Pretty solid story, but I didn't LOVE it. I liked seeing how the sisters relationship grew and changed. I knew a bunch of people who were in crosscountry so that was pretty cool to read a story centered around a sport people don't really focus on. I think the very end was pretty satisfying. Wish Noah would've faced more consequences tho.

RAVEN???!

This was such an improvement from They Wish They Were Us, which aside from problematic books I read, was probably the worst book of 2021 for me. They’ll Never Catch Us was more enjoyable, the message on misogyny and sexism shone through, and the conclusion was much better. I also liked how Goodman didn’t sanitise how teenagers act. I did have three major criticisms, though. The first is that Ellie and Stella’s voices were incredibly similar. I sometimes had to check halfway through a chapter whose perspective I was reading from. The second is that the inciting incident didn’t happen until 37% through the book, so it was quite a slow start. The third is spoilery:

essentially, I wished the cold cases played a bigger part in the mystery. Because they were already technically solved before the book began, I would have liked a more definitive statement that X person definitely did do Y but the police screwed it up, rather than X person probably did Y but the police screwed it up.

Regardless of these criticisms, this book has shown me that They Wish They Were Us was probably a one-off bad book, so I’m interested in what Goodman writes next. 

I absolutely loved this book! I did not se the multiple twists coming, and I could not but the book down.

 I received an e-ARC of this novel from Penguin Teen and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Any and all thoughts and opinions are my own.

Stella and Ellie are the Steckler Sisters, known in their town of Edgewater for their skills in running, big enough to get enlisted by colleges. However, when a new girl Mila threatens to take that crown from these competing sisters, the town's past of being home to a serial killer comes back as Mila goes missing. How far will these sisters go to discover the truth, and how many secrets will be revealed?

This book infuriated me in the very worst ways. Stella was one of the worst main characters I have ever read. She hated everyone and everything, including her own sister. She's extremely selfish and only worries about herself when it comes to being the best there is in running. She treated Ellie like crap half the time. I'm an only child, and Stella is the reason why I am so glad I don't have a sibling. Ellie was okay. She did some pretty bad stuff as well, but not as bad as Stella. I felt like every character except Mila was bad. Mila was probably the one character I liked out of everyone in the cast. All of the supporting cast, aka the cross country team, were all douchebags. It also didn't help that this book vamped up every high school stereotype/drama scene to 11.

Which leads me to my next point: the pacing was awful. Keep in mind here, this book is less than 300 pages. Mila doesn't go missing until around 40% in, and then it's really 70% when the real serious stuff starts happening. The build up was absolutely atrocious. Instead of giving us quality time to get to know the characters and Mila and the world, we're thrown into flashback after flashbacks that were for the most part useless. I could only name one or two off the top of my head. They just re-emphasized stuff we already knew, and it bored me. As a result, the end of the novel was poorly rushed.

This story is advertised as a mystery. It barely felt like it. There were almost no clues and they were scattered so far apart that I pretty much forgot any connections I might have made beforehand. Pretty much all of the "investigation" is done in the last 20% and the true culprit was just thrust in your face like "Hey yeah this was here the whole time, cool." No, there was absolutely no build-up! And the connection for why the culprit did what they did was just so bland and generic and overused that I was this close to throwing my Kindle out of the room. I could have come up with a better result for the true culprit and it would have made more sense than what Jessica Goodman did. And do NOT get me started on the ending.

There were also some issues when it came to development. Stella and Ellie's mom is a recovering alcoholic, but the mom is barely even present that at the end when the mom just apologizes and it's an emotional family moment, I felt nothing behind it. Same with Mila's dad, who apparently is a recovering drug addict himself. He said he recovered that quickly, but it's not ever that simple. I thought his discussion on addiction was better than the mom, however.

They'll Never Catch Us falls under the "great idea, horrible execution" and irritated me in more ways than one. This "mystery" is more of a teen drama straight out of the CW that I won't be picking up any time soon.