Good Girls Lie

July 1, 2019

When you hear that there's a prestigious prep school--called, nudgingly, the Goode School--that accepts only the brightest girls from the best families and steers them to the Ivies, you know there will be secrets, secret societies, and a student suicide pointing to dark and dubious behavior that everyone's let happen until now. Following the New York Times best-selling author's Tear Me Apart; with a 250,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 23, 2019
Ash Carlisle, the heroine of this high-tension thriller from bestseller Ellison (Tear Me Apart), leaves the U.K. after the death of her parents to attend the Goode School, an exclusive girls’ boarding school in Marchburg, Va. Ash knows that graduating from Goode will be her ticket to an Ivy League college. But as she settles in as a sophomore, she’s unprepared for the meanness of the other girls and the hazing she faces when tapped for one of Goode’s secret societies. When a student is found dead, an apparent suicide, the police question Ash and others who knew the victim. The dean, who worries about the potential bad publicity for the school, and the police think that Ash may be hiding something. As the body count rises, Ash’s involvement with the deceased seems too much of a coincidence to be ignored. Alternating points of view raise the suspense, blurring the lines between what’s true and false. No one among the cast of calculating characters is above suspicion. Ellison keeps readers guessing throughout. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Media Group.

October 15, 2019
After the gruesome deaths of her parents, a 16-year-old English girl sets a terrifying string of events in motion when she moves to Virginia to attend an elite all-girl prep school. When coding whiz Ash Carlisle gets a scholarship to The Goode School in Marchburg, Virginia, she's anxious to leave England, and a trove of bad memories, behind. After all, her abusive father's death by overdose and her mother's subsequent suicide would traumatize any child. Ash is determined to keep her head down and her grades up, with an eye toward college. However, her accent and outsider status paint a target on her back, and she soon catches the eye of haughty and beautiful Becca Curtis, a senior who rules the school with near impunity. But Ash intrigues Becca, and it's not long before Ash's social standing takes a turn, and she's inducted into Ivy Bound, Becca's secret society. Unfortunately, Ash's hope for a new beginning starts to unravel when her roomie, Camille, takes a fatal header off the bell tower and dark secrets from Ash's fraught past, including the circumstances surrounding the deaths of her parents, start clawing their way to the surface. Ellison throws in all the elements of a good gothic: a school history chock full of murder and mayhem; secret societies; and halls rumored to be haunted, but Ash swings wildly from sympathetic to insufferable. Readers cheering her devil-may-care attitude and initial resistance to mean-girl shenanigans will be frustrated to see her eventually groveling at the feet of Becca and her cronies, especially after the cruel hazing they put her through. Ellison juggles multiple narratives that weave past and present with ease, but with the book approaching 500 pages, readers may be exhausted from all the melodrama once they finally reach the messy, over-the-top denouement. Overwrought and underwhelming.

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October 1, 2019
Warning signs abound from the start, when Ash Carlisle arrives from her native England to attend the Goode School in small-town Virginia. Whether or not she's a sociopath, Ash has been closely associated with death: her younger brother and only sibling drowned years before, and both parents died just months earlier, her father's death ruled a misadventure and her mother's a suicide. And death seems to follow her to the small, prestigious girls' boarding school whose graduates are assured entrance to an Ivy League college. First, the school's piano teacher dies of an allergic reaction in which Ash has a hand. Then Ash's roommate plummets from the bell tower, in what is either murder or suicide. Meanwhile, sophomore Ash finds herself first a rival, then a mentee, of senior queen bee Becca Curtis, daughter of Senator Ellen Curtis. A strict school honor code to the contrary, Goode girls do lie, though few as significantly as Ash, whose story is told only after a third death at the school. An intriguing plot, featuring a final twist, shows what can happen when hidden truths are revealed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)