Girls Who Burn by MK Pagano is a young adult murder mystery romance book. When Addie's sister Fiona and Seth's cousin Thatcher are killed, Seth and Addie having been blamed for the crimes, and having developed a lack of trust in the police officers on the case, decide to take matters into their own hands and try to discover who murdered Fiona and Thatcher. As well as trying to tackle their feelings of love for each other and their doubts about each other's involvement, they must be very careful and not take too many risks as the murderer is someone very close to them both.
I liked this book because it was somewhat of an interesting murder mystery book, perhaps because it was two teenagers conducting the investigation which adds interest for the reader, especially because many murder mystery books involve amateur adults doing the investigations. The romance themes throughout this book for a number of the characters were both happy and upsetting during different times. In some parts it was nice to see the love and the characters having feelings for each other, however, other parts of the book considered the less pleasant parts of love, for instance when the person you love walks away without ever telling you. The author's aim of showing that one's mistakes do not make one unloveable is also a very valuable part of this book which I think is very important.
However, although there were several good, positive things about the book; the story started very slow and remained rather slow for most of the book with the story only picking up pace and getting more gripping towards the end. One way to overcome this which would have been nice to see is shorter chapters or at least more variation in chapter length. Furthermore, the romance themes in this book were arguably under-developed so it would have been nice to have a bit more focus on the romance, at least with the main characters, Addie and Seth, because some of the other characters appear to have a close romantic relationship but they are not the main protagonists of the story.
Altogether, I rate this book 3 stars, making it a good book because although the romance themes were slightly underdeveloped and the story started slowly, the book inevitably got better with an increase of pace, excitement, and tension, which made the book more gripping for the reader. I would like to thank both NetGalley and Hachette Children's Group for providing me with an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of this book in return for an honest book review.
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