Review: "The Girl You Know" by Elle Gonzalez Rose

The Girl You Know by Elle Gonzalez Rose
Published February 2025 via Bloomsbury YA
★★★

Luna's world fell apart when her twin, home for winter break, was found dead—and with the police planning to make this an open-and-shut case, there's only one thing to do: take over her sister Solina's identity, infiltrate her fancy boarding school, and find proof that her sister's death was murder...as well as proof of who did it.

I love me a boarding school book, but I ran up against my inability to suspend disbelief pretty quickly here. Hard to believe that Luna was able to financially support herself and her sister (who has a scholarship, but one that doesn't cover anything by way of incidentals) on a less-than-minimum-wage diner job; hard to believe that she lasts more than a day in a school where everyone should know her, she doesn't know even the barest details; hard to believe several different event sequences. Like...Luna realises once she gets to the fancy fancy prep school that Solina was presenting a different version of herself to the people there, one Luna knows nothing about, and yet nobody calls Luna on...really anything? She struggles in her classes, and despite Solina having a GPA that nobody else can even touch, nobody questions Luna-as-Solina struggling; she can barely mask her revulsion when kissing Solina's boyfriend; she runs around ready to stab people with her rusty-but-trusty knife, and nobody really notices.

I can't help but think of Tana French's The Likeness, in which the main character is called in to impersonate another woman, one who visually could be her twin. She has to swallow buckets of information in a minuscule amount of time, but she's trained to do it, and also, she plans and practices in the limited amount of time; she holds her breath and watches people's reactions and adjusts on the fly; things are weird, and she actively works to smooth things over. I know the rules are different for YA, but if I do a reread, it'll be of The Likeness, not of The Girl You Knew.