Imaginary Girls

Imaginary Girls
Nova Ren Suma
348 pages
Publisher: Dutton
Source: library
★★★★★

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

Warning: I am about to gush over this novel.

I was blown away by this novel.  I was first struck by the sheer beauty of Suma's writing.  I don't know how she does it, but the writing was gorgeous and at times almost poetic.  Her ability to use her words to create scenes was superb and the descriptions were fantastic.  Imaginary Girls is definitely one of the best written novels I've read in 2011.

The next thing I was blown away by was the plot.  The longer the book went on, the creepier the plot got and the more I wondered about what was really going on with Ruby behind the scenes.  The book started off normally enough, or as normal as any book where the main character accidentally finds a dead body in a reservoir during a party.  Because of all the questions surrounding those circumstances, Ruby's younger sister Chloe leaves her small New York town to live with her father in Pennsylvania.  Then suddenly Ruby appears out of the blue and takes Chloe back to New York.

That's when things start getting really creepy.  Like when Chloe sees that the dead girl, London, is somehow back to life and no one seems concerned about that, at all...

Imaginary Girls was a creepy mystery with a creepy ending.  And I don't mean creepy as in it will scare you and keep you up at night, I mean creepy as in you're left wondering throughout the whole book, "What is really going on here?"  It's hard to describe, but the eerie aspects of this book were part of what made it so beautiful.  I really cannot encourage you to read it enough.

On a side note, I did read some reviews where the reviewer stated they were confused over the plot.  I would just like to say that I found nothing confusing about this book at all.  You cannot skim this book, you have to savor every word.

FIVE STARS!  Read it!