People Like Us by Dana Mele
- lucysbookishbabble
- Jul 5, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 6, 2020
Kay has her fair share of skeletons, but she gets to leave them behind when she is accepted into a private boarding school. At Bates, she is able to reinvent herself as the star soccer player and perfect mean girl. Flash forward to senior year and the body discovered pre-skinny dipping ritual threatens to send Kay back to her poor, small-town life.
People Like Us gives off my favorite boarding school/rich girl vibes and I am so here for it. A big part of the plot revolves around the mean girls of the school and how their actions hurt others and each other more than they ever fully realize. The mean girls storyline is also really fun to read (especially if you aren’t a mean girl).
I used to really dislike murder/suspense novels in YA, but Karen M. McManus’ novel One of Us Is Lying really turned me on to the genre. One of the things that both these stories have in common is the character dynamics. The characters in both stories are very 3-dimensional in the sense that they are capable of good, bad, and can really surprise the reader. I think that the character dynamics are a part of what makes Mele’s story so enthralling. There are various kinda-sorta love triangles and will-they won’t-they storylines that are achieved by the characters being so expansive.
If you haven’t read People Like Us, I would advise stopping here and going to check it out because I’m about to drop some major spoilers…
Most of People Like Us is well-paced and engaging, but the ending is just “meh”. I personally believe Mele had several characters that would have been much more interesting murders than Nola. When I read that Nola was the killer, it almost felt like a cop-out on Mele’s part. While Nola’s story makes sense, it just feels to easy and not juicy enough.
In my opinion, Brie would have been a much more interesting murderer and throughout the story, it felt like they were exploring that possibility. Brie being the murderer would have highlighted the issues in her and Kay’s friendship. Kay and Brie’s relationship was filled with distrust, lies, and hurt not to mention it was SUPER toxic! I think that Kay and Brie staying friends in the end also makes the reader excuse the toxicity in their relationship when we should not be endorsing relationships that are co-dependent or all the mean things they did to each other.
If Brie was the murder she could have been motivated to hurt Kay after she chooses Spencer at the party, and this would also motivate her to hurt Spencer. Jessica and Brie hadn't gotten along since freshman year, which explains why Brie would use her as the target. While there are definitely plot holes in that explanation, I still think it is so much more interesting than Nola's.
While the ending was weak, I did really like how Mele slowly weaved bits and pieces of Kay's brother and best friend's story into the murder plotline. This added another layer of suspense to the novel and explained why Kay is the way she is, and why Bates is so important to her. The scene where Kay travels home and her parents tell her the reason she had to go to Bates was that she couldn't move on from Todd was really powerful.
Overall, People Like Us is highly enjoyable and I would recommend it to fans of One of Us Is Lying and We Were Liars. Happy reading!!
Order on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/People-Like-Us-Dana-Mele/dp/1524741701/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=people+like+us&qid=1594053066&sr=8-3
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