Nice Girls

A Novel

By: Catherine Dang

Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan

Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

“Darkly delicious . . . Nice Girls is about the girlhood we never really leave behind, and what happens when we dare to confront our past demons. A pulsating mystery with a narrator you won't soon forget.” — Laura Dave, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of The Last Thing He Told Me

"If you’re a total true crime addict, Catherine Dang’s debut novel will have you hooked real fast." — Cosmopolitan

Recommended by New York Times Book Review • Entertainment Weekly • Cosmopolitan • Los Angeles Times • Harper's Bazaar • New York Post • E! Online • Bustle • Popsugar • CrimeReads • The Nerd Daily • PureWow • Mystery & Suspense Magazine • Criminal Element • and more!

A pulse-pounding and razor-sharp debut with the emotional punch of Luckiest Girl Alive and All the Missing Girls that explores the hungry, angry, dark side of girlhood and dares to ask: Which is more dangerous for a woman—showing the world what it wants to see, or who she really is?

What did you do?

Mary used to be such a nice girl. She was the resident whiz kid of Liberty Lake, Minnesota—the quiet, chubby teen with the scholarship to an Ivy League school. But three years later, “Ivy League Mary” is back—a thinner, cynical, restless failure who was kicked out of Cor­nell at the beginning of her senior year and won’t tell anyone why. Taking a job at the local grocery store, Mary tries to make sense of her life’s sharp downward spiral.

Then beautiful, magnetic Olivia Willand goes missing. A rising social media star, Olivia is admired by everyone in Liberty Lake—except Mary. Once Olivia’s best friend, Mary knows better than anyone that behind the Instagram persona hides a willful, manipulative girl with sharp edges. As the town obsesses over perfect, lovely Olivia, Mary wonders if her disappearance might be tied to another missing person: nineteen-year-old DeMaria Jackson, whose case has been widely dismissed as a runaway.

Who is the real Olivia Willand, and where did she go? What happened to DeMaria? As Mary pries at the cracks in the careful facades surrounding the two missing girls, old wounds will bleed fresh and force her to confront a horrible truth.

Maybe there are no nice girls, after all.

“Complex characters, questionable choices, and conflicted feelings about who we are and the people we leave behind combine in a compelling thriller that will have you flipping pages to discover how it all fits together.”— Darby Kane, #1 internationally bestselling author of Pretty Little Wife

“Nice Girls finds itself among the most haunting of mysteries, those that resonate with our current affairs, like Alyssa Cole’s When No One Is Watching and Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind. Perfect for the millennial armchair detective, Nice Girls will satisfy your true crime addiction and intensify your desire for justice.”— Paperback Paris

©2021 Catherine Dang (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers

A solid debut. Great narration.

While not perfect, this was an enjoyable and gripping debut full of suspence and interestingly ambiguous characters with a healthy dose of social commentary. I would recommend it to others, and I look forward to future novels by Ms. Dang.

It was also enhanced by the excellent narration, which did a great job with the element of surprise and gave the experience a scary story / cinematic feel, so much so that I felt genuinely scared at times. I saw someone on Goodreads say that they enjoy listening to this narrator because her performances are so honest and raw that they sound like she's always pouring her heart out from a diary. Having listened to her narration before, I do agree, and I think the narration greatly helped us connect with Mary who isn't always easy to understand or like.

ALMOST a good book

Entertaining enough with a story that draws you in. Disappointed the main character had little to know personal growth or accountability for her actions , but the book also took place in a short timespan so I guess that’s realistic. Story of the murdered girls had me hooked and I needed to know whodunnit.

However, they should have gotten a different narrator. The different voices were almost comical and weirdly sounded stuffed up (hard “T” sounds came out more like “D”) and it sounded like a British person affecting an over exaggerated American accent. Probably wouldn’t listen to another book with the same narrator honestly.

Not Nice Girls

After reading the synopsis, I had high hopes for Nice Girls. Unfortunately, the writing style, the story, and the continual bad choices by the main character left me wondering why this book was written. If it is supposed to be an example of the effects of unmanaged mental illness, it falls far short, as that message is not presented or if that message was intended to be a subtle undertone, it was far too subtle for that intention. The writing style is one where the listener or reader is repeatedly given a presentation of what is happening now, and left wondering what happened such that the main character is in the current situation, what took place before. And other times, there is a presentation of what happened years ago that is going through the main character's thoughts when action is called for, and there is little or no action. This book is an example of how people should not act - speculating on flimsy evidence about who might have been involved in a serious crime and acting on it in such a way it puts people in life-threatening situations, learning about the true source of a killing and not involving or revealing that to authorities - doing these things is wrong. The best i can say about Nice Girls is that it is an example of a not very nice girl and how NOT to act.