What a fabulous book!

This was a quirky, quick and easy read that had great characters and character development, with a well structured and interesting plot. Excellent for fans of YA, and I’m very excited to see it turned into a film!

3.75 stars!

Okay so this was like reading everything I wanted all mixed up in a book. Fab, diverse characters, a thrilling premise and the ending left me shook.

THE PLOT & WRITING: Tess can write, there’s no doubt about that and this book was a well thought out, well structured book that depicts a bank heist and also incorporates flashback to Nora’s past lives.
THE CHARACTERS: Everybody was very likeable and I didn’t have any issues with any of the characters. Nora, Iris and Wes were a fun trio and I liked the character development evolution.
OVERALL: I thought the bank heist element really added a pressure-filled aspect to the story and put our characters into some real dilemmas and I think the flashbacks really added to the richness of the book. This was a quick read and was very enjoyable.
I received this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

An original, fast-paced read and I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. There was a lot going on, but as the revelations kept coming, I found myself sympathising more and more with Nora and liking Wes and Iris as well. I can see this being a really good film..

The premise of this book is what attracted me to it and it definitely paid off!
This is a fast paced thriller that i think will appeal to a lot of audiences but specifically to a YA audience.

‘The Girls I’ve Been’ is a mystery/thriller/heist Young Adult novel following Nora, a teenage girl who holds a huge secret. Nora and her mother used to be con artists and Nora is the reason why her mother was caught and put in prison. Nora ends up as a hostage in a bank robbery with her friend Wes and girlfriend Iris, and this is where Nora’s secrets begin to unravel.

I really enjoyed getting lost in the story within this book. The writing was so fast paced which was perfect for the story as it makes you feel like you are there, with Nora, as she is trying to con the bank robbers and find a way to escape. I also loved how this book was written so that the chapters alternate between the present day and the past as you learn what happened to Nora when she was younger when she was pulling cons with her mother. I absolutely loved Nora as the main character and found her to be such an interesting and complex character who I wanted to know everything about.

One of the only things I wish we could have seen is more of a development on the friendships between Nora, Wes and Iris as I feel like they were the strongest relationships in Nora’s life, and they could have been explored a bit more by having them interact with each other more.

Overall, ‘The Girls I’ve Been’ was such an interesting book. Fast-paced, thrilling and with a main character you can’t help but root for, ‘The Girls I’ve Been’ is a book that will keep you on edge until the very last page.

Thank you to Hachette’s Children’s Group for providing me with an advanced copy of this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really liked the premise of this book, and I liked how the actual events of the novel played out over a relatively short period of time (most of which was in a single day) with flashbacks to Nora's troubled past. This was a good YA book overall, but I did find my attention waning throughout and I was speeding through the pages at the end. I can't quite put my finger on what it was - maybe reading The Cousins by Karen M. McManus at the same time was a bad idea because she does fast-paced YA so well that not much can compare!

The Girls I've Been is a tense YA novel about a seventeen-year-old ex-con artist who gets stuck in the middle of a bank robbery with her ex-boyfriend and her new girlfriend. For twelve years, Nora had to live a life of deception, as her con artist mother needed her to play the part when tricking criminal men—until her mum felt for one of these men. Then, Nora had to use her skills to escape, and since then, she's been living as close to a normal life as possible. After a charity event, she meets with new girlfriend Iris ex-boyfriend and now best friend Wes to deposit the money raised, but suddenly, a man pulls a gun, and they're in the middle of a heist. In such a dangerous situation, can Nora keep all her secrets, even as she puts her skills to the test?

I didn't know what to expect going into the book, but it turned out to be immediately gripping and multifaceted. On the one hand, it plays out like a classic thriller as Nora tries to outsmart the bank robbers to allow her and her friends to escape, but with constant flashbacks to her past as the many different girls of the title. On another level, it's a novel that looks at trauma, what makes people who they are, and building your own family, going deeper than you might expect from the blurb. Nora has, expectedly from the concept, had a terrible life in many ways, and has had to try and rebuild things with the help of therapy, her sister, and finding friends. Both Wes and Iris have their own traumatic lives, and Iris especially is given chances to prove her ability to be useful in sticky situations, as well as being a character with a chronic illness (endometriosis).

Surprisingly, the love triangle element is actually much more of a found family situation, with the tension at the start being down to Wes not knowing the two of them were secretly together rather than him pining to have Nora back, and it's nice to have Nora's bisexuality acknowledged but not made a big deal of. Due to the mostly very condensed settings of the action in the 'present' of the novel (which until near the end is entirely over a few hours during the robbery), it may seem like a lot of information comes out at once, but it suits the genre, and in general the book feels like it looks beyond the action and thriller elements to actually consider the impact of things like Nora's childhood and some of the pace of revealing secrets during the heist.

Engrossing, sharp, and readable, The Girls I've Been was refreshing and more complex than expected, combining the enjoyable larger than life elements of a thriller (like quite how good at cons Nora is) with a look at the trauma of being a child crime prodigy type figure that has horrific things happen to them and that they have to do. It's certainly for the upper end of the young adult age group (and plenty of adults too), and it'll be interesting to see the film that's being made of it, because the book really drew me in.