The Girls Weekend by Jody Gehrman Review

Title: The Girls Weekend
Author: Jody Gehrman
Format: Kindle
Publication Date: June 9th, 2020

Their reunion just became a crime scene . . .

June Moody, a thirty-something English professor, just wants to get away from her recent breakup and reunite with girlfriends over summer break. Her old friend and longtime nemesis, Sadie MacTavish, a mega-successful author, invites June and her college friends to a baby shower at her sprawling estate in the San Juan Islands. June is less than thrilled to spend time with Sadie--and her husband, June's former crush--but agrees to go.

The party gets off to a shaky start when old grudges resurface, but when they wake the next morning, they find something worse: Sadie is missing, the house is in shambles, and bloodstains mar the staircase. None of them has any memory of the night before; they wonder if they were drugged. Everyone's a suspect. Since June had a secret rendezvous with Sadie's husband, she has plenty of reason to suspect herself. Apparently, so do the cops.

A Celtic knot of suspense and surprise, this brooding, atmospheric novel will keep you guessing as each twist reveals a new possibility. It will remind you of friendships hidden in the depths of your own past, and make you wonder how well you really know the people you've loved the longest.

This was an ARC I got from Netgalley for an honest review. It is set to come on June 9th, 2020.

We all have that girl from high school that we think got everything we ever wanted. The perfect job, the amazing husband, the big house. For June Moody that girl was Sadie. They were friends in college where June thought she had all the time in the world to write the great American novel. Ten or so years later she hasn't done that. Instead her friend Sadie from college wrote this amazing young adult book that launched into a blockbuster hit movie. Not to mention Sadie married Ethan, a man June was in love with, but turned down because she didn't want to be tied down. Now Sadie has invited everyone to her house for a Girls Weekend and June is drug along, despite her jealousy of Sadie making her not want to. But one morning they wake up and Sadie has vanished and there is blood in the hallway. With no memory of what happened the night before they must try to piece together what happened to her. And it appears June isn't the only one that would have reason to hurt Sadie.

I was really looking forward to this book. Alexa Donne said great things about it on her channel when she read it. And I did like somethings about it. I really liked the representation of Young Adult in an adult book. I went away with wanting to actually read Dakota's Garden. I liked the friendship between June and Em. I liked June overall, except for when it came to Ethan. And for the most part, the writing was good and the flow was decent.

There are several things that bothered me about this book. Ethan being the first thing. I didn't like his character and I didn't understand why these girls like him so much. I didn't like several of the characters, but that didn't ruin the book for me. What ruined it was knowing exactly who did this and why before Sadie even went missing. This book was incredibly predictable for me. For someone who loves mystery and thriller as much as I do, I knew exactly what happened when this character started talking and the things that they said. I wish it would have been dialed back a bit, because if it had been and I couldn't have guessed, it would have been an amazing twist.