Oooh The Cheerleaders is a clever little book. It is a murder mystery meeds psychological thriller wrapped in YA fiction and it is a stonking good read. 

Five years ago 5 girls - all part of the same cheerleading squad - all die in mysterious ways. Monica, the sister of one of the victims, cannot shake off the loss of her sister. She cannot lay it to rest and she spends the majority of her final year trying to figure it out. She knows that there is something more to it and she is determined to uncover the truth.

I got lost in The Cheerleaders by Kara Thomas. I am the perfect reader for this kind of novel because I never see who the killer is, I never guess ahead of time and everybody is a suspect. I literally had everyone down for the culprit. The Cheerleaders is twisty and turny and every time you think you have it figured out Thomas throws in something new to make you question everything you believe.

I cannot wait to share this novel with my students because I know that they will love it to.

The Cheerleaders by Kara Thomas is available now.

For more information regarding Kara Thomas (@karawrites) please visit www.kara-Thomas.com.

For more information regarding Delacorte Press (@DelacortePress) please visit the Twitter page.

‘The Cheerleaders’ is solid YA crime fiction. There are plenty of threads, making it difficult to guess exactly what the ending will be, and while some twists are predictable some take you by surprise. The final chapter neatly ties up loose ends and lets the reader decide for themselves whether justice was served.

The book follows Monica, the younger sister of Jen – one of five school cheerleaders who tragically passed away nearly five years ago. As the five year anniversary of the deaths approaches, Monica is dealing with struggles of her own – affairs, battling for her place on the dance team, keeping up her GPA – but a chance conversation leads her to make a discovery, and suddenly she isn’t sure that the right killer was apprehended.

Monica is a very accurate portrayal of a teenage girl dealing with major traumas. Frustrated and angry, she pushes everyone she knows away and struggles to care about her previous passions. She makes mistakes in attempts to feel genuine human connection and rebels against all her mum and stepdad’s attempts to keep her safe. Monica isn’t always a likeable protagonist, but it’s impossible not to feel sorry for her situation.

Most of the book is from Monica’s point of view, but there are occasional flashback chapters from Jen’s, adding intrigue and context. Unlike Monica, who is popular for being the attractive dancer rather than for her personality, Jen is a genuinely lovely person. The flashbacks turn her from someone considered a saint – after all, who would speak ill of a dead girl – into an ordinary teenager with her own issues. Dealing with squabbles with her friends, a new girl on the cheerleading squad, and the most unsuitable guy in school crushing on her, Jen’s life makes it clear that there might have been multiple people wanting the cheerleaders dead after all.

There’s nothing groundbreaking about this book. The characters are relatively well-developed, the plot well-constructed, the high school dynamics believable – but it never steps out of the safety of standard YA crime tropes. It’s also, for a book being published in 2020, lacking in diversity. That being said, there’s nothing particularly unlikeable about this book either – it’s a fast read that pulls you in, and it’s difficult to connect the dots before the book wants you to. I also appreciated that there was no unnecessary romance – Monica isn’t in the right place for a relationship and has too much to do juggling her normal life with trying to find out what really happened to her sister and the other cheerleaders.

Overall, this is good without being great – a solid read for fans of YA crime novels that doesn’t do anything new but executes the standard tropes of the genre well.

TWs: Rape, abortion, suicide, disordered eating

I really wish Goodreads let you award half stars as this was good, but just not quite good enough to warrant five stars for me.
A small town. One year five cheerleaders are killed within a short space of time. Seemingly unconnected incidents...but some people are convinced there was more to these deaths.
Monica is still coming to terms without her sister, one of those who died. She is convinced Jen wouldn’t have killed herself but nobody is prepared to talk to her.
Monica takes it upon herself to try to find out what happened. Her digging uncovers a lot of secrets, and it isn’t until the end of the book that we realise the significance of some of these secrets.
Plenty of twists and dark undercurrents to this. It wasn’t a book that felt like a long read but there were a number of details that I only recognised their importance once other issues had been resolved. It made more sense of some of the actions and events that took place, but it was frustrating to be left without really seeing all the dots joined.

This is the best YA mystery I've read this year. I really cared what happened and why, I gasped out loud at twists! The characters are incredibly personable, to the point where I started to have to remind myself that they were just characters. Monica and Ginny's friendship is beautifully written and makes the book a pleasure to read even when the plot is dark.