I think this book needs to have trigger warnings somewhere as I went in expecting that rape/child abuse would be a massive part of this story, but didn't even make it there due to the amount of triggers on my eating disorder and anxiety disorder due to obsessive compulsive behaviours. I finished about a fifth of the novel and was extremely uncomfortable the whole time.

However overall the writing was great, very vivid, and the reason I was so triggered was because of how close to real the characters Layden created were, how nuanced and complex they already were.

This was a thoughtful and heartbreaking exploration of what it's like to be a teenage girl nowadays. Told from the perspective of nine different girls attending a prestigious boarding school in New England, the story takes place during the course of one school year, from the moment the new students arrive to the commencement ceremony for the graduating class. Although the main focus is on issues of consent and sexual violence, the book doesn't ignore other issues like racism, homophobia, or mental illness. Trough the nine different perspectives, the author managed to create a pretty good picture of the inner lives of girls and young women these days, with all the minor and major hurts of growing up.

Fall term 2015 starts with a bang at Atwater, when all the girls arriving for the new school year are confronted with yard signs claiming that a rapist works at the school. Although Atwater prides itself on a legacy of progressive thinking and feminist alumnae, the administration tries to cover up the story. It doesn't take long for the students to uncover what's going on: an alumna is claiming that 20 years ago, she was raped by a male teacher at the school and pressured into leaving the school after reporting it. Despite mounting pressure, the school administration seems all too happy to ignore the claims and continue on like nothing ever happened. But one person, or maybe multiple people, keeps the story alive by exposing more and more truths the administration wanted to keep hidden. Every new truth leads the girls to consider their position in society and in school, trying to determine whether their teachers really do have their best interests at heart.

Despite the privilege surrounding these characters, each girl is shown to have her own demons. While the school is preparing them for bright academic futures at any of the most prestigious universities in the world, the message time and time again is a simple question: do these girls know how to deal, physically and emotionally, with being women in a world where control over their own body seems at times to be a far-fetched fantasy? Each and every chapter reads as a carefully crafted plea to educators to safeguard students' well-being, both mentally and physically, and maybe even to prioritise it over academic accomplishments.

The only minor gripe I have about this book, is that it is less of a mystery story than I was lead to believe. This story is not about finding out who is the mysterious vigilante trying to hold the school accountable for its decisions, it is not about uncovering the rapist on campus. But it is a beautiful and tragic combination of vignettes about what it means to become a woman in this day and age.

We follow a group of girls as they navigate everyday life at their boarding school. A coming of age story with a dark background plot.

Overall, I felt this was a good reflection on growing up as a teenage girls on topics such as relationships, friendships and peer pressure but from the synopsis I was expecting more of a mystery novel.

At the start we're introduced to a historical sexual assault case at the school and I expected this to be explored more deeply but it was always in the background and only really mentioned briefly in each chapter.

However, this flowed really nicely and did raise thoughts on how victims of sexual assault are treated and often silenced.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy to read

brill book, i loved it a great page turner, loved the characters the story.
The plot was great and kept me reading right till the end, i wnted to finish and i didnt want it to end....

On the whole I enjoyed this book and it told an important story. However having each chapter told from a different viewpoint personally felt disruptive to me, I just got used to a voice and then I had to start all over again when I moved onto the next chapter.

All Girls is set in the school Atwater. We follow the lives of many different students over the academic year which is filled with talk about sex and abuse. With ex pupil Karen accusing one of the teachers of rape, a friendly vigilante starts a campaign in support of Karen and leaving the teachers and students questioning how well the school informs and protects the students in regard to all matters of sex.


So I had no idea what to expect when I starting reading All Girls, I must admit I was pleasantly surprised. I love the fact that even though we don't follow just one student but several, yet I felt I got to know each of the students whose life we got a snap shot of. All these girls are dealing with their own issues, eating disorders, body dismorphia, sexual confusion, finding their place in life and so on. All the issues each girl is suffering from are all so true to form. I can remember being that age and having issues with some that are mentioned throughout the novel.

I loved the vigilante element of the story we ate kept guessing throughout. Who is the person fighting against the injustice for Karen. I must say I didn't have a clue and was quite surprised.

I also really liked the whole idea of the school having to make a public decision based on the accusation. Further the conversations that are meant to happen regarding sex whilst you are in education seem to start, with a long way to go.

It's written really well with a third person narrator however the description is so intense that I could truly picture it myself

Honestly just loved this book
would I recommend yes ofcourse. Its an easy book to read but had a few trigger points regarding rape so if that's something you think might be too much to read , however it is possible to skip a few paragraphs and continuing on.
This is very much a coming of age book and this truly highlights the important roll education plays in young people. As well as the lack of knowledge surrounding sex all had as young people and where the line of consent. Easy 4 stars.



Thank you to netgalley, the author and the publishers for the advanced digital copy.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

Layden's book is a powerful reminder of the inadequacies of education around relationships and sex, and the way that institutions are primed to protect themselves against accusations of sexual assault, even at the cost of their students' safety. My Dark Vanessa also dealt with the issue of sexual abuse at boarding schools, but the use of multiple voices across the age-span of the students gave the story a breadth that was essential to understand the scope of the problem, and allowed us to see how young women's experiences are broadly similar regardless of background or belief. It's a subject that needs to be talked about more, so I'm glad this book is out there.

Whilst I loved the setting for this story, I found there were far too many characters, each with their own story. I found it too busy and difficult to follow.

I absolutely love the setting of this book, it felt like I was really immersed in the boarding school. I also think it tackles the allegation incredibly accurately, especially the way the school handles it. I wish I got to know the characters even more as opposed to meeting a lot of characters, sometimes it got confusing keeping up with all the names.

There is something about books set in prestigious boarding schools that I just find irresistible, so I was so happy when I was approved to receive a copy of All Girls. Unlike most boarding school books I have read, which are focused on back-stabbing, bitchiness and bullying, All Girls deals with a number of different issues. The girls of The Atwater School are outwardly nice, well-rounded girls, but as each section of the book focuses on the experiences of a very different girl over the course of one academic year, it quickly becomes apparent that there is more to these girls than meets the eye.

Covering issues including sexual assault, unhealthy relationships, mental health issues, sexuality, affirmative consent, and gender disparity, All Girls is a book that, for me, the title says everything – all girls are struggling with something, and all girls should read this book. Yes, the subjects are challenging, and not always easy to read, but Emily Layden handles each of them with sensitivity and nothing is included simply for the shock factor to keep the reader engaged.

With such a range of characters telling their stories, I think everyone who reads this book will find someone to relate to. Although I am significantly older than the target demographic for this book, I could still see elements of myself in more than one character and found myself totally engaged with each of their stories. What I found particularly interesting was, with the frequent changes of point of view, you saw each character through their own eyes and through the eyes of the other narrators, and it was fascinating just how different people’s opinions of themselves and others was.

All Girls is an engaging read that makes you challenge things that perhaps you have always just accepted and highlights just how many struggles teenage girls are facing.

I loved the synopsis of this book and I wanted to love the actual book even more but I didn't, everything was a bit jumbled for me, there were too many characters telling their stories.

The idea behind the book was great but fell a bit short, the writing in itself was in fact really good and I do not doubt there would be some out there that would fall head over heels with this book.

Thank you for the ARC!

I thought this was fantastic - I have read a couple of novels lately told in this ‘series of vignettes’ structure and I think it’s especially effective in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a boarding school. I felt like I recognised and understood many of the characters too

Thank you to the author, John Murray Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This engrossing story of goings-on at a prestigious girl's boarding school has so many threads and undercurrents, that it becomes a rich tapestry the further you get into it. Yes, its biggest strength - the amazingly well-written POVs of girls of different ages and backgrounds - is also its weakness. You get invested, and then the perspective changes. While it would be wonderful to find out more about what happens to the individual characters behind the POVs, the whole is a very well-done, atmospheric exploration of what it means to be a girl today, Not just revealing what girls want, but what society wants/expects from them, and at the same time the often rigid strictures placed upon them that will hinder them getting anywhere. This was a pleasant surprise from a debut author, and I look forward to reading more from her.

All Girls plants us at the prestigious Atwater, an all-girls boarding school set in the affluence of New England. We flow through the school year between the voices of various students, from newly arrived freshmen to jaded seniors. The overarching thread that binds these voices together (other than being young women), is a sexual assault that is alleged to have taken place on campus 20+ years before. The allegations are explored at a distance via each protagonist while also giving us a moment with their own coming-of-age scenes.

This is a novel full of layers. It poses plenty of questions but answers few – much like life. It gives us glimpses of moments that will shape lives. It shows the uncomfortable and the frustrating. The female experience, whether adult it teenage, is not a one-size fits all. This novel explores the multi-faceted. The girls are Atwater are simultaneously brimming with promise and already worn down.

With a book like this, where your point of view shifts with every chapter, it can take longer to connect and find empathy and reflection as a reader. You’ve barely got past the basics before you’re shifting to a new perspective, a new timeline, a new history. All Girls uses this narrative concept well, but with so many names and references, it can be hard to keep it clear who is who.

This isn’t a light read. It’s an exploration of how people we trust let us down. How friendships can be both all-consuming and fleeting. How we can become a product of our environment. It’s smart, confronting, confusing, and layered.

I thoroughly enjoyed Emily Layden’s All Girls, although I recognised that the book has some issues which may be more of a turn-off for other readers. All Girls is set during the academic year 2015-16 at a New England prep school where a former student has recently accused one of the teachers of sexually assaulting her. However, All Girls is not really focused on the details of the accusation, but rather how it impacts the school’s current students, and their developing ideas of how to navigate in the world as young women who are never quite taken seriously. It’s narrated through nine different third-person perspectives (plus a bit of head-hopping in the final section), as we meet a range of girls from different grades, from awkward new freshman Lauren to jaded ex-ballet dancer Sloane to lesbian Emma, a senior whose long-term relationship with her mixed-race girlfriend Olivia has become iconic in the school.

While the characters sometimes become hard to keep track of, I really felt that Layden had thought this all through; there’s something solid about the connections between her cast that makes me believe that if I re-read this novel, all sorts of things would start coming to light that I hadn’t noticed first time round. In this way, I thought her decision to use multiple narrators was much more illuminating than if we’d had to keep to a single person’s perspective (both the strength and weakness of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, which this novel obviously has a lot in common with, is that we’re totally trapped in Lee’s head, and Lee’s head is a very unreliable place to be trapped). And while there are so many novels about the inner worlds of teenage girls, there are very few that are so serious and insightful; like Sittenfeld, Layden really gets how some teenage girls approach the world, and how small but yet significant interactions can crush or uplift their sense of who they are. If there was one thing I found less convincing about All Girls, it was that all her narrators seem to share this sense of watchfulness; it would have been nice, and more realistic, to get inside the head of at least one student who was less compulsively analytic. It’s also, frankly, too long. Nevertheless, it’s definitely well ahead of most books of this kind, and if you like campus novels, you’ll probably like this.

I have no idea what this book was about! It was slow it has a million jumbled characters there was no real plot, quite a disappointment.

All Girls by Emily Layden is set in an all girls boarding school in Connecticut, and happens over a year, starting with the first day, where students are being dropped off, and drive past posters that declare a past student is making allegations of sexual misconduct against a teacher, who is rumoured to still be at the school.

This sets the tone for the year, with more information coming out about the past student, and then about the staff, with the school administration striving to keep ahead of the gossip.

The students are finding themselves, and so there are sexual experiences, consent, anxiety, secrets and a lot of emotions. Trigger warning, there is sexual assault in the book.

There are nine girls that we see the story from their perspective, and that's a lot of different characters to try to keep straight in your head.  I didn't manage it for all of them, and I think that's telling in itself.  If I care about a book, I'll be able to keep the characters straight, or I'll go back and check what's going on.  In this book, I just kept going.

 All Girls  by Emily Layden was published on 18th February 2021, and is available from  Amazon ,  Waterstones  and  Bookshop.org .

You can follow Emily Layden on  Instagram  and her  website .

I was given this book in exchange for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley and to  John Murray Press .

Thank you, NetGalley and John Murray Press for the eARC in exchange for an honest opinion.

From reading the synopsis of this I was looking forward to this but in all honesty, I got confused between all of the characters except Lauren.

This small cast of characters didn't feel small to me and it got to a point where I felt they weren't fully developed. This book wasn't for me but it wasn't badly written.

All Girls is set over the course of an academic year, which at the start of - a faculty member is accused of raping a student 20 years ago. Each chapter ends with an email being sent that gives insight into the ongoing civil law suit that kind of sits in the background of the book.

Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of a different student in the book and the same one is never returned to. As a result, this kind of reads like a series of short stories that happen to be set in the same place.

I really enjoyed when a character that I had already 'met' appeared in another chapter because I like the familiarity. In this book, I didn't feel there was strong character development though because once you've read that person's character, we never return to them. Which is a shame as I enjoy getting to know characters. I think if three key characters had been picked to narrate the story, I would have enjoyed it far more than I did.

I like my ends tied up and to reach a satisfying conclusion - and I think because this story is told the way it is, we don't get that. It's kind of why I'm not the biggest fan of short stories.

As you're probably getting - this book wasn't for me. But that doesn't mean it was badly written. It felt original and despite the vast array of characters I did tend to find I could make the connections back when they appeared in each others chapters. I found the writing to be quite vivid - particularly in the dorms and despite never having been to a boarding school, I could picture exactly what it was like.

All Girls is set in a New England boarding school, and follows the lives of its privileged pupils over the course of a school year, during which the school has to deal with a sexual assault scandal..

It starts off well with an intriguing first chapter with new girl Lauren arriving for her first experience of boarding school, seeing boards on the approach to the school suggesting that a rapist lives on the school campus, a scandal which has repercussions throughout the book. This first chapter hooked me in, but then the next chapter moves on to a different girl, as does each chapter thereafter. While I enjoyed reading about the different girls, I would have liked to get to know fewer girls better, rather than skimming over the lives of many of them. The theme of sexual assault and everyday sexism runs through the novel, showing that even in a predominantly female environment of an all-girls school, no one is immune to this.