The It girl: A dark tale set in academia

I'd been keen to give Ruth Ware's books a go for ages, and was excited to find her latest outing, The it girl, at my local library. British authors of dark tales are totally my jam, and I was intrigued by The it girl because of its academic setting. I've also read another of Ware's novels. My review is posted here.

The It girl | Published July 2022 | Read November 2023

The 'it girl' of the title is April Coutts-Cliveden, a rich, posh, flamboyant student at a fictional Oxford University college. Hannah Jones, a shy, bookish student from an ordinary, middle class family, is thrown together with April as her room-mate in the residential colleges. The two form an unlikely friendship and Hannah becomes part of the tightknit group that orbits April's world.

By the end of term 2, April has been murdered. The book jumps back and forth between the events at Oxford that led to her death, and the present, ten years later. Hannah is now married to Will (from the Oxford group), living in Edinburgh and expecting her first child. The man who was convicted of killing April, creepy Oxford porter, John Neville, has just died in prison, protesting his innocence from the outset.

The quiet world Hannah has built in Edinburgh, working in a bookshop with Will now an accountant, is shattered when new evidence surrounding April's death is brought to light by a journalist. Hannah reconnects with the old gang to delve into what really happened to April ten years earlier.

I enjoyed the Oxford years chapters even though it seems to take a long time to get the point of April's death. The picture that Ruth Ware paints of life at Oxford is super atmospheric. April and Hannah and their friendship group - Will, Hugh, Ryan and Emily - are well fleshed out. Will and Hugh are childhood friends, also from a world of privilege like April, and portrayed as quintessential upper class British men. Ryan is a socialist in the making, cheeky and charming in a laddish kind of way. Emily is a maths prodigy, competitive and sarcastic.

In the chapters set in the present, each of the members of the original group of Oxford friends comes under suspicion as Hannah questions what she remembers of the night of April's death and what she thought she knew about her friends. Hannah has only kept in touch with Hugh, now a successful cosmetic surgeon in Edinburgh. Emily has become a noted academic, still living in Oxford, and Ryan is happily married with kids but unfortunately recently debilitated by a stroke. Hannah has always been haunted by what happened at Oxford, leaving university after April's death and failing to finish her degree. It was her evidence that helped convict John Neville and this is something she has struggled to deal with over the years.

I enjoyed following the trail of the truth about April's death. Ruth Ware does a nice job of engineering the story so the reader suspects each one of the group until the Big Reveal. That said, I didn't warm to Hannah and found her thought processes and her narration somewhat overwrought. I get that she is still traumatised by April's death, but she is naïve and melancholic and this lessens the power of her story. She sometimes comes off sounding a bit hysterical and that made my feminist hackles rise.

A better story may have been to add other players in the suspect pool, even though Hannah does investigate one of the professors in her Oxford college. April herself is something of an unlikeable character, swapping between being fun and generous to downright mean, playing pranks on her friends with often serious consequences. As more of this behaviour is revealed, it is changes the way the reader views her character. In hindsight, this works to limit the suspect pool.

While I have read loads of thrillers over the years, I do attempt to immerse myself in the story and just read it, without trying too hard to guess whodunnit or how the ending will pan out. I like to be surprised and I love being part of clever storytelling, complex characterisation, and intriguing plot twists and turns. I didn't guess the murderer in this one even though I have read plenty of reviews where readers claim the murderer was easy to spot. The ending is a bit mad and over the top, but there's an interesting motive for the murder that I rather liked.

One of the main reasons for my lower rating is Hannah's characterisation. In addition to my comments noted above, Hannah doesn't make a strong protagonist. Her pregnancy in the present-day chapters of the book is over-described at the expense of deeper characterisation. Hannah seems quite passive, yet she does a bunch of stupid things playing amateur detective, endangering the life of her baby. Ware also misses a perfect opportunity to delve into the often indifferent treatment of male violence on university campuses. The story of the creepy Neville and philandering professor (who oversteps boundaries at the very least) is relegated to minor parts of the narrative to focus on April's murder, effectively gaslighting Hannah.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐