A review by alexabookish
The Agathas by Liz Lawson, Kathleen Glasgow
2.0
uhhhhhh. first, let me just say i was so excited for this book. i just KNEW i was going to love it. well i thought i would. so this book is comped to a good girl’s guide to murder, and let me just say: i strongly disagree. agggtm is perfect in every way. this was not a similar reading experience for me. the main problem i had was: i predicted the ending about fifty pages into this, give it take a couple of pages ofc. it literally might’ve even been before that, i just know it was around that area. FIFTY. PAGES. i’m talking perpetrator AND motive. EVERYTHING. the reader is basically hit on the head with the amount of foreshadowing. i mean to write a good mystery, you need to plant those seeds, but they can’t be so obvious, or used too much. or else it’s just too easy to predict! it was just sooo disappointing when everything turned out the way i predicted.
also i had a couple issues with the writing. i’m assuming that since this is coauthored, one author wrote each pov. and one of the pov’s writing was just not working for me. they overused italics (for the purpose of emphasizing) to the point that it would genuinely annoy me every time i came across another, and it would just completely take me out of the story. i literally ended up switching to the audiobook in hopes that not seeing them would help me enjoy the book more. i counted TEN times they were used on one page. it was just so excessive. also, i really think authors who are writing a realistic high school environment need to figure out how teenagers actually talk to each other. because there were a couple interactions that made me literally cringe because it was so obvious it was written by an adult tying to sound like a teenager. example: *said dramatically* “spoiler alert iris: if anyone [redacted bc spoilers]. you’re nobody … i’ll see you around, loser.” (loser was in italics for emphasis) and that example even includes a trusty italic word. and another example, yelled from a random passerby in the hallway to a crying girl: “freak. go cry in the bathroom.” i’m sorry, what? so random and so unnecessarily dramatic and unrealistic. people did not act like this my entire four years of high school lmao.and that was only a couple years ago, i don’t think it’s changed that much.
i think all of this just really really bothered/annoyed me because i saw a lot of people love and hype this up during early reviews and it was just suuuuch a letdown for me. i really wanted to love it. especially since agggtm is like one of the best books ever written, and this was compared to it (which again, hard disagree.)
also i had a couple issues with the writing. i’m assuming that since this is coauthored, one author wrote each pov. and one of the pov’s writing was just not working for me. they overused italics (for the purpose of emphasizing) to the point that it would genuinely annoy me every time i came across another, and it would just completely take me out of the story. i literally ended up switching to the audiobook in hopes that not seeing them would help me enjoy the book more. i counted TEN times they were used on one page. it was just so excessive. also, i really think authors who are writing a realistic high school environment need to figure out how teenagers actually talk to each other. because there were a couple interactions that made me literally cringe because it was so obvious it was written by an adult tying to sound like a teenager. example: *said dramatically* “spoiler alert iris: if anyone [redacted bc spoilers]. you’re nobody … i’ll see you around, loser.” (loser was in italics for emphasis) and that example even includes a trusty italic word. and another example, yelled from a random passerby in the hallway to a crying girl: “freak. go cry in the bathroom.” i’m sorry, what? so random and so unnecessarily dramatic and unrealistic. people did not act like this my entire four years of high school lmao.and that was only a couple years ago, i don’t think it’s changed that much.
i think all of this just really really bothered/annoyed me because i saw a lot of people love and hype this up during early reviews and it was just suuuuch a letdown for me. i really wanted to love it. especially since agggtm is like one of the best books ever written, and this was compared to it (which again, hard disagree.)