Review: All The Wicked Girls

All The Wicked Girls by Chris Whitaker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There was a time when the majority of the books I was reading fell into the thriller or mystery genre, yet that has changed the last year. I went through a bad patch with such books and found myself falling into other genres instead. Recently, I picked up some thriller books that worked to remind me how much I love the genre – thus, I decided to dive in with some of the books that had been sitting on my shelf for a while.

Chris Whitaker’s All The Wicked Girls was the first book I picked up when deciding I needed to return to the thriller genre on a more regular basis. All The Wicked Girls was a book I picked up by chance, yet there was a lot of curiosity about how the story would play out.

If I’m honest, my feelings towards All The Wicked Girls are rather mixed. On the one hand, I was addicted to the story and desperately turning the pages to see how everything played out; on the other hand, I never really came to love it in the way I had hoped and was reading to get my answers more than anything else. Hence the three-star rating: it was good enough to have me curious for more, but it was not enough to leave me obsessed with the story.

I think my big issue was with how many different perspectives we were watching. I really enjoyed how one chapter was told from Summer’s perspective and then the next chapter would give us the details of what was going on with everyone else. It was the chapters details with everyone else I found myself having trouble with. There were some characters and events I cared about more, whereas some I found to be an unnecessary annoyance. They all worked into the bigger story, in trying to throw out red herrings, yet some of the aspects pulled me away from the mystery I cared about and sucked me into the world of drama instead.

In some ways, I feel as though this book walked the line between thriller and drama. It fell more into the thriller genre, due to the criminal elements, yet I could easily have seen this being pulled the other way and becoming a drama had certain elements been focused on more. Had the focus been less on the drama, I’m sure I would have enjoyed this one even more than I did.

Overall, this was an addictive quick read even if it wasn’t all I had expected it to be.

View all my reviews