WOWZA! I was on the edge of my seat while reading this book! I was instantly invested in the book from the very beginning and was turning those pages and huffing and puffing when life got in the way of my reading this gripping and shocking book! Christina Henry has knocked it out of the ballpark with this riveting book. Color me impressed!

Calista - wakes up in a home that she does not recognize with a little girl calling her mom and a husband she has never seen before. She has a job and responsibilities, but nothing feels right. She knows that this is not her real life but can't figure out what or how to get back to where she belongs. She knows something isn't right, she is unsettled and fearful. How did this happen to her?

Allie - has a birthday weekend trip planned with her friends and was shocked when her friend's boyfriends show up. To make matters worse, the driver did not take them to a beach house as planned but to a remote cabin in the woods. Nothing feels right about this cabin or location at all!

Maggie - wakes up in a strange location where she is told she must follow the rules and complete a maze. If she does not, harm will come to her daughter. She is not wearing her own clothing and does not know any of the women she is with. Something is seriously wrong!

Holy Moly! I was so engrossed in this book. I was on the edge of my seat, feeling all kinds of emotion ranging from anger, anxiety, concern, outrage, and hope. This book was like being on a never-ending roller coaster. The women are all different, they are all in different situations, and they are all facing danger.

I love suspense, mysteries and horror and this one was the perfect combination of all three. The pacing was fast as there is a lot on the line for the women in this book. I loved not knowing what was truly happening. As well as the female characters in this book, I had questions - a lot of them! Plus, this book reminded me of several movies such as The Cabin in the Woods, The Hunger Games, and The Stepford Wives to name a few.

This book was gripping, shocking, tense, and hard to put down! There is a lot of misogyny in this book, and I loved that the women were strong, intelligent, and not willing to back down!

The descriptions are vivid and there are some scary and gory scenes, not to mention a ton of spiders. ACK! There is also a lot of suspense, thrilling and shocking moments which will get the heart rate elevated and the pages flying!

I had so much fun reading this book and look forward to what Christina Henry writes next!

Well written, shocking, gripping, and hard to put down!

I love Christina Henry’s novels! They are always so unique and fun to read, even with the gore (especially because of the gore). This book brought me out of my current reading slump with characters that were bold and interesting. I highly recommend this book if you love badass women who aren’t afraid to do what needs to be done for survival.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this eARC of 'Good Girls Don't Die' by Christina Henry.

This is my first Christina Henry book and I sadly didn't enjoy it. I may enjoy her other work but this wasn't for me. It may be the genre or the fact I didn't really enjoy the characters but this book felt like it was dragging for me. If this is your type of book, go ahead and give it a shot.

When I first started reading this book, I was worried that I wasn’t going to enjoy it. I normally love Christina Henry’s books so was expecting to like this one. The more I read, the more I started to like it! It was an interesting storyline and I enjoyed reading it. I liked the horror aspect of this book as it wasn’t too scary. I did struggle with some of the characters at times, as they were sometimes annoying. However, I became intrigued and hooked on all of their storylines. I was a bit disappointed by the ending as it felt anti-climatic, but overall I enjoyed this book and will continue to read Christina Henry’s future books. I definitely recommend this book.

This is a very clever and intriguing book that follows 3 different women who have been placed in a fictional world with no idea of what is going on. I most enjoyed the classic cabin in the woods story where Allie and her friends end up with a killer on the loose but all 3 stories offer complexity and detailed settings that made me want to keep reading on. I also enjoyed the reveal at the end and thought the book was done brilliantly.

Have you ever read a horror or dystopian book and thought to yourself 'I would do better/live longer than the protagonist'?

That's exactly what Celia, Allie and Maggie believe, before they wake up in entirely new realities – for Celia, a creepy small town with a husband and child she doesn't recognise, where she's being framed for murder; for Allie, a trip to a cabin in the woods with a slasher villain picking her friends off one by one, and for Maggie, a high-stakes life-or-death maze she must complete to save her daughter. As the women fight to survive and escape their respective horrors, they must use their knowledge of their favourite genres and learn from the mistakes of popular protagonists. And most of all, they must stand strong against a misogynistic regime determined to see them fall.

The three separate stories are fantastic, each drawing on a recognisable genre with tropes any seasoned reader will spot. They give you all the thrills and chills of thrillers/light horror, but with the added mystery of how the women got there, why somebody put them there, and how they might escape. The writing style is cleverly simple, crafting fast-paced tales that are easy to read.

I also really like the three main characters – all from different walks of life, they fight for themselves, their families, strangers and respect. They portray female rage and human kindness in equal measure, and you want to see each of them succeed for different reasons.

I do think the story would have benefitted if the final section (where all the storylines meet) was a bit longer. After everything the women go through, the ending seems to arrive too quickly, and the explanations for their entrapment are made known but not elaborated on. I also think the ultimate villain could have been fleshed out a little more. The feminist themes are all very clear, but I think the villain reveal and subsequent conversations with him could have given those themes more nuance and impact.

All in all, a very different and twisty read.

I love Christina Henry. I have most of her novels in ebook, paperback, hardback, special editions, signed editions you name it. This isn't a brag, this is to give it weight when I say I hated Good Girls Don't Die.

The first three parts of the book were fun even if the characters monologues were sometimes repetitive and the male villains caricatures.

The ending had me in an almost blind rage. Never have I been so bludgeoned over the head with an 'ALL men are bad' message. This kind of modern day writing meant to fuel female rage is not healthy for impressionable minds, it creates the exact mindset that prevents me posting my review anywhere other than on goodreads. I won't be contributing to this novels publicity.

I'll still eagerly await the next Henry novel though, I may not have appreciated this one book but I loved the other nine I read before it.

I loved the premise of this book, however this did not hit the right notes for me. I can only suspend my disbelief to a certain extent and these stories definitely pushed those boundaries.
I also found it quite repetitive and the ending left me feeling very unsatisfied
From reading other reviews it seems I am in the minority on this one and so it may just have not been the book for me.
Thanks to Titan Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy of this book.

The blurb for this book really intrigued me. Three women are caught up in three scenarios that aren't quite real. The book is set so each story is told by the main woman and then the stories cone together at the end.

The first story with Cecila really gripped me and I couldn't stop reading. Cecila wakes up and doesn't know who she is and doesn't recognise her life, and she tries to live a "normal" day and make sense of it all. I really liked following her story and trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Allie goes away for the weekend with her friends, but not to the beach like she thought but to a cabin in the woods. I found that for a bunch of kids being stalked and attacked they were all a bit too level headed. The dialogue became repetitive and it didn't hold my attention

Maggie had been abducted along with 9 other women who must get through the maze if they are to live and see their loved ones. This had a very Squid Games feel. I enjoyed reading this one a little more and liked the diversity of characters.

My rating very much weighed heavy on the ending and this book ended abruptly. There was no explanation and all my questions were left u answered. It felt that the ending was rushed, I felt it could have had a way more exciting ending than it did.

Different from what I have read from Henry before and for the most part enjoyable but the ending let it down

If you're looking for a fast-paced story that pulls you in with so much mystery and you quickly get to witness it unravel and also spiral into madness... then this is for you!

You follow three women who slowly discover that things are not what they seem, and they appear to be stuck within their own favourite books/movies.

Celia wakes up in a home she doesn't recognise and has a family that she's never seen before.
Allie gets stranded in a cabin in the woods with a killer on the loose.
Maggie was kidnapped and thrown into a Hunger Games dystopian style maze!

I think everyone is agreeing on the fact that this story is so fun, so original and an entertaining read for sure, but it falls apart at the conclusion. When all three storylines end up being connected we get an underwhelming reveal, and a typical scooby-doo style of the 'villain' revealing all their secrets and how they set this up.

This is only my second read from Christina Henry and I'm still so impressed at her way of story telling so I will definitely be picking up her backlist! I think the Alice In Wonderland re-tellings might me more my style so let's see!

Thank you to NetGalley + Titan Books for the e-Arc in exchange for my honest review!

-Sarah

*peeps out window*
Has someone been spying on me? Taken all the things I love and tossed them into a delicious literary salad? Because that’s is exactly how it felt reading Good Girls Don’t Die! What a fun ride this one was!!! We have the whole locked room mystery, people waking in situations where all is not as it seems, slashers, murder mysteries, cabins in woods, mixed media, dystopian games, strong, vengeance seeking women…..sweet lord Christina Henry you are spoiling me! This books was pure escapism at a time where I needed nothing more than to escape. What an exciting and thrilling introduction to this author.

I’d recommend this book to:
You…and you….and you….(you get the idea right?!)

This was such an interesting premise! I'm new to Christina Henry as an author so I went into this basically blind, and I was immediately hooked. There are three stories in "Good Girls Don't Die" that at first seem unrelated, but it becomes clear rather soon that there's more going on.

The first story is about Celia who wakes up in a house she can't remember with a husband and child she can't remember, all the while plagued by weird thoughts about a life different to the one she is obviously leading. The second story introduces us to Allie who wants to go on a fun birthday trip with her two best girlfriends but ends up in a creepy cabin in the middle of some eerily quiet woods with her girls and their respective boyfriends - and a killer out to get them, as it turns out. In the third and last story, Maggie's daughter gets kidnapped and in order to save her, she has to complete a hunger games style survival parcour full of actual deathtraps.

That there is possibly some connection or at least an overarching theme becomes more and more obvious through the second story already. I thought all three plots were interesting, exciting and creepy in their own right, even though the characters often remained rather flat. But I still wanted them to get out of their troubles and come out on top, and I was really invested in the mystery of it all - up until the big reveal. Then it all went downhill.

It almost felt like a perfectly good setup was then ruined by a way too on the nose resolution. There were some good and important themes, but the execution was comically over the top. It felt rushed and borderline cartoonish, with sledgehammer messaging when a more subtle approach would have had so much more of an impact. So yeah, a perfectly fine horror-ish thriller with minor issues throughout that completely lost me with an underwhelming ending. Still, I'd give this 3 stars for what comes before.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an e-ARC in exchange for my honest review!

4.5 stars rounded to 5

This was SUCH a cool concept for a thriller - and utterly perfect for anyone who loves all different types of horror, thriller or mystery.

Three women are placed in three terrifying scenarios they have to battle their way out of - I think my favourite was Celia's story, a woman who was sure the life she'd woken up in was not actually hers. Anyone who reads a lot of crime thrillers or mysteries will find themselves trying to guess who the murderer is, what the twist is. And Celia is just the same. I loved the whole idea of her waking up apparently in one of those cozy small town mystery novels she enjoys.

The ending was something I predicted once we hit story two (Maggie, at an isolated cabin in the woods with her friends), but was still explosive and shocking regardless of me guessing it.

I highly recommend this to anyone who likes a different take on a crime thriller! You won't be disappointed!

"Maybe everything felt like a thriller when you were trapped inside it."

Christina Henry is back with another wonderfully weird and delightfully dark story of horror and mystery. I fell in love with Henry for her twisted reimagining's, and so I was so excited to see her take on the idea of The Final Girl. We find ourselves following three women all living in a seemingly fictional world created just for their terror and tailor made to destroy them in a delightfully dark survival tale.

Each women tells their story one at time in three short stories before we move on— the first switch was a little jarring to leave behind but it very quickly found a flow and kept a quick, energetic pace that swept me up and dragged me along for the ride. Moving from a quiet unease to full on fearing for their lives, each world was different but had its own personal brand of fear. It was full of mystery and intrigue, with descriptive visuals and chilling scenes that make your hairs stand on end. Each individual story was a weaving, complex web that was so satisfying to unravel - although there’s some quite big clues as to what is happening, the why and the how are dangled like bait and it was intensely suffocating. And as for our leading ladies, our final girls - I was absolutely obsessed with them, their sense of sisterhood and their badass will to survive.

Small town murder mystery meets Slasher B-movie meets survival horror with a genre-blending narrative and masterful storytelling; just in time for your Halloween reading.

I LOVED THIS. I love Christina Henry and I think I’ve read every book she’s ever written, but this might take the top spot from Alice. It’s thrilling, feels horribly likely, and is masterfully written with just enough suspense and intrigue that I had to devour it in one afternoon. I would highly recommend it for everyone who loves horror and thriller movies!

Ooooh really enjoyed this combination that was kind of fantasy, horror and thriller.
Fascinating concept that definitely had me intrigued.
I don’t think the ending quite lived up to the suspense of the stories, which was a shame. But I did enjoy reading!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this advanced e-copy of Christina Henry's newest release.

Published 21st November 2023.

Celia. Allie. Maggie. 3 very different women, who all love books, from 3 very different lives who have never ever met. But these 3 women all find themselves in the most horrific situations, even if they can't completely explain why.

Christina Henry is an author that has been recommended to me before but this is my first read by her that I really enjoyed. I was unsure of the story structure at first - we hear Celia's full story, then Allie's and then Maggie's before the conclusion - but once I got into the second point of view, the pace and thrills settled well. I enjoyed all of the characters (including Sanya), particularly Allie and felt I could root for all of them. The finale was quite surprising and angered me hugely - but that was the exact point!

A perfect spooky season read.

Good Girls Don’t Die is fast-paced and fun. It’s largely split into three sequential narratives and while I enjoyed all of them it’s hard not to pick favorites! I love a cabin in the woods horror story so Allie’s section was definitely the winner for me. I think I was hoping for a little more from the reveal as it felt pretty telegraphed throughout. But even so, having the three sections each be a different genre was very unique and they worked together brilliantly.

I'm always grabbed by Henry's concepts and the inevitably disappointed with her books. At least part of that is me. I just don't seem to be able to gel with her writing. In story terms these were ok but I just didn't connect.

I enjoyed the three different stories. I have to say the first was the worst and I debated not finishing, but I enjoyed it after starting the second part.