, she was kicked out of Cornell her senior year and nobody knows the real story what happened, but she is back in Liberty Lake working at the local grocery store.
Olivia, her once long ago BFF, now social media star has gone missing. Mary tries to help uncover answers, but she is reminded that nobody is nice in this town not even herself!

Oh poor Ivy League Mary, as she was called in her small town of Liberty Lake, for being the smart chubby kid to get accepted into Cornell. Mary once in Cornell thought she would transform herself and became thin and thought she was going to go places. However, she was kicked out of Cornell her senior year and nobody knows the real story what happened, but she is back in Liberty Lake working at the local grocery store.
Olivia, her once long ago BFF, now social media star has gone missing. Mary tries to help uncover answers, but she is reminded that nobody is nice in this town not even herself!

For me the first half was great, but by the end it became dismal. 3.5 stars

Mary was meant for more than Liberty Lake, Minnesota. She was smart, brilliant even, Ivy League Mary, the girl who was going to get out of Liberty Lake and never return. But even the new and improved Mary, the thin Mary with friends and party invitations and boyfriends, cannot escape her own actions and she finds herself expelled and sent home. Unable to bear her shame Mary makes excuses for her return and her sudden need for a job at the local grocery, a long-term project for a class, nothing really worth talking about. Olivia, a friend she last spoke to before high school, one of the mean girls who was suppose to stay stuck in Liberty Lake, escaped as an influencer, a model, goes missing. The community pulls together for her, worried for the gorgeous girl they lost. DeMaria Jackson went missing some months ago, the police disregarded her mother’s concerns willing to believe the worst of her. There has to be a connection between the disappearances, Mary needs there to be. She needs to do something worthwhile, to help, to assuage the guilt she should not feel. It’s what a nice girl like Ivy League Mary should do.

Catherine Dang’s Nice Girls is a character study more than a murder mystery. A digging into of a character who is tired and angry and who feels like she has failed entirely. It is dedicated to digging into the protagonist’s failings and anxieties and mistakes. And that is where I started having issues with it.

Mary is entirely exhausting as a protagonist, especially a first-person protagonist. She starts the book being kicked out of college for attacking a freshman who she was RA to. She lies to everyone she talks to about why she is home, constantly pokes at her feelings of being inadequate like a sore tooth, betrays the trust of multiple people, and just is generally miserable. She feels unrealistically willing to snoop around when it comes to people she has no reason not to trust, unreasonably willing to hide things that could be important, and just all too willing to knowingly bite off more than she can chew and then do nothing with the results. I very nearly quit reading Nice Girls more than once almost entirely because of Mary as a character, the second half finally caught me though.

And I admit, it did start to improve somewhere around the time the reader finds out what happened that got Mary expelled, context matters as it turns out. The second half finally does something with Mary’s situation and lets her really hit rock bottom and realize how badly she had messed up. There was suddenly weight to her actions where there had not been before, she made a mistake and real consequences were probable and time was running short. It was no longer a matter of her being frustrated with her life and poking at threads of a mystery she should not have been a part of. The time for vague guilt over a girl she had not spent time with in years or the girl she had never known was suddenly past. And the focus became fixing her mistakes and finding the real killer.

The second half or so of the book did not save the book by any means, far too much just sort of suddenly fell into place to allow Mary to figure everything out. That said, it was significantly better than the first half. I still disliked Mary and wanted to see her face the consequences of her actions, especially all the lying to people who believed she was going to help them, but I no longer found myself thinking that I might be satisfied if the killer won. It became a matter of following a mostly static character through the events around her changing. Mary was still a liar who jumped far to quickly to conclusions she would not entirely follow through on. She still hated herself and her situation and spent far too much time feeling sorry for herself for my taste. But she was finally doing something clever and actively forwarding the murder plot herself rather than feeling like she was just jumping to the next point because Dang needed her to.

It leaves me feeling like Dang wanted to write a book that explored the darker side of young adult life, the bits that parents worry about. Like she wanted to talk about the drugs and sex and danger and foolish choices that young people might make. A character study of someone who built herself around her academic dreams only to tear them apart herself in an impulsive moment of angry lashing out and all the horrible thoughts that would creep in in the aftermath. It also feels though that Dang was more than a bit over attached to Mary’s misery. Depression and anxiety hang like a full cloud over so many of Mary’s interactions with other characters and situations that it just winds up exhausting to read through, like an over emphasized memory of bad brain times. But after a certain point it just felt like forced darkness, the kind of thing meant to make a book grittier and more real, and fell flat. Nice Girls wanted to say something, but what that was feels more than a bit lost.

Nice Girls is almost certainly the perfect book for somebody, unfortunately that somebody is not me. In the end, despite the much improved second half, my score feels as inevitable as the end of the book, I give Nice Girls a two out of five. Based on this one I am not likely to read Catherine Dang again any time soon, maybe after she has a few more books under her belt.

Woooo this book was good! I was hooked from the beginning- “Ivy League Mary” is expelled from Cornell University for some kind of altercation. I needed to know more about that!

She heads to her hometown in Liberty Lake, Minnesota and while she’s home, a popular girl from her HS goes missing. Mary and Olivia were childhood friends who grew apart. The whole town can’t stop talking about the missing girl; but the truth is that this is Liberty Lake’s second missing girl. No one is talking about the missing black girl, DeMaria who also went missing. Mary decides these two must be related and takes it upon herself to figure out the connection.

I loved the use of the hometown; people from her past to help solve the crime. Her job at the local grocery store gets her in contact with many people she used to know. I thought the way the two girls’ cases were handled were fascinating and sadly too realistic. The black girl’s case is ignored where the white girl is fawned over and made to seem angelic. The town organizes searches and tip lines for Olivia, while doing nothing for DeMaria.

A lot of reviews I’ve read said that Mary is unlikable. She is! But I can still really enjoy a story when I don’t like a single person in the book. This book was gripping and I had to know what happened. I’m incredibly impressed with this debut novel by Catherine Dang.

4.5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Three young women from the same town are connected through mutual friends in this thriller about missing girls.

The book’s synopsis caught my eye and I requested this a while back. While the beginning started off very strong, things went downhill without ever coming back up. The MC was very unlikeable and her reckless actions were confusing and frustrating. I also didn’t like the preachiness of the social injustice bit. While absolutely accurate and important, it did not add to my reading experience. (Reading is my escape from reality.) By chapter 39, I lost all interest and DNF. Thank you for providing me with an arc to read and share my honest opinions.

Thank you to Book Club Girls for the early read. What an amazing read! So hard to put this book down wanted to see what happened next!

This book is an amazing debut novel. The imagery. The vulnerability - or lack of. The isolation. The intensity of emotion.
The spotlight on girls' and women's emotions was just intense and so incredibly well done. The buildup. The suppression. The need of all around girls and women to force our emotions, the negative image of our emotions. The impact on ourselves, our relationships, our world. The need for medication to remain as expected - docile, emotionless, trudging through the days without a need for attention.
And of course when those emotions just erupt.
And a man's need to punish girls and women. To categorize us as unworthy, dirty, worthless.
Mary finds herself expelled - and forced to return home with her dad, in shame.
While going through the motions of a thoughtless job, trying to be the person her dad needs her to be, a high school classmate goes missing. Another young woman had gone missing earlier in the year - DeMaria was classified as a runaway.
Determined to show the world DeMaria mattered, Olivia mattered, Mary becomes obsessed. She is forced to recognize the racism in her community, in the police.
Amazingly well done. I docked a star because the ending didn't work for me.

I really liked it but the end was a little disappointing. I dont want to spoil the ending, but I was left with more questions than answers. The killer was predictable and not really someone I cared about.

I found this to be an engaging read, but I did find myself growing frustrated with the protagonist at times. Overall I would recommend.

Nice Girls could be considered a suspenseful thriller, but I felt like most of the suspense was unnecessary. The main character, Mary, is kicked out of college. Why?? We don't find out until 67% through the book. You get some small snippets about an altercation early on, but no definite reason until that point. I don't think it added anything to the story to make the reader wait that long to find out. And honestly, it seemed completely unbelievable that she would even be kicked out because of it.
Because it took so long to find out why Mary was back home permanently, I found it hard to enjoy the book as a whole.
Mary took it upon herself to put her nose where it didn't belong too often and without cause in most instances. She decides to investigate the disappearances of two women who she doesn't even know. Sure, she went to school with one of the girls, but show any feelings toward her or even the other girl. I don't recall Mary showing compassion concerning the missing girls or not enough to warrant putting her own life at risk to find the kidnapper.
Thank you Netgalley and William Morrow for a free copy of this book in exchange for a free and unbiased review.

This was so engrossing that I finished it in one day!! Mary is a college student, very proud of how she has gotten into an ivy college when things just seem to unravel. Her father comes to pick her up but never really seems to be her support until things are really really out of control! This book has so many up and down feelings and Mary, just jumps in to try and make things better but does she?!#NETGALLEY#NICEGIRLS

Books about toxic female friendship are my catnip, but this book missed the mark for me. Ivy League Mary wasn't a hard character to root for and the twists were easy to see coming.