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They Wish They Were Us meets The Queen’s Gambit in the world of competitive Scrabble when a teen girl is forced to investigate the mysterious death of her best friend a year after the fact when her Instagram comes back to life with cryptic posts and messages.CATALYST 13 points noun: a person or thing that precipitates an event or change When Najwa Bakri walks into her first Scrabble competition since her best friend’s death, it’s with the intention to heal and move on with her life. Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to choose the very same competition where said best friend, Trina Low, died. It might be even though Najwa’s trying to change, she’s not ready to give up Trina just yet. But the same can’t be said for all the other competitors. With Trina, the Scrabble Queen herself, gone, the throne is empty, and her friends are eager to be the next reigning champion. All’s fair in love and Scrabble, but all bets are off when Trina’s formerly inactive Instagram starts posting again, with cryptic messages suggesting that maybe Trina’s death wasn’t as straightforward as everyone thought. And maybe someone at the competition had something to do with it. As secrets are revealed and the true colors of her friends are shown, it’s up to Najwa to find out who’s behind these mysterious posts—not just to save Trina’s memory, but to save herself.
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0 0PRODIGIOUS
14 points
adjective: wonderful or marvelous
Trigger warnings: Indepth conversations about grief, trauma, dealing with the death of a loved one. Cheating, manipulation, detailed panic attacks, on-page death.
This book first and foremost is about learning how to live with grief, how that is different for everyone, and how each person's grief effects them and others around them. This book has a wonderful authors note right at the start detailing this and it says "I trust you to know if you can handle that today. And if you can't, there's always tomorrow." and I love that. Please take this note seriously however, the book is very explicit on each character's journey with grief and the mental toll it takes.
The myster however, oh my *god* the mystery element. For most of the book it's simmering under the surface, still there but just slowly building up until the climax of the book. And then all hell is released at once. But even then, it didn't really feel like a bad sudden shift. It felt like a total 180 suddenly with how active it suddenly got, but thinking back to previous foreshadowing (that I've noticed, I'm sure on a second read I'll notice much more hehe) it all just clicks into place perfectly.
Reading through the climax and the ending, I didn't have any "wait that was sudden" or "that didn't make sense", the motives and character changes felt understandable. And for a mystery book, that's just perfect tbh.
And if you where like me and where weary about the use of scrabble and the "gimmick" of rarely used words and such, it's done very well. Najwa's commentary is written like a typical teen would speak, however her main grounding technique is to pull related words to the situation from her scrabble dictionary and go over the definition of them and focus on the word for a bit. Each of the words are clearly defined so you won't need to have a dictionary open on the side aha! Honestly it also fits her personality very well, it's something that keeps her grounded to what's happening and is self-soothing.
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