This book took me on a twisty turney ride! I really liked how Luca felt like such a real person, she was messy and depressed, determined and bossy... and when she loves someone it's with everything she has. The mystery thriller part was great, I was really invested along with Luca as shes trying to figure out whats really going on Parris and if the curse is real, and how she might stop it from taking another victim.

Luca is convinced that the story of a curse in her hometown is real, and the reason behind the deaths of so many of the girls living there, including her best friend and now her older sister. She knows that the police aren't really going to be looking into the death, after all, they did the same thing when her friend Polly died. They just chalked it up to accidental drowning, even though Polly was afraid of the water and Never went in it.

When the police come to Luca with a story about her sister that she knows isn't true, she knows she has to investigate for herself. This leads her to uncover some deep secrets in her sister's friend group that someone will kill to keep private, and this puts Luca in danger as well.

Thankfully Luca isn't alone in her search, the new girl that has moved in next door is willing to help Luca out with her investigation, and as they grow closer, Luca doesn't feel quite so alone anymore.

But there are secrets and lies everywhere, and Luca won't stop until finds out the truth about what happened to her sister.

Short chapters, a compelling MC, an intense setting... still, I was only half heartedly interested in the plot.

For a quick read on a beach day another might enjoy this one. Not my cup of tea.

I thought I would like this as it said it was for readers that loved I Killed Zoe Spanos but I didn’t think it was like that at all. The plot didn’t really interest me and I grew bored. Not sure why I requested this.

If you’re looking for an atmospheric mystery read, one that transports you to a small island, wraps you up in its cursed waters, then look no further than Bad Things Happen Here. This is mystery at its best: twists and turns, questions abound and answers dripfed, and compulsively readable. Once you’ve picked this one up, you won’t want to put it down.

Plot aside, though, what drives this story is the characters. You wouldn’t get nearly the same effect without Luca as the main character, and definitely not without Rebecca Barrow’s skilled character work. I would hesitate to say that Luca is morally grey here, but she’s complex and messy and she doesn’t always do the right thing. She’s the sort of character you want to read so much more about.

What Bad Things Happen Here has done, then, is cemented Rebecca Barrow as an auto-read author. I loved This Is What It Feels Like, and I thought her story in the Fools in Love anthology was the best of them, so I was always highly anticipating Bad Things. And I’m happy to say it didn’t let me down.

I really really enjoyed this book. It hooked me from the very beginning and kept me hooked the entire time.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC.

This story starts out really well. Luca lives in a small beach town that is super affluent and she is still mourning the loss of her friend, Polly, years later. A new girl moves in to Polly's old house and the first night Luca hangs out with Naomi is at a popular kid's house party with Luca's own sister. Everyone is drinking and everyone is a mess.

But Luca's sister ends up murdered and part of what Luca identifies as the curse. Women have been getting killed since the 70s and no one knows why/who. This is what happened to Polly as well. Luca decides to solve the mystery because the police are useless. Naomi is down to help and they start talking to everyone who was there and close to Luca's sister.

Along the way she finds out some awful secrets. Her sister was sleeping with her best friend's boyfriend. She apparently used to do drugs and hid it from her. Others claim Luca fought with her sister that night but she can't remember (and I don't think they actually did).

Turns out her other best friend killed her because she wanted to stop the girl from doing drugs. She claims this was an accident that she pushed her and the sister fell and died but there were bruises all over her body that don't line up with that story. We never really get the truth about how/even maybe why she was murdered by her friend. But the police chief's son helped cover it up because he loved the girl and so when Madison realizes Luca overheard everything and knows the truth she kills the boy Isaac and claims that Isaac killed Luca's sister so she murdered him in self defense. Luca goes along with this story because she's afraid of Madison and because she thinks no one will believe her.

Then she runs away from the hospital, breaks up with Naomi previously because Naomi wasn't super honest with her, and then runs away from home. The ending is where this book loses its appeal/steam. It's absolutely ridiculous and unbelievable. Why would Luca run away and not tell her parents or warn her parents? She's basically putting the rest of her family in Madison's way, which is so selfish. Also her breakup with Naomi was mean and ridiculous too. Naomi deserved better she was super supportive of Luca and they did understand each other.

The writing had good pacing and most of the characters aren't super likable, which makes it an interesting read. Even Luca as the main character, she kind of sucks. She's mean to nearly everyone. She's not a very good detective and she's a mess. It also makes no sense that she doesn't try to find out who killed Polly. Throughout the entire book Polly is a main thread that's pushing her to do things and solve her own sister's murder. We needed the answer to Polly's death as a reader.

This book would have been better if we had a couple or family of serial killers and those are the people who killed all these women, going back to the 70s. That would have been interesting!

thank you so much for sending me an advanced copy of this in exchange for an honest review.

This book was definitely difficult to get through, the story itself seems interesting, a girl trying to find out who killed her best friend and older sister. But the story had so many subplots that the main purpose just got lost in the mix, like Naomi and Luca sleeping together which made no sense to me, and luca’s fixation on Naomi because she lives in her murdered best friends house, and you never really find out why jada who was supposedly Luca’s best friend at one point in time isn’t her friend anymore and is just super rude for no reason. And luca’s mental illness is talked about in the first two chapters and then never addressed and all of a sudden she’s super confident. This story just didn’t make sense. It needs to be edited more before it’s put out in the world.

I absolutely love this book. It’s a great thriller interesting plots and characters. I couldn’t wait to find out what was going to happen and was not disappointed.

I absolutely love this book. It’s a great thriller. I was incredibly interested in finding out what was going on and I loved hearing about the characters. I would highly recommend this book for any thriller fan.

I'm so gutted to give this a three star, but it just wasn't there for me.

Things I loved:
- Queer Black main-character
- Mental health representation
- Atmospheric

Things I didn't like
- Felt like an adult title retrofitted to be YA - especially some of the background plot lines
- Most of the side characters felt like caricatures

Overall, this will be a great summer beach read, but I wish it has been a little more.

Bad Things Happen Here is a story about the dark secrets lurking beneath the surface of seeming-glamorous world–and the girl who is determined to dig them up.

Seventeen-year-old Luca Laine Thomas lives on Parris, an island home to a community of rich elites. Parris is also an island that’s haunted by a history of dying girls. From house fires and drownings to back-alley assaults, girls keep dying on Parris in terrible, unsolved ways. Luca, who lost her Polly best friend three years ago in what was ruled an accidental drowning, thinks it’s not just a series of deadly coincidences, but a curse. Most people on Parris think of the curse as nothing more than a schoolyard story, content to ignore it in favor of a life of careless decadence on the island, but Luca believes otherwise. When Luca’s sister, Whitney, is found dead and her death is ruled a murder, Luca decides it’s time for her to investigate the curse herself.

Rebecca Barrows is one of my favorite YA contemporary authors (I adored her novel This Is What It Feels Like), so I was super excited to get an ARC of her upcoming thriller Bad Things Happen Here. While the genre is a big shift from her previous novels, her new novel has a similar character-focused, emotional feel. There’s certainly tension, murder, and mysteries, but Bad Things Happen Here is also a novel about grief. Three years after Polly’s death, Luca is still haunted by her memory–and even more so by the idea that she might begin to forget. When Luca’s sister is torn from her in an act of shocking, unsolved violence, she vows not to let Whitney become another forgotten name in a string of dead girls.

Luca as a main character was probably my favorite part of Bad Things Happen Here. She’s really easy to root for and the grief she feels for Polly and Whitney is very well-conveyed and nuanced. Luca has always felt more out-of-place on Parris: mixed-race in a very white community, queer but not very open about her sexuality, mentally ill in a world that’s not understanding about that. I also appreciated that Luca’s mental health was never used for shock value. She has depression and anxiety and deals with intrusive thoughts regarding self-harm, but the novel never uses her mental health as a twist or an attempt to make her an unreliable narrator like other thrillers I’ve read in the past. Instead, mental illness is something that Luca has learned to live with, a much more nuanced and realistic depiction of mental health than is sometimes found in the thriller genre.

There’s also a bit of romance as Luca falls for Naomi, a new girl on the island whose family moves into Polly’s old house. Naomi has also lost her best friend back on the mainland and the two find a shared understanding of grief, neither willing to buy into Parris’s beautiful veneer but still trying to find some comfort with each other. (Though, being a thriller, there’s also some further layers to that relationship.) Luca’s complicated relationship with her ex-friend Jada, who she was in with love but no longer talks to after Polly’s death, was another relationship I was really intrigued by and liked seeing teased out over the course of the novel.

There are also some good twists since this is a thriller, after all. Luca, unwilling to see Whitney’s death reduced to another tragic accident like Polly’s, takes the investigation of her sister’s murder into her own hands and begins trying to track down her sister’s killer. Parris is an insular, exclusive community of wealth and pleasure, but there are plenty of dark secrets being kept beneath the surface, even by people Luca has spent her entire life among. There were quite a few reveals that genuinely surprised me, though I won’t go into them here since the novel isn’t out yet. I also enjoyed the book’s atmosphere quite a bit, probably because I’m a sucker for stories about glamorous worlds with dark secrets and seaside settings, which Bad Things Happen Here delivers in spades.

Overall, I would recommend Bad Things Happen Here to readers with an interest in a character-driven thriller with a nuanced portrayal of grief and mental health.

Note: I received a free advance reader copy from Simon & Schuster in exchange for a review.

Representation: biracial Black/white, queer main character with depression and anxiety, sapphic biracial Filipino/white love interest, biracial Black/white side character

Content warnings (taken from the back of the book): themes of self-harm, suicidal ideation, and physical and sexual violence

Review available on my blog, The Reading Fairy on February 21st, 2022

CW/TW: Grief, Mention of Pregnancy, drug-use (off-page), smoking, ablest language, suicidal ideation, self-harm, physical & sexual violence, murder (on & off-page), blood, cheating (off-page), car accident (off-page)
Rep: Queer Black Fat Depression MC, Sapphic Biracial (white & Filipino) LI

Disclaimer: I received an eARC from the publicist via Netgalley, in exchange for my honest review. This does not affect my opinion whatsoever. Any quotes used may not match it's final copy. 


But they want me to be fixed, Luca thinks. They think I am broken. 

I am not broken.

I been on a thriller/mystery/horror book mood for a while, so I was really excited to get an email saying that Rebecca Marrow's new book, Bad Things Happen Here, had advanced copies out for a potential review- I had to say yes. And honestly, I am so glad I did. I do want to say this- we stan authors for using content warnings in books, and having marginalized characters- Queer Black MC in a thriller/mystery book.  

Bad Things Happen Here follows Luca, a queer Black teen, living on an island, Parris, with her sister and parents. She meets Naomi, the next-door neighbor who moved into Polly's old house, and become fastest friends. A party at Beth's friends, leaves Luca's sister, Whitney, not answering her phone calls until the cops shows up at her house and tell her that her sister's body has been found. Luca figures something was off and decides to investigates on who exactly killed her sister. 

Luca really grew on me! I wasn't so sure about her at first, but I really enjoyed her character later on. I love the fact that she is fat, and has depression with very clueless parents. I really related to her with her obsessive thoughts and the suicidal ideation she has. As someone who went through that so many times, it's not a fun place to be and seeing that in a book made me feel seen. Also, as someone who as very clueless parents when it comes to mental illness, they mean well but sometimes they don't do enough or don't think it's helpful. 

I love the fact that she was so many flaws, and it's shown on page from losing Jada, Polly and now her sister- it was so interesting to see on page, especially how grief is different from person to person. 

I really loved Luca and Whitney's relationship! Even though Whitney dies, it was still great to read. And their relationship is so realistic especially the misunderstanding, the 'helpfulness' and wanting to kill one another from time to time! 

The mystery about this book about this book was so mind-baffling, but so intriguing. I had such a hard time putting down this book, because I needed to know the answers. I really had to know who was actually Whitney's killer, especially since all the confessions of people made complete sense. And the lack of help from everyone just made this book intriguing. 

Also, when the killer was actually revealed- I was so shocked. I didn't see that happening whatsoever. I expected someone else, just never that one person, which means the author did a really good job with the shock value and making sure that because everyone is grey in this book, make it seem like there wasn't just one person, who would have had the motive. 

I also loved the fact that we don't get every answer solved like I was expecting. We get the answer to what happened to Whitney, but nothing that would concern anyone else, and all the things that was revealed throughout this book. 

I liked how Naomi and Luca's relationship was built up. Of course, it was probably seen as insta-love, but I loved the secrets they both hold, and how they help comfort each other even while they do/did questionable things. Also, it was really cool to see even though their relationship flourished and seemed really close, it also ended . That is really rare in fiction, but honestly I just want more of that shown instead of 'happy ever afters'.