Review: "This Book Kills" by Ravena Guron

This Book Kills by Ravena Guron
Published January 2023 via Usborne Publishing
★★★

Boarding school is supposed to be Jess's ticket to the top...but instead it looks like it might be a ticket to an early grave. A beloved student turns up dead—and Jess gets a message thanking her for the inspiration. Then there are threats, and more notes, and another dead student...and Jess has very good reason to think that she might be next.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book, to be honest. It's sometimes tongue-in-cheek (it's a ritzy boarding school, and there is literally a character named Clementine-Tangerine), and I do love a tongue-in-cheek boarding school mystery, but I probably wouldn't have picked it up if I'd known ahead of time that there was a secret society plotline—they're very common in boarding school books (far more common, I suspect, than real-life secret societies are...although the same can be said of a lot of common plotlines), but even with the twists here, such plotlines feel played out to me.

Beyond that, there are some nice red herrings and twists and turns, but my god that school is terrible. Students are being murdered, threats are being sent, and their best idea is 'well, if things get worse maybe we'll kick out the scholarship students who are receiving threats'? Oh dear. And I'm just now realizing how little time Jess & co. spend in class or doing homework, as opposed to running around trying to figure out which Gifted and Talented student might be a murderer.

Quick read, but not one that will stay with me.