This book started out strong for me, but I'm sorry to say that it didn't finish as well. I had high hopes for the way the author introduced the topic, but I felt like halfway through, it was forgot the type of a character the MC was supposed to be. Someone who has studies psychology, I may be a little more picky on these things than most. I just didn't enjoy the book as much as I hoped. Thank you so much for giving me a chance to read it!

It was a fun fast paced read, well written and with a good plot. Really enjoyed it..
I just reviewed Confessions of a Dangerous Girl by Dan Birk. #ConfessionsofaDangerousGirl #NetGalley
[NetGalley URL]

I loved it !

Till the end I didn't knew how it gonna end, I was thrilled to know what gonna happen !

Emma is a moraly grey character, a really complicated young girl, and I defenitly loved her.

This book is adventurous, funny, you HAVE to read it

I would recommend this book for fans of Jennifer Lynn Barnes' series The Naturals and The Fixer.

Emma has been training at an institute to become a deadly assassin, even though she's just a teenage girl. She now must go undercover at a high school with normal teenagers and gain the trust of a straight A student, Susie.

I’d like to thank Netgalley & William Rookwood for the ARC of this title! This was a super cute YA spy novel. It was easy to get lost in the story & you really started rooting for the main character Emma!

Rating: 4.5 stars
Spice: Very mild, intimacy is alluded to but in no detail. Safe for readers of all ages
Language: Clean, a couple of censored curse words

I really enjoyed this book it was fast paced and action packed. I read the book in one day. It was not as dark as it could have been seeing as the story is told by a psychopath. In fact I found quite a few parts of the story very humerous.

Emma is sent on her first solo mission as a way to make up for a previous mission that went haywire. This new mission horrifies emma, leave her "school" go back to the family that are scared of her and become friends with normal teenagers.

I appreciated Emma's character growth as she began to form friendships for the first time in her life. She learnt how to think about others even though it wasn't her natural inclination. Even as a psychopath she discovers she has some what of a conscience starting to question wether or not what shes been assigned to do is the right thing. Should she trust the people who have guided and accepted her for the past 10 years?

I really hope that this will be made into a series. The ending certainly left room for this option. If it is I will definitely come back and read the rest of the books.

Dan Birk’s CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS GIRL has an intriguing premise, but the actual story isn’t quite there. The prose, plot and major character development all fall short, and there are a few notable stereotypes embedded in the text that don’t land right. I suspect this book may have done well with audiences a few decades ago, but for modern readers, it misses so many marks.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC. All opinions my own.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to read this amazing book!

I finished this book like 5 minutes ago and it’ll probably take me a while to recover from it. It was so good that I can’t stop thinking about, and my brain is all foggy, lol.

I’ve always been extremely curious about mental health problems, especially ASPD, which is short for antisocial personality disorder. In other words, that’s a more ”neutral” word for sociopaths and psychopaths. When I saw the description of this book, I knew I had to read it!

Emma Garthright is a fascinating character. Even though she’s a diagnosed psychopath, she’s very likeable, and therefore, among many other people who have read Confessions of a Dangerous Girl, I couldn’t put this book down due to wanting to know even more about her.

Despite all her flaws and psychopathic tendencies, Emma proved that it’s actually possible to become a better person and to not act on your impulses. The character development in Confessions of a Dangerous Girl praiseworthy, and it’s one of the many reasons why I loved this book so much.

I also enjoyed the writing style being inside Emma’s head, although I normally tend to dislike that particular style. However, it worked perfectly in this book!

I did not finish this one, it was not for me, I couldn't relate to the characters, and just did not care for the story.

Confessions of a Dangerous Girl is an interesting premise. You have a psychopath who attempts to kill her younger brother and is institutionalized. Instead of receiving treatment to stop herself from killing, she's taught to kill in the best way possible. As a parent of teens and young adults, I don't know how I would handle this mental health diagnosis, but I would surely be afraid to have my murderous child return home for everyone's safety. And to warn her "No more killing" would be such a stressor that I don't think I could parent that child, but here we are. While Emma has the duel issue of portraying herself as a regular teen girl and carrying out her mission, she does it to the best of her ability. If she's a psychopath, she surely got the friendships right. I definitely called the twist early on, but the story concluded satisfactorily.
Thank you to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Maybe I’m just too old for this kind of story now. I used to eat this shit up growing up. Teen assassin/spy spent back into the real world to complete a mission? Gimme. But this one… just didn’t hit the mark unfortunately.
There are numerous reasons, so let’s start at the beginning.

Sixteen-year-old Emma Garthright is a psychopath. Diagnosed as a kid after trying to kill her younger brother, she’s sent to live in an institute for kids like her, where she grows up being taught all sorts of things, including how to kill. When she’s deemed ready, she’s sent on a mission to kill a highly important person, and to do so she must move back in with her family and make friends at her new school. Her mission derails right from the start and she has to figure out a way to bring it back on track, but when she uncovers what her old school is hiding from her, she finds herself at a crossroads.

I want to start off by saying that for a young teenager, this book would be perfectly fine. There weren’t any glaringly obvious issues that would take most readers out of the story. As a concept, it was executed well enough to be liked by fifteen/sixteen-year-old.

I am not a fifteen/sixteen-year-old.

Emma was an interesting character. It’s not every day you get to read a book about a teen psychopath who is also secretly a trained assassin. I don’t know much about psychopathy, so I can’t attest to how well she was written, but I did enjoy reading her point of view of things, especially when she could identify that the way she was acting wouldn’t do her any good and then therefore actively tried to fix that.

My main issues were with two things: one, the relationship between Emma, Susie and Maeve, and two: the writing.

Starting with number one. I’ll admit I may be misremembering, but whenever – or at least a good eighty percent of the time – whenever Emma was with Susie or Maeve, or both, they mostly talked about boys. Constant boys. And since this book is written by a man, that gave me the ick. This book most definitely does not pass the Bechdel test and that really quite annoyed me. There’d be moments where I’d assume they’re going to talk about how Susie is trying to make Emma a better person, and instead they’d talk about crushes and Braeden and it was just annoying, especially when there’d be chapters where there were multiple breaks but every part of that chapter was just Susie and Emma talking about boys. It gave me a great impression of just how much Birk knows about teenage girls – which is that he knows very little past our supposed obsession over all things boys. This bugged me, but it wasn’t too bad of a problem.

My second issue was with the writing. It was very simple, lacking a lot of depth to the point some scenes felt like there were missing the necessary detail needed for them to be entertaining. Maybe this was on purpose, to match with Emma being a diagnosed psychopath who doesn’t feel as much as others do, but even if it was the case, it was still boring in parts, which I don’t think was intended. The action scenes themselves were lacking, and the pace could have been better. The book was very slow – we didn’t get into Emma’s actual mission until past the fifty percent mark and at that point I just wanted to get to the end.

Overall, it was an okay book. I’m glad I read it because I satiated young me who used to eat up books like this, but I don’t think I’d read another one of his books unless he improves.

Thank you, NetGalley, for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

One of my favourites this year! I loved reading it!

Emma has spent most of her life in a boarding school, that is supposed to be for child psychopaths, but it's actually an undercover CIA training facility. They are supposed to help kids like Emma to become better people, but in reality, they are training them to be assassins.

Emma's latest mission takes her back home when she has to go undercover at a local high school and pose as a normal student. She needs to get into Model UN, so she will have access to her target. But something like that is much harder for Emma than anticipated. She never made real friends and her first attempt failed miserably.

To get into the club, she convinces the best student, to help her become a better person, while she will help her get a guy she likes.

Slowly but surely, Emma changes. She learns how to make actual friends and starts to do good, but the mission should always come first.

The story is told from Emma's POV, so you really get into the head, her reasoning for why she does what she does and why she reacts the way she does. The more you get to know her, the more it is evident that there is more to her than just psychology and there is a way she is not all bad. And soon you can't help but root for her.

My favourite moment was with her grandma, that put it all in such a nice perspective. :)

Highly recommend it, it's awesome! :)

I loved the aspect of seeing through the eyes of someone who isn’t in tune with their emotions. It was a great plot and I liked the few surprises that came about. I would love to read another installment and see what else Emma goes through!!

I thought this book was quite interesting and a fun book. At times I pictured Black Widow and the training she did. While I enjoyed the spy stuff, I really thought that the development of the main character was nice to see. The ending was cute (kinda predictable) but left it kinda open for a sequel, which I would read. I like how the main character wasn't too emotional, but also not a robot. I felt like the social dilemmas Emma goes through were relatable and didn't give off the "this would never happen is real life" vibes.

Emma Garthright was diagnosed as a psychopath and sent to school where she'd be trained as an assassin for the CIA. Emma's commentary was dry, funny, and deliciously overconfident. The twists and turns were enjoyable, and the big reveal was a lot of fun. The character's tendency to overexplain certain things brought down the pace a tad, but the action and humor will keep the pages turning. This will be a huge hit in book talks at school.

Thank you to William Rookwood and Netgalley for the e-arc; I really enjoyed this book. It took me on a journey and it was very much enjoyable.

The idea and premise of this book really interested me, but I guess it didn't really live up to expectation. Emma (MC) is a psychopath and being used as a spy/assasin to channel her personality and emotions for good. This, in theory, is super interesting and the book was really fast-paced and easy to read. However, it just didn't really delve that deeply into any characters and I didn't find myself warming to anyone really. Also, it very much didn't feel like the internal monologue of a psychopath and she did actually seem to care? Maybe it was too YA for me? If this was longer and delved a bit deeper then this idea could really work. Unfortunately, it just wasn't for me.

I had a lot of fun reading this one! It reminded me of the books I used to love as a teenager, like the Gallagher Girls series by Ally Carter.
I loved Emma, her friendship with Susie and Maeve and, most of all, her bond with her grandmother. The plot was engaging and the author managed to strike a good balance between the secret spy stuff and the teenage development aspects.
I thought the ending was a bit rushed, bu,t all in all, it was a very enjoyable read. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a fast paced, fun, YA.

Confessions of a Dangerous Girl is strong debut from Dan Birk. A quick read featuring teenage assassins.

I liked the concept: Emma is diagnosed as a “psychopath” and sent to a reform school that is actually a cover to train teen assassins. I really enjoyed that this story didn’t center around a romance.

I did find the writing to be a little repetitive and even though Emma did make some progress as a person, I didn’t really see enough of a difference until it seemed too late and I didn’t really like her. I wanted more spy plot and less school/friend plot.

Overall, a decent read, but left me wanting more.

This started off string and it read like a Gallagher Girl book, but about midway through it got extremely predictable. I still finished it, but I felt like the storyline was missing something, I just don’t know what.