Suicide Notes From Beautiful Girls by Lynn Weingarten
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery, Revenge
Published by: Electric Monkey
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
Rating: ★★

I dubbed 2015 the year of the contemporary mystery thriller, and even though I read a lot last year I still had a few lined up that I still wanted to read. This title is so enticing I just had to know what happened! I was really engrossed upon first picking this book up, it had a wonderful Pretty Little Liars vibe with the main character, June having lost her ex-best friend after it’s announced in a school assembly that Delia killed herself. June doesn’t really believe Delia would do something like that, so she gets sucked up in a quest to find out what really happened to her best friend.

Of course from the nature of this book, even though June is the main protagonist, and for the most part she’s the narrator, this was always going to be Delia’s story. Through a series of flashbacks, told in third person, we learn about the past June and Delia shared before Delia’s ‘death’, which fills us in on how the become friends and how June was desperate to make a friend and Delia was the new girl in town and so mysterious and cool – a manic pixie dream girl, if you will.

We’re able to piece together June a lot more clearly when the perspective changes from Now And Then to Character A and Character B. The change in the narrative was definitely confusing, and I’m not sure it entirely worked. It sounds like the kind of thin my Creative Writing professors would say not to do, but still, it helps to push the plot forward, and is overall a necessary change.

One her quest June meets so many different people. Ash, who was Delia’s next best friend after June stopped talking to her. Jeremiah, Delia’s boyfriend who as a weird obsession with her, being a few examples. They all have something new to fill in the gaps of Delia’s life that June wasn’t a part of, all the while we discover more about what happened running up to and the night that Delia died that makes us suspicious of certain characters. I’d say that the novel lost it’s way half way through and changed into something completely different that I didn’t buy into. None of the characters were particularly liable. Delia was probably the worst and we never learn enough about the host of characters introduced later on in the plot to really care for them.

That’s the end of the non-spoiler section!

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I was always on edge about Ryan, his relationship with June just seemed completely fake to begin with. But still you could kind of see that it was a red-herring. He didn’t really deserve what happened to him, but he’s still a douche-bag, that’s a given. Being familiar with Pretty Little Liars I can’t say Ally Delia’s big reveal was surprising. She was exactly the kind of self-absorbed person that would fake her own death just to see what everyone would say about her after she was gone.

The relationship between June and Delia was so messed up, I think it really should have been less ambiguous. I guess the plural in the title kind of suggests that they faked June’s death and the five of them lived somewhere else with their new identities. June didn’t really love her mother anyway, so what was stopping her? Neither June or Delia seemed particularly happy, but apparently June’s the kind of girl who’s ready to be complicit in an actual murder that it doesn’t speak up about ow uncomfortable she is! Also, Delia’s crazy. Actually crazy. Why would you follow her to the ends of the earth? I do have hope for the character’s futures, but at the same time I never really cared about them.

V  E  R  D  I  C  T

Overall, I’m glad to have another mystery thriller under my belt, I’m just sad that the second half wasn’t as good as the first, because it had real potential to be something great. I really enjoyed the detective element to the story and probably should have stopped reading way before Delia got a perspective. It’s probably still a good read for fans of PLL and revenge stories.