This book is a crazy ride. A local game that the town has been playing for generations. It seems so simple call upon the goddess and she shall test your faith in her by asking you to test your friendship. Yet sometimes local games aren’t always a game. When three people go missing in one night including Nora’s best friend Becca, she is faced with trying to figure out what really happened that night. Nora quickly learns that people maybe aren’t always what they seem, and that games maybe should not be taken lightly.
This is a very fact paced book filled with layer upon layer of deception and twists. Readers are going to be swept up in the mystery of what really happens when you place your life in the hands of a game based on a goddess.
Thank you so much to Flatiron Books and Netgalley for allowing me to read an advance copy of this book.

Enjoyed this overall... clearly a young adult book but still with a good deal of mystery and intrigue. I would recommend and I found the book engaging and entertaining.

The Bad Ones by Melissa Albert is gripping YA supernatural horror novel about four mysterious disappearances in a town haunted by a sinister magical history.
Ok, so talk about being creepy, unsettling and downright unputdownable….. that’s this story.
Melissa Albert weaves together an intricate and clever story with several twists and turns throughout.
The writing is captivating and she hooks you almost immediately.
I will be keeping an eye out for all her next titles because I loved this one.

Thank You NetGalley and Flatiron Books for your generosity and gifting me a copy of this amazing eARC!

I really enjoyed this for what it is: a YA horror book. I thought it was creepy, twisted, and I could not put it down. Can't recommend it highly enough

This was really a 3.5 for me, rounded up. The Bad Ones was a modestly entertaining, quick read, but for me it felt too familiar, like maybe it had been a Hulu series aimed at teens looking for an atmospheric Halloween time show to binge that I’d watched several years ago and which wasn’t quite good or original enough to stick in my memory. I won’t say that I knew exactly what was going to happen from early on, but I will say that nothing ever felt terribly shocking or surprising to me. The opening scene is a slumber party and that was very much the vibe - slumber party horror, with a story that maybe you haven’t heard verbatim before, but is extremely familiar.

That’s not terrible I guess. In some ways it made it a comforting little read.. but not one that I’m likely to remember in six months either. The characters never quite sing and the prose keeps reaching for artistic and literary similes and metaphors but frequently doesn’t really get there convincingly. It’s never bad, but it’s also never great either.

Heart pounding thriller that left me on the edge of my seat. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one. Definitely one of the best books this year.

I absolutely LOVED this book!! It was hard for me to put down.

This story is about two best friends, Becca and Nora, who have a toxic relationship but are always there for one another. Then one night, people in the town start mysteriously go missing, but they’re not all as innocent as they seem. I would liken this to a revenge story, with a woman righting the wrongs people have done in their lives. As the story goes on, we learn Nora is not as reliable a narrator as we’re initially set to believe, but we also start rooting for her and Becca.

The heart of this story is the imagery, with Albert’s writing making it feel like you could reach out and touch this world she built. I’m SO excited for this to hit shelves so everyone can enjoy this!!

In accordance with FTC guidelines, please note that this ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Fun, wicked, and as entertaining hell! I could not put this book it down!

A first for me by M. Albert but certainly not my last.

Thank you NetGalley and Flatiron Books for this arc in exchange for an honest review.

Pub date: 2.20.2024.

Goddess, goddess, count to five
In the morning, who’s alive?

In the course of a single winter’s night, four people vanish without a trace across a small town.

The protagonist, Nora, has a believable teenage personality, and the way that she handles the struggles presented throughout the book makes a lot of sense. Her complicated relationship with her best friend Becca is well written and serves as a good foundation for the central conflict of the story.

I haven't read other books by Melissa Albert, but this book definitely will be changing that.

Happy Tuesday, friends 🖤

The Bad Ones by Melissa Albert
@MelissaAlbert
Pub date: February 20, 2024

“𝘐𝘵’𝘴 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘯 𝘛𝘝 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘳 𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳. 𝘐𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺’𝘳𝘦 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘶𝘨𝘭𝘺.”

This is a story of friendship and sisterhood, a bond between girls and women, and the magical power and influence that bond can hold. But, of course, it’s so much more.

Nora and Becca have been best friends of the truest kind for years but over the last few months, they’ve been estranged. There’s a secret between them and there’s secret’s they keep from each other.

In the small town of Palmetto nothing exciting ever happens. That is until four people go missing in one night. One of the missing is Becca. As Nora delves into the disappearances, she finds a disturbing connection between the towns past that mimics hers with Becca. That of the Goddess Game, a local legend and game that is passed down, mother to daughter, sister to sister but how much power does the legend hold and does it have anything to do with the recent disappearances?

This is a hard one to fully review without giving too much away so I’m struggling a bit to put my feelings into words without spoiling anything! I’ll leave things here but I want to say that Melissa Albert is one of my favorite writers. Her skill in telling dark fairy tales that border reality is unparallel, in my opinion, and in The Bad Ones, she skims the line between fantasy and reality with finesse. I felt Nora’s anxiety, fear, confusion, her love for Becca and her horror at what is happening around her.

Sinister and eerie, insidious and chilling. This is the kind of story I live to read.

My thanks to @FlatIronBooks for this gifted copy!

💭Are you still friends or in contact with your childhood best friend?

Stay bookish, my friends 🖤

Creepy and unique but with a little discombobulation with the cast of characters. Not everyone seemed necessary and seemed to just be thrown in for confusion. All in all, enjoyed this read!

Thank you to NetGalley for sending me an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Bad Ones by Melissa Albert was a beautifully written, atmospheric fantasy horror that sucks the reader in and doesn’t let go.

As someone who normally doesn’t read this genre, I loved this book as an introduction. The author did an great job of creating complex and endearing characters with relationships that were layered and unexpected. The plot was sinister and twisty and just dark enough to turn my stomach into knots without leaving me with nightmares.

I gave this book four stars and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone, especially if they are new to the genre. The writing was lovely, the pacing exciting, and the characters tugged on my heartstrings. An overall excellent read.

I have loved every book by Melissa Albert I have read before and this book was just as captivating. The writing had me hooked from the very first chapter and the development of the bond between the two main characters was flawless. It gave you a bit of a thriller vibe mixed with a fairytale and had me at the edge of my seat until the end. There were plot twists I didn’t even see coming! If you are a Melissa Albert fan or simply a fan of page turners this is the book for you!

This book definitely had the vibes of the author - which, well, it should. It felt very similar to the Hazel Wood in some ways and it was mysterious and dark. I find that Albert's books often aren't straightforward and require a bit of thinking to understand the bigger plot of what is going on. I thought the elements reminded me of Slender Man, which I am not sure was intended!

Melissa Albert weaves an unique story in this supernatural horror that had me gripped from the very first page!

I’ve been a fan of Melissa’s ever since I read The Hazelwood years ago! She has a beautifully unique form of storytelling that transports you into her immerive worlds!

I was immersed from start to finish reading The Bad Ones, eating up ever single sentence and paragraph and soon finding that I had devoured it in a single sitting.

I highly recommend this one, especially for those who are in a spooky mood!

*A big thank you to Flatiron Books, NetGalley and Melissa Albert for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review! It is much appreciated!

The bad ones was way better than I thought it would be! I'm so glad I was able to read this book for an honest review. The authors writing style draws you in from the first page to the last

In one night, four seemingly unconnected people go missing. Nora's best friend, Becca, is one of them. The town worries that something bad has happened to them, but as she follow's the clues Becca has left her, Nora suspects her struggling best friend wasn't a victim of the disappearances...but rather the reason for them.

Thank you netgalley for this arc!

Wowza! This is so much darker than I anticipated, my dark little heart loved it. I can’t even really say much without spoiling but the aesthetic is everything, and that cover…..yes. Times 10

I don't think I've experienced such whiplash of highs and lows in one book in a long time. I'm in the vast minority in this, judging from the other reviews thus far, but I loved the first ~85% of the book and inhaled it down in the course of one day. But some of the more substantial twists just completely took the wind out of my sails, as it were, with the overall ideological implications behind them (in terms of anger, violence, vengeance, etc.). I won't say more so as to avoid spoilers, but wow, yes, this book turned out to not be for me at all.

The prologue of this book packs a punch! I was immediately captivated by Melissa Albert’s rich imagery and eerie suspense. However, I felt the pacing slowed almost to a stop during the initial chapters of this contemporary YA genre-bending horror/mystery.

Patience does pay off for readers who stick it out. The rich world-building, character development, and intricate plot take off in the later chapters. And once things started to ramp up, I could not put this down!