Tana French has won much praise for her five thrillers, with good reason (see glowing reviews below). This one takes place in a girls' boarding school in Ireland. The key characters are eight teenage girls, members of rival cliques. I needed a pencil and paper to sort them out at first. But by the time this book concluded, I couldn't stop thinking about them.
French's dialogue makes use of current teenage slang. I am not an expert in this area, but apparently "totes" means totally, and "adorbs" means adorable. Combining the two: "That would be so totes adorbs I could just die." My favorite is "jel," which means jealous, as in "ppl are mad jel of me." My spell-checker doesn't know what to make of that one. Perhaps it's easier to text these truncated words than to spell them out entirely. So in that vein, like hello? I'll rate this engrossing novel totes awesome.
Don't like crime fiction? You'll like The Secret Place regardless. It's outstanding by just about any standard. Or by my modest standards, at least, which is all I really care about.
Links:
New York Times review by Janet Maslin
Washington Post review by Maureen Corrigan