Books like The Girls Are All So Nice Here

I loved The Thirteenth Tale because it made me distrust every comfortable version of a family story.

What stayed with me most was the way Diane Setterfield treats memory: not as a reliable record, but as something people reshape through fear, shame, love, and silence.

I was especially drawn to the sense that what is missing from a story can matter as much as what is told. By the end, I found myself thinking about the family stories we accept without ever asking who first told them, what they left out, and why.

Since my early reading days, I had this habit to just sit in bed with a book at night and munch on snacks till wee hours of the morning. I got rid of it for long years but this book again made me reach for my namkeen containers and peanut pouches! 

All that gossip and trivia-night silliness in the book turns out to be camouflage for something much darker. Madeline made me laugh, Celeste made me want to reach through the pages. And the murder, withheld till the end—victim and killer both—was a killer!

Scarves off, Moriarty! 

This story follows Alex, a girl haunted by ghosts only she can see. Because of this extraordinary ability, she gets—despite being a crime suspect—chooses to go to Yale and oversee their secret societies that meddle with magic. As she tries to rebuild her life, the death of a girl and her suspicions about the societies pull her back into danger.

The book’s intricate plot and suspense have made me read it multiple times, with its vividly real world, societies, and characters making me eager to visit New Haven and see if it matches the story. Its twists and turns ensure you'll be hooked and constantly wondering what comes next. Also, I've loved Yale since I first saw Gilmore Girls.

Before reaching middle school, I pretty much believed that my friends—who they were and how many I had—determined my value. But my circle could be fickle; girls were ostracized for minor infractions (you bought the same coat as me!) I lived with daily fear of being dropped.

So Cat’s Eye captivated me with its lack of sentimentality in depicting (some) girls’ friendships. Elaine, a middle-aged artist, returns alone to Toronto, the city where she grew up, for a retrospective of her work. The trip gives Elaine space to reflect on her life in that city, and Cordelia, her childhood “friend”, is central to her memories.

Cordelia tormented and humiliated Elaine, even putting her life in danger, yet Elaine remained loyal to her for years. It felt very real to me that this toxic relationship would continue to preoccupy Elaine into her functional adulthood. Girlhood friendships are often fraught, and Atwood… show more.

Shiver is one of the best books I read last year. Essentially it’s a locked room mystery set in the world of professional snowboarding. Milla gets an invitation to reunite with friends from her snowboarding days, but they’ve not been together since their friend, Saskia, went missing. And then, as is the way with edge-of-your-seat thrillers, they can’t get off the mountain, the storm’s closing in and someone is watching them. The truth about Saskia will come out one way or another. Milla and Saskia had been competitors, rivals, and then friends. It’s a complicated friendship and a fascinating look at professional sport and women at the top of their game, what they will sacrifice, and what they’ll do to win.

I can’t list thrillers that shine the spotlight on female relationships without featuring siblings. In this book, four sisters go to spend the summer with their aunt and uncle who haven’t recovered from their daughter’s disappearance five years previously. The main driver of the story is to uncover what really happened to Audrey Wilde but I was drawn in by the special relationship between the four sisters. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have any siblings that the bond intrigues me.

Skip this one if masterful suspense and paranoia aren’t your thing. In this book, a woman is facing life in prison, and the story is told through letters she writes to a lawyer, pleading with him to help her with her defense.

Ware sucks you in with writing that feels effortless, then she ratchets up the tension, again and again, until you can’t stand it, and then just when you think you’re going to get some relief, it gets turned up to eleven. 

I started acting on stage at age five and have continued working in theater since, ultimately becoming a playwright. So, the theatre kid in me ate this book up! Much like The Secret History, the setting of If We Were Villians absolutely sucked me in and did not once let me go. I found it a perfect example of beautiful young adults living a dreamlike experience at school, all the while being horrible human beings.

It was the first book in years that I found myself making excuses to go hide in isolation so I could continue reading. In my opinion, M.L. Rio did a spectacular job of making extremely oddball characters, who speak in Shakespearian clips and have blinding tunnel vision view of their art, into people who seemed eerily real. This book is definitely going in my “to be read again” pile. 

Woolford describes his book as a prenatal guide for musicals and it is indeed just that. He breaks down the process from idea to opening night for a thorough examination of what goes into each part of writing a musical. From the tickle of inspiration—and everything that went into its construction after that point, including the steps back and sideways, trying to find the right formula for success—there isn’t much left out. Warning: You might be inspired to try your hand at writing once you finish this book! 

I felt as if I’d taken a college-level theatre course at the end of How Musicals Work, with an instructor who revels in the complicated chaos that is musicals! It opens up a whole extra level to watching/experiencing a musical.

One night, decades after I first read James’s suspenseful gem of a novel, the book suddenly came to mind.

For years, I’d been struggling with how to fit together two women whose voices had been haunting my head. Now, in a flash, I saw the parallels they offered to the characters in Aspern. A determined, none-too-scrupulous scholar (male, in James’s book), an elderly woman who’d had a secret affair with a celebrated man, the two living together in the ruins of a once-elegant home, and a cache of hoarded papers the scholar desperately wants…

I dissected Aspern chapter by chapter, then gently fitted my characters onto its skeleton. Voilà: Must Read Well. “We stand on the shoulders of giants,” writers sometimes say. Also, “Steal from the best.”