New Girl

New Girl
Paige Harbison
314 pages
Publisher: HarlequinTeen
Source: NetGalley
★★★★☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

Appropriately titled, New Girl is a novel about a girl who transfers to a private boarding school named Manderly.  Upon arrival, she learns she's taken the spot of a girl who went missing at the end of the previous year.  The scandal is filling the school with rumors - Becca was either dead, alive and planning a flashy return, or pregnant somewhere in hiding, waiting to give birth.  Either way, the new girl was catching a lot of flack for taking Becca's spot.

It's been years since I've read the novel Rebecca, but I noticed several parallels, which I really enjoyed.  New Girl is filled with drama, in a good way.  I really felt bad for the new girl who had to come into all that drama and be targeted in it even though she never even knew Becca.

You might notice the "new girl" doesn't have name in my review - that's because her name isn't revealed until practically the last page of the novel - a plot device I thought was fantastic.  The new girl was treated so poorly by most of her fellow students, it was like she'd lost her identity.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book, though it did get redundant for me.  The new girl would do something and then her roommate, Dana, would cuss her out for trying to emulate Becca.  This happened over and over.  By the end of the book I was like, "I get it already!  What happens in the end?"  The ending was super though, I really enjoyed it.

Four stars!  I loved the parallels between New Girl and Rebecca, but parts in the middle of the novel got redundant.

New Girl is out January 31st so be sure to preorder today!