Courtney Summers is well-known for her bleak and gritty YA novels that handle difficult, taboo topics and I’m The Girl is no different. With a plethora of unsettling content warnings and a philosophy best summed up as Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here, this isn’t a book that will suit all readers. Brace yourself to feel uncomfortable, shocked and sickened at the situations depicted within.
The author’s last two releases Sadie and The Project were both focused on a girl desperately trying to uncover the truth behind her sister’s disappearance, and I’m The Girl is a variation on the same theme. This is the tale of troubled teenager Georgia Avis, an underprivileged white girl in the care of her older brother after their mother passed away. While he does his best to provide and care for her, Georgia has that feeling of invincibility that teen girls often do and winds up in one compromising situation after another, displaying zero sense of self-preservation in her unswerving ambition to work at the nearby exclusive and remote resort Aspera. This is against her brother and her late mother’s wishes, but fuelled by the need to prove herself worthy of being an ‘Aspera girl’, Georgia stubbornly pursues it nonetheless by stealing over four grand from Tyler to fund an explicit photoshoot and heading to Aspera in the hopes of securing a position there.
On the way, Georgia is struck by a car and as she struggles to make it to Aspera while injured, she is sidetracked by the discovery of 13-year old Ashley’s broken, violated body in a ditch. The prevailing presumption is that the killer knocked Georgia off her bike after abandoning Ashley’s body, which brings her older sister Nora into Georgia’s orbit. From the blurb, my expectation was that this would be a murder mystery with the two girls investigating Ashley’s death, however that turns out to be a side-plot with minimal focus so it would be a good idea to adjust your expectations accordingly to avoid disappointment. Georgia never really shows a strong desire to work with Nora to unmask the killer, it comes off as more an excuse to spend time with her crush; the couple clues she finds are either by chance without any intention on her part to find a hint to the killer’s identity or she wilfully blinds herself to the warning sirens and withholds evidence.
The real heart of the story is Georgia’s quest to make it as an Aspera girl, which she sees as the ultimate pinnacle of achievement, again without heeding any warnings that suggest a sordid underbelly to that role at Aspera. Georgia is hardly naïve or sheltered, her ignorance appears to be deliberately self-inflicted based on the unfortunate belief that she can wield her beauty as a tool to manipulate men without realising that the worldly older men in positions of power over her are the only ones who win when she uses her body to influence them. There is a vast gaping chasm between Georgia’s perception of the abusive situations she ends up in compared to the reader’s horrified identification of the many ways in which the men (and a female accomplice) around her groom and take advantage of her.
I’m The Girl functions as an effective cautionary tale, showing how girls who are exploring their sexuality and think they’re in control can quickly get in over their head when surrounded by the immoral and depraved elite who believe they can take what they want without consequences. But it’s a very dark and depressing read that doesn’t offer much hope or any sort of silver lining; this book depicts a vulnerable overconfident teenage girl suffering one traumatic event after another without offering much in the way of insightful social commentary or a fresh deconstruction of rape culture and the patriarchy that might provide a meaningful message.
Raw, brutal and emotional, this book is recommended for readers who aren’t looking for an escapist story to block out the real world, but those who are willing to be bluntly confronted with all the ugliness and horrors that our world can inflict on young innocent girls. Read it and weep.
I’m The Girl is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of September 13th 2022.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
The new groundbreaking queer thriller from New York Times bestselling and Edgar-award Winning author Courtney Summers.
When sixteen-year-old Georgia Avis discovers the dead body of thirteen-year-old Ashley James, she teams up with Ashley’s older sister, Nora, to find and bring the killer to justice before he strikes again. But their investigation throws Georgia into a world of unimaginable privilege and wealth, without conscience or consequence, and as Ashley’s killer closes in, Georgia will discover when money, power and beauty rule, it might not be a matter of who is guilty—but who is guiltiest.
A spiritual successor to the 2018 breakout hit, Sadie, I’m the Girl is a masterfully written, bold, and unflinching account of how one young woman feels in her body as she struggles to navigate a deadly and predatory power structure while asking readers one question: if this is the way the world is, do you accept it?
