All These Beautiful Strangers

3.25/5

17 years ago, Charlie’s mother vanished. No one knows what happened. Charlie wants to move on and focuses on her new life at an elite school. She finds herself as a prospective recruit for a secret society with a rigorous initiation process. As she plays the game to join, she also learns she will be dredging up her family’s secrets and maybe finding out where her mother went. 

This seemed promising, but I found it to be a bit confusing. There were two different plots I was following– Charlie’s life at school and the mystery behind the elite group, The A’s. Then, there was the plot about Charlie and her mother. The alternating timelines made sense and then they finally converged and everything started to come together. However, the resolution left me wanting more. 

There was no thriller aspect to this story, so I would just classify it as a YA mystery. I was hoping for more character development and depth. Not just from the high schoolers, but the adults too. Instead, it just seemed like high school drama followed them throughout life, and Charlie is just now bringing it all to the surface. This could be a good story for someone looking for a dark academia mystery, it just wasn’t the one for me.