DNF @ 19%. Wasn’t expecting all that on page murder and rape as the traumatic backstory for the main character. It’s implied in the summary but this way is too much for me. 

  DNF @ 25%. The writing is pretty good and I enjoyed the atmosphere being set up, but this seems to be going in a direction where the main question becomes "is the MC just a victim of her mental health issues and imagining shit?" and I'm just not here for that kind of story right now. I'm so, so tired of unreliable narrators in thrillers. 

  DNF @ 20% on audio. I'm unfortunately so bored by this so far, I'll try picking it up in the future to see if anything will have changed. 

I really liked this, especially for a YA contemporary novel! Obviously at 37 I'm nowhere near the YA target market, but I really enjoyed how much this was written for its age group. Hanna Alkaf has a gift for writing teens as they are, not as adults aged down (*coughLeighBardugocough*) and as a result I could simply enjoy the story for what it was.

I think pushing this book as "They Wish They Were Us meets The Queen’s Gambit" is a little bombastic. Yes, it's a murder mystery, but it's not a thriller. It feels more in the veins of a cozy mystery in its structure and character work. 

The best part about this is our main character Najwa. We follow her a year after the death of her best friend Trina at the same Scrabble tournament she's taking part in now. Yes, she's drawn into the mystery of how/why her friend died and trying to figure out who may have done it as someone has hacked Trina's Instagram account and is taunting everyone, but the story is really about Najwa's growth arc. 

She's obviously traumatized by the death of her best friend, and the way she deals with her grief and anxiety as she tries to step back into their old Scrabble world is lovely to read. It feels real and human and I wanted so badly for Najwa to keep working on dealing with her grief and to find a way to keep moving forward in life.

The rest of the story was pretty neat as well. We get to see the the world of the Scrabble tournament, we meet a host of various characters (all suspects at some point!), and this book is so unapologetically Malaysian! It takes place in Kuala Lumpur and Malaysian words and phrases are used with NO translation - you just have to figure it out from context and feel. I loved it.

This really was a delight to read and I hope it becomes a big hit among teens. They deserve a book like this!

 Honestly not sure what I thought of this by the end. 

I enjoyed the blend of genres that St. James works with, it made things feel interesting and fun for me and really brought me into the story pretty quickly. I also enjoyed that Shae was a female main character in a thriller with past trauma who DID NOT self-medicate in harmful ways!! Yay!!!

Unfortunately halfway through, as we began to branch into more past timelines and the whole story began to become clear, I rapidly lost interest. We essentially know everything by the 70% mark, everything after that felt boring and kind of like...so what? Not even Shae's moments of growth in the last parts of the book made me feel anything because they were overshadowed by the fact that, like most other thriller main characters, she had to make stupid decisions to lead to the climax. 

Other than that, I really did enjoy Shae as a main character. Beth was also interesting to follow, though I wasn't a fan of her past timeline narrative. I think that was probably my main issue here, I would have liked things a lot better if it was just Shae unraveling the mystery vs Beth telling her the story and then us ALSO getting to read about Beth's story in the past timeline narratives. It felt unnecessary.