Nice Girls
Book Feature - Nice Girls by Catherine Dang
HBL Note: Have I got a debut for you! A page-turning, heart-racing, thrill-ride of a debut. Described as Luckiest Girl Alive meets All the Missing Girls. Have you heard of the term “Minnesota Nice?” I had to Google it after reading the email that introduced me to this book. Apparently Minnesotans are stereotyped as passive-aggressive and unusually courteous. That mixed with society’s tendency to pit women against each other makes for a “deviously dark” read. Scroll down to read more about NICE GIRLS by Catherine Dang.
From the publisher:
What did you do?
Mary used to be such a nice girl. She was the resident whiz kid of Liberty Lake, Minnesota—the quiet, chubby teen with the scholarship to an Ivy League school. But three years later, “Ivy League Mary” is back—a thinner, cynical, restless failure who was kicked out of Cornell at the beginning of her senior year and won’t tell anyone why. Taking a job at the local grocery store, Mary tries to make sense of her life’s sharp downward spiral.
Then beautiful, magnetic Olivia Willand goes missing. A rising social media star, Olivia is admired by everyone in Liberty Lake—except Mary. Once Olivia’s best friend, Mary knows better than anyone that behind the Instagram persona hides a willful, manipulative girl with sharp edges. As the town obsesses over perfect, lovely Olivia, Mary wonders if her disappearance might be tied to another missing person: nineteen-year-old DeMaria Jackson, whose case has been widely dismissed as a runaway.
Who is the real Olivia Willand, and where did she go? What happened to DeMaria? As Mary pries at the cracks in the careful facades surrounding the two missing girls, old wounds will bleed fresh and force her to confront a horrible truth.
Maybe there are no nice girls, after all.