Books & Bubbly

final girls by riley sager

B&B RATING: 3 / 5

MOOD: If you’re looking for a book to make you constantly second guess yourself, this one is for you.

Synopsis

What was supposed to be a fun weekend with her friends in the woods turned into an unprecedented nightmare. Celebrating the birthday of her best friend and college roommate Janelle, Quinn and a group of friends plan to spend the weekend in Pine Cottage, a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Cell phones locked away in the car, an abundance of booze, creepy woods, and a random stranger showing up creates the perfect mix of heady teenage fun, sexual tension, and a creepy unease.

After a night filled with partying, the entire group of friends is slaughtered by a random stranger - with Quinn being the only one to make it out and without a memory of anything that happened - both her blessing and curse of that night. Coop, the police offer that finds her hysterical and covered in blood, becomes her saving grace as she swims through the media, now part of an exclusive club of Final Girls: a total of three women, Quinn now included, who survived brutal massacres.

Now, another Final Girl commits suicide, and the other, Sam, comes out of the woodwork to seemingly mess with Quinn’s mind. Pushing Quinn to the point of uncontrollable rage, making her double guess what happened that night in Pine Cottage, and flipping her world upside down, Quinn takes a deeper look into the two Final Girls’ past to piece together why Sam is here. What Quinn finds is unprecedented, sending her in a whirlwind unlike any other.

Review

Filled with twists and turns, you’ll need to hold onto your seat for this one. While not hard to follow, there were times I had to go back in the book to resolve the timelines in my head. The characters were well developed, and the arc on Sam was astounding to me. I found myself much more interested in her story than in Quinn’s, often reading into her past, trying to understand what lead her to reach out to Quinn. Some pieces just don’t seem to make sense.

I’m starting to identify what a classic Riley Sager is. He has three books out (in order): FINAL GIRLS, THE LAST TIME I LIED, and LOCK EVERY DOOR. I’ve read LOCK EVERY DOOR and just got LAST TIME I LIED from the library yesterday, getting ready to continue my Spooky Season reading. When reading LOCK EVERY DOOR a few months ago, I was absolutely obsessed with it, needing to know what happened, like I needed it to breathe. I’ll do a full review on that one soon (I’m going through a backlog of some things I ready this year). While he knocked it out of the park for that one, I didn’t feel quite that way about FINAL GIRLS, but I finished it in four days, so it definitely wasn’t a bad read.

I love the way Sager writes - from the first-person point of view, sucking you into what the protagonist is thinking. It helps to trap the reader in the many twists and turns the book takes, and man, there were many. The beginning was captivating. I kept questioning what I knew, often switching my opinion of who the Pine Cottage killer was several times throughout the read. I wasn’t expecting the ending,

Told as a tale of current, mixed with memories revealing themselves about the past, this will keep you guessing, second guessing, triple guessing, and then still wrong at the end.