Hello everyone!
I am back with another book review, The Cheerleaders by Kara Thomas.
This book follows Monica, a teenaged girl, who is still dealing with the death of her sister, Jen, five years ago. After a murder and a car accident took her best friends and cheerleaders lives, Jen died by suicide. Monica never really believed that Jen would do such a thing and when she stumbles upon Jen's phone in Tom, her cop stepdad's desk drawer, she begins to question what really happened to the Sunnybrook cheerleaders five years ago.
The book definitely had a lot going on in it, but it never felt too busy or over the top. There was a bit of high school drama, but nothing major; most of the book focused on finding out what happened to the girls. I didn't really have any theories to go off of, Thomas was pretty stringent with any clues that would give away the ending, although, now that I know how things turned out, there were definitely some big warning signs.
The story is told from both Monica's first-person perspective and Jen's third-person perspective from five years before. I thought this was a really great way to look at the story because we were able to get the then and now. I also went into this book thinking it would be more like the cheerleaders were dying off presently, not in the past, so the back and forth helped with not having the book set up that way.
I would say the ending was pretty good, in typical Thomas fashion we get a fairly well tied up ending with just a hint that something isn't quite right. We're left with a feeling that the full story might still be hidden away, but that it doesn't really matter because everything was resolved the way it should have been. I really like this sort of ending, especially in a book that deals with such deep, often dark, issues. The world is not all sunshine and rainbows, but it's still worth existing in. With these sorts of endings, Thomas is reflecting that idea.
Overall, while I didn't love this one as much as I did Thomas's two previous thriller novels, I did still quite enjoy it.
The book definitely had a lot going on in it, but it never felt too busy or over the top. There was a bit of high school drama, but nothing major; most of the book focused on finding out what happened to the girls. I didn't really have any theories to go off of, Thomas was pretty stringent with any clues that would give away the ending, although, now that I know how things turned out, there were definitely some big warning signs.
The story is told from both Monica's first-person perspective and Jen's third-person perspective from five years before. I thought this was a really great way to look at the story because we were able to get the then and now. I also went into this book thinking it would be more like the cheerleaders were dying off presently, not in the past, so the back and forth helped with not having the book set up that way.
I would say the ending was pretty good, in typical Thomas fashion we get a fairly well tied up ending with just a hint that something isn't quite right. We're left with a feeling that the full story might still be hidden away, but that it doesn't really matter because everything was resolved the way it should have been. I really like this sort of ending, especially in a book that deals with such deep, often dark, issues. The world is not all sunshine and rainbows, but it's still worth existing in. With these sorts of endings, Thomas is reflecting that idea.
Overall, while I didn't love this one as much as I did Thomas's two previous thriller novels, I did still quite enjoy it.