People Like Us by Dana Mele

Cover Art Courtesy of Goodreads

If a book (or show or movie, for that matter) has a boarding school, snobby teenage girls, and an unexplained death, you can count me in. That's why I was so excited to receive a copy of People Like Us by Dana Mele. 

This story follows Kay, a popular girl at Bates, a boarding school for the rich and preppy. She has her typical clique of friends, and as predicted they tend to bully others at their school just for the fun of it. One night a fellow student Jessica turns up dead, an apparent suicide, but as both Kay and detectives start looking into the death, it turns out it may not have been suicide after all...and Kay is one of the prime suspects. After she gets a threatening email from the deceased Jessica, Kay has to solve a series of riddles, taking out each of her friends in the process to save her own dark secrets from being spilled. She finds an unlikely ally in Nola, an unpopular goth girl with superior hacking skills, who Kay and her friends made miserable in the past. The two of them work together to solve Jessica's riddles, bringing down each girl in Kay's circle and piecing together clues to try to find the killer. 

This was a solid read, it just wasn't fantastic. It was an overall quick read with a gorgeous cover, and I would definitely recommend it for fans of Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars for the big brother/communication from the grave vibes. Unfortunately I thought the killer was predictable from about the halfway mark, and the reveal wasn't even that good. Some parts did drag and were somewhat boring, and you didn't see very much character development. Of all the characters, I loved Spencer the most, and I would have liked to see more of him. I did appreciate the diversity and LGBTQ+ representation in this book, and it's important that we're starting to see more of that in YA novels.

Overall Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars

A huge thanks to Penguin Teen for sending me a finished copy of this book! People Like Us by Dana Mele just released on February 27, so you can pick up your copy now!