Undead Girl Gang by Lily Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
After the small town of Cross Creek suffers the loss of three of its local girls, apparently to suicide, things begin to get strange.
Mila Flores, a student at Fairmont Academy, was best friends with one of the girls, Riley, and she knows there is no way Riley would have ever been part of a suicide pact.
For one thing, Riley wasn’t even really friends with the other girls, June and Dayton, resident ‘It’ girls. Sure, June dated Riley’s brother for a while but that certainly didn’t make them close enough to develop death day promises.
Mila suspects foul play but no one is listening to her. Feeling abandoned, misunderstood and unheard, she decides to take matters into her own hands to find our who murdered Riley.
Finding a spell in an ancient grimoire that states it will bring the dead back to walk the earth for 7-days, Mila thinks she knows how to get the answers she seeks. She will simply conjure Riley back and ask her what happened to her.
Unfortunately, the spell brings back not just Riley but June and Dayton as well. Now Mila is tied to a trio of snarky teenage zombies with only a week to figure out what happened to them.
Meanwhile, in her regular life, outside of zombie babysitting, Mila is starting to get closer to Riley’s older brother, Xander. Sure, most of their relationship is based on their mutual grief but she’s still not mad about it. She’s had a crush on him forever and it just seems right.
Even though this is a wild story with super humorous and engaging writing, there is also a lot of really good stuff in here with regards to friendship, loss, grief, body positivity, making yourself heard and finding strength within your self.
I am a firm believer in the concept of how powerful it can be to read the right book at the right time and for me, that was the case here. I am going through a lot of stress in my work life currently, so when picking this up, I was just looking for something engaging enough that it would get me out of my head for a while. If it made me laugh or think about deeper topics, even better. This book provided all of those things for me.
It was Heathers, Mean Girls and The Craft all mushed together into a hilarious little ball and I absolutely needed that. This was actually my first Lily Anderson book, although I own two others by her, and I really meshed well with her writing style. Definitely more excited to pick up those other two books now: The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You and Not Now, Not Ever.
Finally, a big thank you to the Dragons & Tea Book Club for FINALLY providing the impetus I needed to pick this one up! This was our September 2019 book and I loved it so much. Keeping this one on my shelves and could definitely picture myself revisiting this story next October. Really fun stuff!
