Nice Girls by Catherine Dang
9/14/21; 352 pages
HarperCollins
Nice Girls by Catherine Dang is a so-so murder mystery.
Mary left Liberty Lake, Minnesota for Cornell with the moniker of "Ivy League Mary" given to her by the locals. Now she is back at age 22 having been expelled during her senior year from the university for assaulting another student. Mary, who was a quiet chubby girl before she left, is now much thinner but still carrying much of the anger she had when still living there and apparently all through her time at Cornell. When Mary's father brings her home he expects her to get a job and she does, as a cashier at a local grocery store. Right after Mary arrived back in Liberty Lake, a previous friend, Olivia Willand, goes missing and the town is searching for her when Mary discovers that another girl, DeMaria, went missing months earlier and didn't receive the same attention and care by the police.
Perhaps this is more of a mystery for young adult readers because of
the simplistic writing and predictable plot. Mary is truly an extremely
dislikable character so it was a struggle at time to keep reading the
novel. She's immature, cynical, carries grudges, and constantly recalls
wrongs done to her in the past. She is only 22, so it is not like she
has a life time of being down trodden. I could go with all of this but
when she starts working at a grocery store, which, horrors, is beneath
her intelligence and capabilities, the whiny protagonist lost me. Then
when she calls in sick to start doing her own investigating, I was over
it. There are plenty of stereotypes presented and the characters are all
more caricatures in Nice Girls. The last third of the novel heads off
into an unbelievable direction and the ending takes a whole lot of
suspension of disbelief. I finished it, but this one wasn't a winner for
me.
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