A book that takes you through the trials and tribulations of being a high school girl with an unresolved life. Iris Blackthorn’s sister is missing. A funeral buried a n empty coffin and an incomplete police file with it. That is until the mayor’s daughter goes missing and things may not be as they seem. This book takes the reader on a captivating journey of solving crime in the hope of all the ends being tied up in a neat bow. That’s all Iris needs- closure. Is there more to the missing girls than we first think? Is Iris hiding something from us? A brilliant mystery that enthral from beginning to end.

A new YA book that follows a teen detective agency. The protagonist is Iris, whose sister disappeared. Her ex-girlfriend Heather is doing a podcast about when she disappears.

Initially, this gave me Good Girl’s Guide vibes with the podcast prologue. However, I didn’t connect with the characters’ voices here like I did in that one. The writing style just wasn’t as much for me. Others might enjoy it more though!

I absolutely loved this book! It follows Iris and her underground sapphic detective agency as they investigate the disappearance about Heather, Iris' ex-girlfriend who disappeared right after release of a controversial episode of her true crime podcast, How to find a Missing Girl. The podcast investigated the disappearance of Iris' older sister, Stella, the year before, and who has still not turned up. Between trying to avoid getting into trouble with the police and navigating a possible rekindled friendship, Iris has a lot on her plate and time is running out.
This book is as chaotic as it sounds and it is brilliant. It is a fast-paced YA thriller that had me changing my mind on what actually happened but I never guessed it. The story was set up really well as we learn about the societal structure of the town it's set in and this provides the perfect backdrop for the story and its characters. I loved the sapphic detective agency. It was great representation and just such a fun group of friends. I also loved watched Iris' and Lea's relationship develop. There were so many new leads and information each chapter yet it all tied together perfectly. I stayed up late to finish this because I was so desperate to find out what happened! Such a thrilling, engaging book and I highly recommend.

This novel was okay. The characters I couldn't connect with in this genre. I think I need something with more meaning as this felt very materialistic.

Cheerleader Stella Blackthorn went missing a year ago, everyone in her town assumed she had just run away. Her younger sister Iris still believes she wouldn’t have just run away. Now, a year later another girl goes missing, this time it’s Iris’ ex, so her and her friends who have set up an amateur detective agency are determine to find out what happened.

Right of the bat, this whole book gave me very AGGGTM vibes which I was here for, it has a very diverse group of characters. I did find it a bit slow at the start but once I fully got into it, I couldn’t put it down because I needed to know what was going to happen.
I am also a sucker for any book that is mixed media so I really liked the podcast aspects breaking up the chapters


Thankyou to @Hodder and @netgalley for sending me an advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest review.
This book comes out on the 21st September

This is a slow mystery that builds in intensity. I enjoyed the atmosphere and the use of the podcast, but some of the characters were hard to connect with. Overall a decent book!

I received a copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review

What a stonking mystery and sapphic read! I am here for it. I did suspect early that it may be someone, but the book moved so fast and none of the suspects felt too obviously red-herring-y and felt that there was good reasoning for all the suspicion. Also the aspect of the possible link between the disappearances was so good too :)

I really liked Iris and her sapphic detective agency! She’s a lil messed up and a lot amazing and i adore her and the gang. This fits so well with my other fave fictional teen detectives in VMars and Pip <3

More please! 4.5 stars.

How to Find a Missing Girl is one of the best YA mysteries I have read this year. It is a searing and startling story, full of love, grief and trauma.

This book consumed my every waking thought. It is an incredibly well plotted and twisty thriller pulsing with anger, sadness and a complex look at grief and guilt. Wlosok sits in these emotions, allowing them to fully spill over and unfold. They are presented in a full range of complexities. Iris personifies these complexities. She is a young woman embittered by her experiences with law enforcement and their failure to care about her sister’s disappearance. Yet she is also fiercely passionate, driven and determined. Her perceptiveness and intelligence serve her well as an amateur sleuth, but I also like how realistically messy and mistaken her investigation can be. It adds a layer of authenticity that brings grit under the fingernails of the book.

This is a book that wears its heart on its sleeve. Those emotions filter through every word and page. One place that they shine brightest through is in the depiction of true crime. It weighs both the positives and the negatives of this social phenomenon. We turn violent stories of loss into neatly packaged television episodes, documentaries and podcasts. The central podcast here is edged with personal grievances, but also a dogged sense of wanting to find the truth at all costs. Wlosok again sits in the grey, showing both the murky ethics and the potential benefits. Also, this is an incredibly twisty and dark slice of life. I gasped at some of the twists, having everything I thought I knew immediately upturned. There are some truly heart-breaking sequences. I must warn you that Wlosok is not afraid to shed some blood on the page.

How to Find a Missing Girl is ridiculously brilliant. It takes the bare bones of true crime and examines them thoroughly, weaving in a nuanced depiction of the real people affected by these vicious crimes.

This book drew me in as it felt similar to the good girls guide to murder books which I love. The book starts very slow and less mature than other YA of this style I've read. It took me a fair while as I kept losing interest in the characters but I did enjoy the writing style change when the transcripts happened. I wish this style was kept for the main text as I found those sections really engaging. I took the majority of the book before I was engrossed and I ended up finishing about the last third of the book on an afternoon. Overall I would describe it as a good starting text for those young adults just getting into the crime genre and it still has a feel of high school clique type books about it so a good seqway. I hope to read more of this author and see how their writing style progresses.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for an ebook ARC of this book in exchange for this honest review.

This book has quite a few similarities to A Good Girls Guide to Murder (mainly the chapters being split by date and time, and the transcripts splitting up chapters).

The book has a very slow start which from the get go made me consider whether I would even continue reading or put it down because it wasn't making me want to continue. However, it was actually the transcripts of the podcast that drew me in and got my attention. The writing style seemed different during these sections - more mature and gave the right amount of information to lure you in without giving away too much.
The use of "ex-best-friend" and "ex-girlfriend" was severely over used, and got to a point where every time I read it I was mentally rolling my eyes which threw me off reading for a few sentences. It would have been much smoother if the people's names were just used after mentioning that they were ex-best-friends and ex-girlfriend the first 2 times.

I did begin to enjoy the book at about 35/40%, but it truly got my attention at approximately 75/80% when it was all coming together and tying up all the loose ends and questions. It left me unable to put the book down as I just needed to finish and find out exactly what happened. Even though I did not love this read, I did enjoy it, and I will most definitely be keeping an eye out and reading any more books by Victoria Wlosok.

This was a nice twist to the tropes that Good Girls Guide to Murder YA books started, with a more diverse cast and as equally fast paced mystery. If you liked Holly Jackson's novel, this is your next read!

Thank you to NetGalley for this advanced copy.

I was really excited to read this, but sadly it just didn't quite live up to my expectations. I felt the writing to be quite juvenile and the behaviour of the main character was incredibly irritating at times. There were many instances of things she did that were quite unbelievable and wouldn't ever happen in 'real life'. I totally understand that this is fiction but it really took me out of the story.

There were also occasions of the same phrase being used over and over again (eg. my ex-best-friend) to describe someone instead of using their name, which I found to be quite distracting.

The plot itself was quite engaging but the characters and writing didn't really work for me. I don't read a huge amount of YA any more so perhaps that had an impact on my enjoyment.

I would definitely try another book by this author in the future as I believe this was a debut.

I found this book quite similar to a good girl’s guide to murder (although the main character wasn’t as cool as pip). There is plenty of betrayal, drama and secrets that keep you reading. Also the inclusion of queer and gender non conforming characters was nice to see.

The podcast scenes were very reminiscent of AGGGTM, but I enjoyed how they broke up the narrative and the visual display of text. I loved the revelations in the last 100 or so pages. Most of it I didn’t predict. And the villain was not who I was expecting!

This book was fun! I've been following the author on tiktok for a while so I was super excited to get this as an ARC. I've recently discovered that teenage murder novels are very enjoyable for me in general so I was eager to read another. HTFAMG did not disappoint. I love that Victoria started writing it as a teen too because it adds a layer of authenticity that many YA authors fail to achieve.

I liked that all the characters were well fleshed out as people outside of the main character even if we didn't see much of them. I did find Iris kind of annoying, but that's totally in line with YA protagonists anyway so that made sense. Plus she wasn't SUPER annoying. There were a couple points where I thought "no, you idiot! you need to do this thing!" But then turns out it was fine and I was worrying over nothing.

The most unusual thing about the book was the diversity, I wasn't expecting it. It was good, although some of it initially threw me off. All of it made sense (after all, queer kids attract queer kids) but I think maybe the thing with Lea having six fingers is what got me. It felt kinda arbitrary and like there was a diversity tick box the author was checking and that was the solution for one of them, but I'm not sure which one? Because it wasn't a disability yet also there wasn't a disabled character (that I noticed). It's not a big deal and I'm not going to complain about representation but it did pull me out of the story for a second.

Plot wise: I'm usually pretty good with mystery plots but there were enough twists that I didn't know who the killer was until the reveal. The story follows a normal murder mystery formula type but it still felt original which was great.

Also the cover is cute and the characters are cute. I like this book and would recommend it.

This book was very gripping and I enjoyed the plot, it just lacked a little something, but was still good

I really struggled with what to rate this book. I ummed and ahhhed and flipped back and forth between 3.5 and 4 stars, but ultimately I ended up going for 4.

The premise for this book is fantastic: sapphic detective agency, being gay and solving crime. And things get even gayer and even more crime-y when a local girl disappears and obviously our main character and her crime solving pals have to investigate what’s gone on.

As always, I’ll get the negative out of the way first. For me, I was expecting just a bit more from this book than was given. I've read a few books this year that have a similar sort of plot to this one where a girl goes missing and then someone non-law enforcement chooses to investigate and in every single book the exact "same" character is the bad guy and this book is no different, it's the same old character who is ruining a young girl's life. So that left me slightly disappointed.

Spoilers are included in this next paragraph so please skip ahead if you wish to avoid those.

The other thing that let me down is the fact that in every single one of these books the girls end up dead. Now that's not to say there's anything wrong with killing off your characters, but it would be nice to see the girls in these types of novels survive for once. There was so much potential for Stella to be alive in this novel, and even for Heather to come out of this one alive, but alas the author chose to go in a different direction. Maybe I'm just fed up of girls being murdered in these books, but this one is more personal preference over an actual issue with the novel.

SPOILER FREE FROM HERE ONWARDS

Now onto the positives. I think this book had some really great characters, and the core characters are a joy to read about. Similarly, the author does a great job at connecting us with the characters who are only spoken about, and I really liked both Heather and Stella even though they don’t really play “active” roles on the page (obviously Heather plays an important role in the plot but she’s never really on page herself). I think it would have been cool to get some of the backstory of El and Iris as even though they were a cute couple it sort of comes out of nowhere as we miss a lot of their friendship as it happens in the past.

Overall, I enjoyed this book but I think there were a few things which could’ve been developed a bit just to add an extra layer of depth to the story and the characters.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC, and I look forward to seeing what the author does next.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for a copy of this book. All opinions are 100% my own.

I’ve heard so many good things about this book and went in expecting to love it so I’m so disappointed that I didn’t.

This book is very similar to other young adult mysteries, such as a good girls guide to murder and two can keep a secret. Fans of these books will enjoy this one I’m sure.

I enjoyed the last 3rd of this book as the pacing was spot on and the story became really gripping. The twists were unpredictable and the sequence of events leading up to this was really interesting. I struggled to get fully into the book before this as the main characters dialogue dragged out too much. The podcast transcripts though broke up the chapters nicely and stopped the first half of the book being boring.

The characters are very diverse, which is really refreshing to see. However, there are too many names popping up throughout this book who seem like pointless characters with very little to add to the plot.

Fun fiction. This an older YR, YA and up murder mystery detective thriller, with sapphic/LBTGQ+ themes. A sort of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys feeling, updated for the TikTok generation. Lots of Senior High School teenage banter and angst between the characters. Thank you to Hachette Children’s Books and NetGalley for the ARC. The views expressed are all mine.

This book gave the same feeling as A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder, intriguing, exciting and keeping you on your toes. Through lots of guess work, I could never have guessed who the killer was and I only wish Iris had more time with her big sister. The author made Iris incredibly relatable through her character flaws and I definitely recommend.

There were definitely things I liked about this book:

- it is diverse
- the Podcast
- the mystery itself is interesting and keeps you reading
- there are plenty of twists and turns
- I didn’t see the reveal coming

For me the characters just fell a little flat and I didn’t really find myself caring a huge amount for them which meant I felt less invested in the actual plot.

I am sure plenty of people will really enjoy this YA thriller but in my opinion there are better ones out there.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my early copy in exchange of a fair and honest review.