#BlogTour ‘The Girls Are All So Nice Here’ by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

About the book…

Two former best friends return to their college reunion to find that they’re being circled by someone who wants revenge for what they did ten years before—and will stop at nothing to get it—in this shocking psychological thriller about ambition, toxic friendship, and deadly desire.

The Girls Are All So Nice Here opens when Ambrosia Wellington receives an invitation to her ten-year college reunion. Only, slipped in with all the expected information about lodging and the weekend’s schedule is an anonymous letter that says: “It’s time to talk about what we did.” Instantly, Ambrosia realizes that the secrets of her past—and the people she thought she’d left there—aren’t as buried as she’d thought. Amb can’t stop fixating on what she did—and who she did it with. Larger-than-life Sloane Sullivan (“Sully”), who could make anyone do anything. The game they played to get a boy who belonged to someone else, and the girl, Amb’s angelic roommate, who paid the price.

Amb had thought that she and Sully had gotten away with what they did their first semester at Wesleyan. But as Amb receives increasingly menacing messages during the reunion, it becomes clear that she’s being circled by someone who wants more than just the truth. Amb discovers that her own memories don’t tell the whole story, and that her actions and friendship with Sully had even more disturbing consequences than she ever imagined.

Told in alternating timelines between the 10 year college reunion, and Ambrosia’s turbulent first months of college, ‘The Girls Are All So Nice Here’ is a gripping rollercoaster ride of a novel that examines the dark complexities of female friendship and the brutal lengths girls can go to take what they think they are owed

Thanks so much to HQ Stories for the e-arc of this wonderful debut adult novel, which is published in e-book and hardcover on March 9th.

These girls are absolutely far from nice, they are cannibals who eat parts of themselves in the mistaken belief that they are destroying each other, not realising that they are devouring their own mirror image. In a bid to emerge, butterfly like, into college life from their high school caterpillar existence, it is the one girl, Flora, who remains true to herself throughout all the trauma visited on her at Wesleyan .

Amb tells the story in ‘now’ and ‘ then’ chapters, she has been running from the events of the first year she spent away from home and now, the ten year anniversary is here to make her face up to the truly terrible things that she was instrumental in creating.

Much like a cuckoo, she takes and steals what she perceives are the best bits of the other girls around her, becoming engaged in a toxic, mutually enabling relationship with bad girl Sloane Sullivan, known as Sully, who wrecks lives without consequence.

Her freedom to do exactly as she wishes with complete lack of regard to the fallout immediately attracts Amb to her, who has viewed college as a a place where she can be the person she has always felt she could be. Instead, under Sully’s malign influence, she descends into this caricature of the person she thinks she is. The freedom she perceives from throwing off the shackles of trying to fit in is an illusion based on exchanging sexual favours for feeling needed, rebellion against conformity and that being ‘nice’ will get her precisely nowhere.

In reality, every time she returns to her dorm room and sees Flora, her too good to be true roommate, she is reminded of her inadequacies-totally creating a self fulfilling prophecy-and descends further into chaos until she turns on Flora with the most wicked betrayal of them all.

It is untrue to say that there are no nice girls here, there are, but Amb dpes not recognise them as such, she sees opportunities to steal and borrow other people’s personalities and try them on for size, completely missing the point that this re-invention marks her out as nothing but a fake. However, in the contrasting narratives of Flora and her sister Poppy, attending Wesleyan 14 years later, there appear to have been very few lessons learnt.

What this raises is the issue of conformity, rebellion and the values we place on friendship born from necessity or convenience. Is it the fault of a patriarchal society that turns girls on each other by devaluing the very parts of their personality which makes them ‘nice’? Is being nice really such a crime? And why do we continue to lie to ourselves about the traits we see in others, instead of valuing and uplifting them, what we see in others and we lack in ourselves, we seek to destroy?

The males seem to get away with it, they are passive recipients of the sexual favours doled out by drunken girls eager to please, whilst upholding this as a ‘traditional’ rite of passage. Amb’s husband is not seen by her as a real person, more a source of irritation and you wonder why on earth she married him, she clearly finds his existence barely tolerable, but again, it is the expected norm and part of her re-invention as ‘nice’. So when she and Aiden attend the school reunion, not only does she have to face up to the person she was, she has to become self aware of the person she still is,as soon as Sully re-appears, Amb falls back into her sidekick role very quickly.

The cumulative effect of seemingly victimless crimes are brought front and center, as Amb’s husband Aidan becomes aware at the reunion that the woman he married is not someone he ever really knew. And then , there is the small matter of the handwritten invitation cards that brought both Amb and Sully back to the scene of the crime…but who wrote them and what plans do they have in store for them? Have Amb and Sully changed, have they grownup and will they take accountability for the wrongs that they have wreaked upon their fellow classmates?

This is a brilliant debut novel, deliciously dark and menacing with undertones of grief and redemption which I think will have one hell of a lot of buzz around it, and have readers discussing the events portrayed in it for quite some time. It is a dark academia novel which will have you thinking about how you were as a teen, the pressures on you to conform when the structures around you are removed after leaving home, and how you make yourself accountable for your actions. There is a reason why karma is often framed as being female.

About the author…

Laurie Elizabeth Flynn is a former model who lives in London, Ontario with her husband and their three children. She is the author of three young adult novels: ‘Firsts’, ‘Last Girl Lied To’ and ‘All Eyes On Her’, under the name L.E. Flynn.

Her debut adult fiction novel, The Girls Are All So Nice Here, will be released in 2021. It has sold in eleven territories worldwide and has been optioned for TV by AMC.

Links-http://www.laurieelizabethflynn.com/

Twitter @lauriellizabeth @HQStories