AWW GUYS I really wanted to like this. I love campy ghost stories and mean girls. The back of this book cover says LET THEM EAT CAKE... AND DIE. This should have been a home run.

But I really struggled to finish it or care about it. The main character, Collete, and her friends Hannah and Pilar are like mean girls out of an afterschool special. Collette is secretly poor but pretending to be rich so her mean girl friends don't reject her, and she's very aware that she doesn't even like the mean girls and would rather be friends with the nonpopular girls, but like, social status?? Ughh.

Then the ghostly aspect of it made no sense. Like the idea of it was that Marie Antoinette was murder-haunting all the descendents of the families of the Order of the Key, which was a secret society that protected the queen or something. (Which, in an afterword, Alender says is 100% made up, so it's not even like Dan Brown territory where it's sort of based in truth, which I find more interesting.) But it wasn't really clear why just NOW the queen was starting to murder-haunt them.

OK I have to confess something, this book (maybe because it was an ARC, maybe they fixed this in the final version) was printed in 3 different fonts, and the like flashback font I guess was really hard to read, so I barely read any of those parts. So it's possible that this was better explained than I'm giving it credit for.

Anyway also Ghost Marie Antoinette was marking all her victims by putting ghostly smudges on their wrists that only other members of the society could see? What? That's not a thing that ghosts do.

Also it made very little sense that this whole thing took place over a 1 week trip to Paris. It couldn't have been a semester abroad? A summer, maybe? Like, so much shit happened in this week, I can't even.

Let's be real, guys... if I can't love a mean girl ghost murder book, who will??