Sisters Stella & Ellie Steckler are cross-country runners, both hoping to be able to attend the university of their dreams via scholarship. The older sister, Stella, was offered a scholarship to Georgetown but this was quickly revoked when she was blamed for being behind a physical injury which happened to another girl at one of the running meets. Everyone views Stella as 'too much' because she is focused & dedicated to her running, but when new girl & fellow competitive runner, Mila Keene, transfers to their school & then goes missing, the sisters soon find themselves implicated in her disappearance.

I wasn't sure what to expect with this YA book, but I enjoyed reading it. The author neatly demonstrates the double standard for girls in the narrative: where on one hand we are told we can be anything/achieve anything we want, but in reality society punishes driven, ambitious girls. They are viewed with suspicion not admiration. I recently read a Twitter thread about the words written on clothing for boys as opposed to girls - the boys had active words such as 'achieve' whereas the girls clothing had 'Be kind', & even 'Be Humble' on one. I mean, WTAF?!

I found it slightly easier to empathise with Stella as Ellie is 'the other woman' in her relationship with a popular guy, & I couldn't wait for her to wake up & see that he was using her. Stella doesn't know how to communicate her feelings to others so she hides them & this means she struggles at making genuine connections with anyone, & she comes across as emotionless. Overall, it's a more complex read than it seems at first glance. 

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.