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Final Girls by Riley Sager
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This thriller is honestly one that I feel took half of my breath away. We follow Quincy, one of the remaining "final girls" which is a term dubbed by the media to describe survivors of these massacres. She is deeply affected by the news of Lisa, the first final girl who supposedly committed suicide, which makes her rethink about the many dark choices a human can make and what leads to that.

One day after the news of Lisa's suicide, a women comes to Quincy's door, claiming to be Samantha Boyd, the last other surviving final girl. From there we follow a twisty path as Quincy tries to recover the memory of Pine Cottage and figure out what really happened that life-changing night.

The flashbacks to the worst moments of Quincy's life were just fascinating puzzle pieces into putting the big picture together. hey provide backstory and foreshadowing, which is incredibly difficult to do in such a short format, however Sager managed this balancing act masterfully. I would also say that if you're fan of slasher movies, this is one for you to read.

All the characters were deeply unlikable mysterious character with a closet of skeletons. They were complicated twisty characters, and I thought that the author did an excellent job of developing them to be portrayed in a certain untrustworthy way. One things that irritated me was the author using the trope of dissociative amnesia that made Quincy have an black spot of memory, because this book could have been so much more to the point if she'd known the history.

I think my problem is that I might have stepped into this book with too high expectations, and I felt like the twist was something that I could have easily seen coming (even though I personally didn't pick up on the foreshadowing). The first two thirds of the book were so slow, the pacing was off whilst Quincy baked cupcakes for her blog and exercised. The last third of the book really picked up with the pace; it could be described as a whirlwind of an ending, with the big reveal happening and things getting rapidly wrapped up.

The thing was, that the ending make no sense, and it feels like the only reason that the author wrote it this way was for shock affect. I was just unsatisfied with it, because it didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the story or even be in-character for the character. Overall, while this was a purely fun and addictive read, the hype let me down a bit, causing me to write this mixed-feelings review.

**Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.**

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