I received an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of this book from Colored Pages Blog Tour and Simon Teens. This has not impacted my rating and this review is voluntary.
- Genre: Young Adult
- Published by: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
- Publish date: July 25, 2023
- Number of pages: 416 pages
- Author’s website: https://www.joellewellington.com/
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A Black teen desperate to regain her Ivy League acceptance enters an elite competition only to discover the stakes aren’t just high, they’re deadly, in this searing thriller that’s Ace of Spades meets Squid Game with a sprinkling of The Bachelor.
You must work twice as hard to get half as much.
Adina Walker has known this the entire time she’s been on scholarship at the prestigious Edgewater Academy—a school for the rich (and mostly white) upper class of New England. It’s why she works so hard to be perfect and above reproach, no matter what she must force beneath the surface. Even one slip can cost you everything.
And it does. One fight, one moment of lost control, leaves Adina blacklisted from her top choice Ivy League college and any other. Her only chance to regain the future she’s sacrificed everything for is the Finish, a high-stakes contest sponsored by Edgewater’s founding family in which twelve young, ambitious women with exceptional promise are selected to compete in three mysterious events: the Ride, the Raid, and the Royale. The winner will be granted entry into the fold of the Remington family, whose wealth and power can open any door.
But when she arrives at the Finish, Adina quickly gets the feeling that something isn’t quite right with both the Remingtons and her competition, and soon it becomes clear that this larger-than-life prize can only come at an even greater cost. Because the Finish’s stakes aren’t just make or break… they’re life and death.
Adina knows the deck is stacked against her—it always has been—so maybe the only way to survive their vicious games is for her to change the rules.
Rating: 4/5
Whoa, this was violent in a way that I did not expect but I totally should have with the “Squid Games” reference. This is just a reminder that teenage girls can be vicious if the stakes are high enough.
There is so much going on in this novel without enough time to develop the characters nor give us time to mentally process what’s going on. I think I would have loved this as a duology or trilogy where these games take place over a month or longer instead of a week. This way we would get time to know the characters in a way that could make their triumphs or failures more emotional. Then, the games could have been more involved and I wish we had gotten more time in them and maybe even more of the lore/history behind them. All this to say that I think this novel could have really benefited from more world-building or, I guess, setting-building?
That being said this book was incredible as it was! We get a nightmare of elitism and sexism to the extreme with a heroine/MC who is smart, relatable, and tenacious and seeks to not only win the games but burn down the system. You have morally gray characters and some evil with a capital E
The games Joelle Wellington invented are truly diabolical and I would love to see this play out visually if it were to be adapted into a TV show or movie.
Have you read this book? What are your thoughts? I’d love to know!
Musings by Michelle 
This actually sounds like a really good novel so I’ll be on the look out for it.
Thanks for taking the time to read my review! If you end up picking up the book, I hope you enjoy it!