DEAD GIRLS DON'T SAY SORRY

A high school senior must come to terms with complicated feelings about her best friend’s death.

Nora Radford’s long-standing plans for the future include her best friend, Julia Hoskins: They’ll finish high school and attend McGill University as roommates. The problem is, Nora has a chance at early acceptance to another university with a competitive journalism program that would be a dream come true, and she isn’t sure about her sometimes-toxic friendship with Julia. Julia is cool and popular, but she can also be a bigoted bully, constantly putting people down and spreading nasty rumors. After Dillan Fletcher, Nora’s childhood best friend who moved away, transfers to their school, her increasingly close (and possibly romantic) relationship with him throws her friendship with Julia into stark relief, and Nora finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew about her friend. When Julia dies unexpectedly, Nora must confront her grief while reckoning with her complicated feelings about Julia as she uncovers a web of lies. Told in alternating timelines set before and after Julia’s death, Ritany’s novel adeptly captures the stomach-churning feeling of betrayal by a friend and the confusion of being constantly manipulated and lied to. Some plot points feel vague, and the alternating timelines can at times be hard to follow, but the book ultimately propels readers through one gut-wrenching discovery after another. The main characters read white; background characters bring diversity in ethnicity and sexuality.

Unsettling and sharply observed.