Book Review: Dead Girl Walking

Dead Girls Walking 

by Sami Ellis
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Unfortunately two stars is probably generous here. I should have DNF’d this. However I persevered; but didn’t really gain anything except more confusion in the end. I know this is a debut novel by a young writer. I understand what was being attempted; however, it was so poorly executed I’m shocked this was the ‘best’ final product. Sometimes when you are sent away by many, many publishers it’s because your book needs too much work. More work than an editor can reasonably provide. I believe that to be the case in Dead Girls Walking.
To keep this from being me ranting let me summarize some of the key issues I had:

• no rules are ever really set-up for the world and it’s resurrection style magic. There’s an attempt early-on but every time I turned around a rule is proven wrong
• it is possible to have too many twists and turns. In order to make a book feel cohesive, readable (ie: plot can be followed), and seem ‘realistic’ inside the confines of magic set-up it needs to have some stickiness that keeps it all together. Dead Girls Walking is a flat hot mess of jumping around, attempts to be clever that all fall down because nothing seems to fit together properly 
• our leading girl is annoying. Her obsession with identifying herself as a monster for no real reason (besides her father is a serial killer) really bugged me. Especially as you learn some of the spoilers in the story… she clearly knows right from wrong even early on in the story. I think a survivors guilt complex would have been a smarter way to go
• the attempt to connect this all to a fictional novel written by a person close to the family is bizarre. We never get any real info about the novel (some excerpts with little context), and our heroine hasn’t read the book (which is also weird…); as she is our only POV we get snippets of the novel in the text but no real analysis of it. In some ways the inclusion of the novel tries to set boundaries for the magic (and maybe solutions?) but it felt gimmicky and incomplete 
• finally, the first third of the book feels like it’s about a completely different type of ghost/horror story than the rest. The ghost set-up went from tiny to huge with little transition. I really want to read what the story should have been within the confines of the set-up of the first part of the novel. Instead it grew so quickly and by the halfway point Dead Girls Walking had become outrageous and out of control. There’s no real pacing, attention to timeline details, or magical rules to help define the world. Unfortunately for me that means it just didn’t ‘stick’ together well. 

Overall, Dead Girls Walking has a bunch of poorly written fairly gory scenes, illogical plot jumps, a very annoying lead character, upside down twists that don’t fit, and no real cohesion. I’d love to read the story of lesbian girls at a ‘horror themed’ camp (who are obsessed with a real crime nearby) learning about the crime and themselves at the same time. That is the book I want to read. Unfortunately, while this is billed as such, it’s far from what I had expected or hoped for based on the blurb.

Please note: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. This is an honest and unbiased review.

Follow up on Goodreads