Editors Reads Verdict
Ware's strongest literary novel: the Oxford setting gives The It Girl an elegiac quality, and the investigation into April — who was charming, difficult, and ultimately unknowable — is more about the nature of obsessive friendship than it is about crime.
What We Loved
- The Oxford setting carries specific weight — the closed hierarchies of the college give the book an elegiac quality Ware's other thrillers don't need
- The investigation circles the question of who April actually was, rather than merely what happened to her — a more sophisticated thriller structure
- The Hannah-April friendship is the most fully realized relationship in Ware's body of work
- The mystery mechanics are sound and the social world of the Oxford college is precisely rendered
Minor Drawbacks
- Readers seeking Ware's faster, more visceral psychological twists may find this more literary pace slower than expected
- April's deliberate unknowability is thematically intentional but can make the emotional stakes feel diffuse
- The pregnancy subplot occasionally interrupts the cold-case momentum without adding sufficient thematic return
Key Takeaways
- → Some people are fundamentally unknowable because they are always performing — charisma can be a form of concealment
- → Obsessive friendship in youth carries as many psychological dangers as romantic obsession, but receives far less critical scrutiny
- → A closed conviction can feel like closure while leaving the truth entirely unexamined
- → Revisiting the past with adult understanding reveals what proximity and infatuation concealed in the moment
- → The most compelling cold cases are the ones where the victim's identity is itself the mystery
| Author | Ruth Ware |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Scout Press |
| Pages | 384 |
| Published | July 12, 2022 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Thriller, Psychological Thriller, Mystery |
The It Girl Review
April Clarke-Cliveden was the kind of person who made everyone around her feel simultaneously chosen and peripheral. Brilliant, reckless, magnetically cruel, she dominated the Oxford college she and Hannah shared a decade ago — until she was murdered at the end of their first year by John Neville, the college porter, a crime that seemed conclusively resolved. Now Neville has died in prison insisting he was innocent, and a journalist contacts Hannah with evidence that the conviction may have been wrong.
Hannah, heavily pregnant and trying to build a stable life, is pulled back into the most destabilizing year she ever lived through.
The It Girl is Ware’s strongest literary novel, and it stands apart from her earlier work in ways that are immediately apparent. The Oxford setting carries a specific kind of weight — the closed world of an old college, with its hierarchies and traditions and the particular intensity of first-year friendships — that gives the book an elegiac quality her other thrillers have not needed to reach for. Ware writes the past with warmth and the present with strain, and the contrast illuminates what losing April cost Hannah beyond the obvious horror of the crime.
What distinguishes the novel within Ware’s catalog is its central preoccupation: not what happened to April but who April actually was. The investigation, as Hannah re-interviews former friends and classmates, keeps circling back to that question. April was impossible to know clearly because she was always performing. The thriller is built around an absence — a personality too dazzling to see through — and Ware handles that structural difficulty with considerable sophistication.
The mystery mechanics are sound, the Oxford social world is precisely rendered, and the emotional core — the friendship between Hannah and April, which was never entirely healthy — is the most fully realized relationship in Ware’s body of work.
Our rating: 4.1/5 — Ware’s most literary and emotionally nuanced thriller, a cold-case mystery that doubles as a meditation on obsessive friendship and the unknowability of those we love.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The It Girl" about?
Ten years ago, Hannah's Oxford roommate April — beautiful, charismatic, and impossible to ignore — was murdered by the college porter. The case seemed closed. Now the porter has died in prison claiming innocence, and new evidence suggests the wrong man was convicted. Hannah must revisit the most disorienting year of her life.
What are the key takeaways from "The It Girl"?
Some people are fundamentally unknowable because they are always performing — charisma can be a form of concealment Obsessive friendship in youth carries as many psychological dangers as romantic obsession, but receives far less critical scrutiny A closed conviction can feel like closure while leaving the truth entirely unexamined Revisiting the past with adult understanding reveals what proximity and infatuation concealed in the moment The most compelling cold cases are the ones where the victim's identity is itself the mystery
Is "The It Girl" worth reading?
Ware's strongest literary novel: the Oxford setting gives The It Girl an elegiac quality, and the investigation into April — who was charming, difficult, and ultimately unknowable — is more about the nature of obsessive friendship than it is about crime.
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