There was much to admire and enjoy in this book, but I think it was a case of personal taste, because I didn't quite click with it. I will read more from this author though.

I couldn't read this as an ebook for some reason so will get it when it comes out! Sorry! (Leaving a 4 star review to be fair.)

4/5 stars! I really liked the cover of this book. It was like a new vibe take on "The Girl on the Milk Carton," which was a favorite of mine growing up. Up to the last 10% of this book, I really bought into the creepiness and mystery of these traumatized teens. My only let down was that the ending was more speculative than definitive, which I do not like in mysteries. But I enjoyed the character development and the majority of the twists.

I received an advance review copy for free through NetGalley, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

The sense of place in this novel is astonishing. I really felt like I was there, in this paranoid little community, terrified about what horrors lurked the shadows. A really impressive horror novel that tipped its hat to the likes of Stephen King and Twin Peaks, but delivered its own original story of small-town terror.

Firstly, love the pun of the name. That was very well done. Secondly, this was..... unexpected! I didn't really understand what was happening for quite some time, but when it did start making sense, oh boy! This was grotesque yet intriguing. The story was just the right balance of weird and wild, but also offered hope of redemption and acceptance regardless of who you are at your core. What a wild book

A brilliantly written twisty tale full of secrets, well developed characters, and a complex plot that kept me guessing from start to finish. I couldn’t put it down and it’s a story I will remember. I’m excited to see what the author writes next, i will definitely be checking it out.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC of this title. It has a fantastic opening but, for me, went a bit slow after. That said, my teens will love it!

Three girls went walking in the woods near Little Hope. Three friends, young teenagers, who face all the usual problems of teenage life and aren’t part of the school “cool” crowd. There’s not much of note happens in Little Hope but when the three girls don’t all return safely from their walk suddenly a small town has a lot going on.

Two of the girls return, covered in blood and with no memory of what happened on their walk – or so they say. Their third friend, Kat, remains somewhere in the woods and search parties are organised. People come out in big numbers to search for the missing girl but the searches are not successful and Kat’s mother, Marybeth, becomes increasingly frustrated at the perceived lack of endeavour and commitment from the police to continue the searches.

The great writing in this story comes from the dilemma which the two other girls face. Donna and Rae are not talking about what happened in the woods. They both know they are going through a personal trauma and internal turmoil but until they can get together and discuss what happened to them they are not saying anything. And who would believe them anyway? The other great part about this book is the way the authors capture the angst and frustrations of teenage drama. The blurb describes it as a story for Stranger Things fans and I can think of no better comparison. Spooky instances, most people oblivious to an unseen danger and distinctly odd twists to the story.

What I initially didn’t take in was that the blurb does not just compare Girls of Little Hope to Stranger Things but also to The Thing. Yup – big clue there that this book was actually a horror tale. I’d been enjoying a well written mystery novel – the characters were entertaining, their problems had me hooked and the investigation into the “walk in the woods” story was starting to reveal some discrepancies in what Donna and Rae were telling the police. Why did the girls lie about where they were walking? Were they lurking near the home of a dangerous local criminal? Who else may know where Kat could be found?

Girls of Little Hope wasn’t the teen crime mystery I had been anticipating. It’s actually a mystery story which suddenly moves to creepy horror then raises the stakes further to move from creepy to outright carnage. Once things really kick off in Little Hope the town is never going to be the same again. As for Rae and Donna, they know what happened to Kat but it there anything which can be done to undo what’s gone before?

Despite being surprised by the slide from mystery to horror I was not disappointed – I love me a good horror story and Girls of Little Hope IS ad good horror story. The reader will care what happens to the three lead characters and will be more than a little shocked when they learn what really did happen in the woods.

Girls of Little Hope by Sam Beckbessinger & Dale Halvorsen is a smalltown coming-of-age horror story set in the town of Little Hope, California, in 1996.

After hearing about the Legend of Hope Gold Mine, three friends go in search of it one Summer. Only two return - but it's almost immediately evident that they're not telling the truth about what happened.

Donna, Rae & Kat make zines and enjoy investigating some of the town's legends, making sure to steer clear of notorious criminal Ronnie Gaskins, rumoured to have buried his parents alive. When the girls go to a cave to try and find the Hope Gold Mine, only Donna and Rae return. There's no sign of Kat, much to the horror of her mother, Marybeth, who is insistent that the other girls are hiding something from her.

Marybeth is also struggling with her own guilt over how she has raised Kat, pressuring her to get involved with beauty pageants from an early age and failing to hide her disgust when Kat intentionally gained weight to take control of her own self-image (and piss her mother off as a bonus).

As Marybeth investigates and gets closer to the truth, Donna and Rae quickly realise that the truth won't stay hidden for long... not in a small town like Little Hope.

I LOVED this. It reminded me of Point Horror, The Goonies, Fear Street, Goosebumps - all the horror I grew up with. The addition of Marybeth's story made for a compelling read, it's not often we get the POV of a parent in this kind of story and I really appreciated the insight into her character and how she became the way she was.

Rae's family, too, made for a clever, satirical look at a stereotypical conservative 1990s family in smalltown America. Their behaviour when they realised what was happening was darkly hilarious.

I loved the girls, I loved their friendship, and I really enjoyed this. It did have echoes of "My Best Friend's Exorcism" or the girls from the Hocus Pocus sequel, but it was a fun, gruesome, gory, nostalgic romp.

I went into this one relatively blind after receiving it in my @abominablebook box. @memydogandbooks, @booksbethanyreads, and I decided to buddy read, and I’m glad we did as our chat was really just full of constant “what is going on?!” messages!

I suspected, from the cover mostly, that this would be a horror/thriller about missing teenage girls who had got lost in the woods and/or kidnapped. Boy was I wrong. Without giving too much away this one goes from a typical missing kids story to body horror magnificence in 2.5 seconds. It was so disgustingly wonderful and completely worth it to receive pictures of Johanna’s disgusted faces as she was reading.

Please pick this up, you will be pleasantly surprised!

✩​​✩✩✩

I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this. A really strange plot and a really bizarre ending. I didn't hate it but I was just hoping for a more maybe modern take on a kind of Point Horror from the cover!

Huge thank you to NetGalley & Titan Books for the ARC of this book to read and review!

Girls of Little Hope was haunting, but in the most beautiful way, at no point did it feel too much or too scary, but it still maintained an air of fear and paranoia, culminating into this wonderfully eerie story that took my breath away at points.

The story itself was narrated by our 3 main characters, Kat, Rae, and Donna and getting to see chapters from each of their perspectives was a really clever way of telling the story whilst also allowing us to meet the characters. For me, it made the girls feel like more than just characters on a page, they felt real, they had hopes and dreams, and aspirations and lives and family issues, it helped to form an attachment with them.

I also really enjoyed how the other characters were woven into the story, they didn't become overbearing of the main characters and storyline, but they did have their own personalities and added real value to the book.

The whole book was just excellently done, the atmosphere that the author created was amazing I think the whole idea of a small town really helped with that vibe. And the writing was so well done, I really liked the way the author used mixed media within the book, it helped to really break the story up.

That being said, there were a few points that the writing felt a little tough to get through, just small paragraphs where I felt myself having to push to continue reading.

It was saved though by the plot, I couldn't put the book down! It could have so easily been another alien/body horror story, but the authors worked to add all of those extra layers to make it into a story that was so eerie and horrifying, yet so haunting and beautiful. Working in the fear of being stuck in a small town forever, coupled with teen drama and overly religious parents oppressing their child, plus a small town that had it's day a few decades ago and the residents were still trying to ride that high? PERFECTION!

I don't think this is something that I would read again, more so because once you know how the story has panned out it takes away some of that enjoyment and shock factor, you know what's coming so you lose that spark a little bit.

That doesn't mean that I didn't absolutely LOVE this book and would recommend it to anyone who wanted a little bit more of an elevated horror story, that has more than just blood and guts and cheap scares.

Fuelled by a desire for adventure and curiosity, three teenage girls hike into the woods, scale down a ravine, and enter a cave. Only two return.

Donna and Rae are shaken and disturbed. They dont know where Kat is, and they have very little memory of what happened during the period when their community was frantically searching for them.

Before you dismiss this as another 'young girls abducted and violated' tale, this novel is a very different beast!

The authors present a close-knit group of girls navigating adolescence. There is teenage angst, insecurities, unfulfilled parents trying to live through their offspring, the desire to become an individual, and the dreams of leaving a conservative hometown behind. You get a real sense of each girl's personality, their flaws, and their love for each other.

The novel is also dark - it depicts the terror of being consumed and transformed, including moments of well-executed body horror.

I loved it!! This is a great read (a perfect summer read) that melds coming-of-age with monsters!

While 80s nostalgia is still alive and well, nostalgia for the 1990s is becoming more and more prevalent; especially in the horror genre.

This brings us to Sam Beckbessinger and Dale Halvorsen's Girls of Little Hope which aims to remind of the good and the bad of this time period.

Remember we are living in a pre-internet and mobile phone era, so when someone goes missing its faces on milk cartons and newspaper appeals to try and track them down.

Our titular girls of the small American town of Little Hope, are Donna, Rae and Kat who are bonded by their tags as outsiders in school. When Kat goes missing the woods nearby, Donna and Rae claim to remember nothing under interrogation from the police.

Are they telling the truth or is there something more sinister afoot in Little Hope?

Beckbessinger and Halvorsen do a fine job of fleshing out our trio and their immediate family and really capture the small town paranoia of a missing person case.

Admittedly, there is a flip in Girls of Little Hope which you will either get on board with or not, but this never feels dull and the stakes are continually raised.

Nostalgia hounds and fans of missing person crime horror stories will lap this up.

Girls of Little Hope is a story of teen angst in 90s small town America. The eerie tale follows the story of an all-girl trio (Donna, Rae and Kat) and the strange goings-on in their hometown, Little Hope.

A monster-mystery of sorts, Girls of Little Hope is one for Stranger Things, Twin Peaks and The Thing fans. Although a little slow in pace, I was invested in the girls’ stories and struggled to put it down.

An exploration of female friendships in small town America, Girls of Little Hope unpacks important themes surrounding identity, relationships and trauma. More than just a missing girl narrative, the novel highlights the horrors, sufferings and injustices endured by young women in everyday life.

This is a must-read for fans of female bonds and nostalgic horror. I loved every minute of it!

Rated 4.5 really.

First off...DISCLAIMER: I requested this title on NetGalley. Thanks to Titan Books for providing an ecopy. This didn't influence my review in any way.

PUSHING THE LIMITS

Here's a fact for you: teen horror is on a roll, and has been for a while now. I think the main reason is that YA horror authors have taken to use the genre (and in this particular case, its tropes) to frame and enhance coming-of-age stories with tridimensional and compelling protagonists - an art that (most) YA thriller writers haven't mastered yet, at least in my experience. Girls of Little Hope is an excellent example of this genre-blending attitude: it starts off like a mystery, then adds a strong layer of teen characterisation, and ultimately punches you in the face with a familiar, but nonetheless unsettling horror trope, only to twist it into something that ties in with the characters' arc (call it a rite of passage if you will, though of a brutal and decidedly peculiar sort). [...]

TROPE BENDER

At the heart of Girls of Little Hope is the friendship among "wannabe rebel" Donna, "wallflower nerd" Kat and "preppy church girl" Rae - all fifteen years old. They couldn't be more different if they tried, but have bonded over their sense of displacement and their desire to push the boundaries of their boring, stifled lives in a small town (also, the story is set in the '90s - the book's chapters are even named after song titles from that decade! - and the sexism and prejudice of the era are accounted for, though at the end of the day, small towns probably haven't changed much since then). Each of the girls is interesting and relatable in her own way: Donna is the daughter of a single father and the owner of a grown-woman body who isn't about to get shamed for either; Kat is a former pageant queen who was finally able to leave the spotlight behind and to regain control over her life by turning herself fat; Rae is the closeted lesbian daughter of an ultra-religious family who cuts herself to relieve the pressure she's put under. The authors manage to elevate all three beyond the tropes they embody, so that they feel real and nuanced, and their friendship messy and fierce enough to give them even more depth and make the reader believe in them - and in it.
The fourth main character is Kat's mother Marybeth, on a quest to find her missing daughter; her chapters manage to put her relationship with Kat in perspective (especially when it comes to the whole pageant queen affair) and to bust yet another trope, but I found myself questioning her place in the novel at first, based on the appeal her character could have for a YA audience...until her pursuit came to an end and produced an outrageous twist that - again - had a lot more than shock value going for it, besides forwarding the plot in an unexpected, yet necessary direction.

LAST-MINUTE QUIBBLE

Admittedly, as much as I enjoyed this book, I have mixed feelings about the ending. I mean, yeah, it's off the beaten path, fitting and even empowering in its own way, plus it ties in with the friendship theme at the core of the story, but at the same time I thought that the characters I'd grown to love deserved better. The main issue I have with it, though, is that I can't see how a certain plan could work - or more precisely, be brought to completion (the novel doesn't explain the logistics, which is a good choice, on a purely narrative level). All in all though, it's just a small detail in the face of a gripping, disturbing yet heartwarming story - and I can't wait to see what the authors will come up with next (not to mention, to buy a copy of this book for my collection and for future rereads...).

I have a fair few books sitting on my reading pile, books that I've picked up to review long enough ago that by the time it's come to actually sit and read them I've kind of forgotten what the blurb was. This, often leads to pleasant surprises when I delve into a book that I sometimes don't even know the genre of. I agreed to review them, so I know that they at least sound like something I'm going to like. Girls of Little Hope might be the best time I've ever had with having picked up a book I've wanted to read and having forgotten what it's going to be about, and going into it without any foreknowledge is absolutely the best move to make. So, if you want a fantastic, surprising experience go grab a copy now and stop reading this review; otherwise, keep reading to find out more.

Girls of Little Hope begins with one of the most frightening experiences that a parent can go through, as three teenage girls vanish from their homes in the small town of Little Hope in the mid 90's. After being gone for three days, two of the girls, Donna, and Rae, return naked and screaming for help on the outskirts of town. Their friend, Kat, is still missing though. The girls seem to have little to no memory of what happened to them, and are unable to give the police much information to work with in their search for Kat. However, it's soon revealed that the girls are hiding something, and that more than they're letting on happened out in the woods.

As Donna and Rae try to fit back into their old lives after having gone missing, the rest of the town concentrates on trying to find Kat. Kat's mother, Marybeth is determined to find her daughter, and begins to suspect that the other two girls know more than they're letting on. With the search continuing to bear little results, Marybeth starts to take matters into her own hands.

The first half of Girls of Little Hope is a fairly normal mystery thriller story. Three girls go missing, two come back; where's the third girl? It's the kind of story that you've seen a dozen times before in film, TV procedurals, and in crime novels. Some folks have a secret, and that secret will come out. And, because I'd forgotten everything I'd read about this book I assumed that this was what the book was, that it was going to be fairly normal. And I was very much enjoying that.

The book spends a great deal of time letting you get to know the three girls, how their friendship formed, how they relate to each other, and why they feel like misfits in their quiet, sleepy community. Their characters becomes a huge focus, and you end up getting dragged into the story of Rae and Donna trying to put their lives back together. I loved seeing the relationship that Donna had with her dad and how past trauma's had formed a unique family unit; and resulted in a young girl determined to rebel against a system and way of life that she saw as unjust. This also acted as a strong counterbalance to Rae, who on the outside seemed to have the perfect life with parents, a sibling, a decent house, and a strong religious community around them. Learning that this was a thin veneer, and that Rae is living in an abusive household made you come to care about her very quickly.

We even learn a lot about Kat, even though she's not present in the narrative, thanks to her friend and mother constantly thinking about her, and small snippets taken from the pages of her diary. It's interesting to see the two sides of Kat that we get via this method. Her mother builds a picture of her sweet daughter having lost her way in her teens, turning her back on her beauty pageant hobby and, in her mothers view, wrecking her future prospects by gaining weight to rebel. Meanwhile, via her friends and her diary we see that Kat is flourishing as a teen, embracing parts of herself that she loves and wants to nurture, and that her gaining weight isn't some tragedy, but her creating an armour for herself.

As the book goes on we're given a number of possible suspects for who might have tried to harm Kat, there are ideas of where she might be and what might have happened. One of them, the first to be dismissed and the one that seems the most outlandish, is part of the account Rae tells Donna as she begins to remember part of what happened to them. That Kat was attacked by a monster in a cave. This is clearly the ravings of a girl going through trauma, some kind of false memory her mind has created to protect her from the events that really happened. There's no way that this crime story would take a hard turn halfway through with monster... right?

I won't say much about what happens in the latter half of the book, except that this interesting character driven mystery quickly changes tone in one of the most surprising and shocking ways. At least shocking when you've forgotten that the blurb mentions The Thing. The latter half of the book becomes an incredibly tense and frightening experience at times, and it's genuinely hard to try to predict the twists and turns that the authors are going to throw at you next.

Speaking of the authors, this book is written by a duo. I've read some books by dual authors where you can see the seams, and you can see very different styles from chapter to chapter when the authors split writing duties. But with Girls of Little Hope you'd be hard pressed to find this, and if you didn't know that it had two creators you'd never know. The two of them work very well together, and have clearly spent a decent amount of time working out how to work together in a way that serves the narrative best.

Girls of Little Hope is a hugely enjoyable experience. If you can read it not knowing that there's more here than it first appears all the better. It's like the literary equivalent of watching From Dusk Till Dawn and not knowing that this movie about a couple of criminals becomes a vampire horror half way in, or watching Predator thinking it's just going to be some macho action movie. Keep as much of what this book is about as quiet as you can, but try to get as many people as you can to give it a try.

What a ride. A chilling, gripping and brilliant horror novel that mixes media, features great characters and truly horrific moments.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Totally forgot that I am 45 reading this - I was a teenager in the 90s again. So much nostalgia of being the weird outcast back in the day, all nestled in a crazy, intriguing mystery which is littered with awesome little touches such as newsletter/magazine clippings. We have got multiple POVS mixed media, satanic panic, coming of age - It’s angsty, it’s relatable, it’s mind blowing, it’s gross, it’s cosmic, it’s a brilliant wee horror novel!

4.5 stars