Written by contributor Elena Horne
From Alexa Donne, YouTuber and author of Brightly Burning, comes a prep school thriller filled with college admission scandals, intrigue, and mean popular girls in the vein of Gossip Girl. Donne, widely known and loved for her YouTube channel and sci-fi romances, tries her hand at a whodunnit in this YA thriller.
At elite prep school, Claflin Academy, the Ivies aren’t just Ivy League colleges, they’re the five-member popular girl clique who will stop at nothing to get into their Ivy League schools, which are designated by queen bee Avery because “friends don’t compete with friends.” Scholarship student and the Ivies designated UPenn applicant, Olivia, knows better than to break the rules, but when she gets into Harvard and queen bee Avery doesn’t, she knows she’s in trouble, especially when another Ivy crosses Avery and turns up dead. Amid scandal, murder, and secrets galore, Olivia is looking for the truth behind the murder, but in doing so, she must confront the terrible things she and her friends did to get into college and decide where she really wants to stand.
As a big-time and somewhat picky fan of mysteries, there are four things I look for in a good murder mystery:
- The story can surprise me in some way, whether by the killer reveal or another twist;
- All the puzzle pieces fit together by the end;
- There is a decent amount of realism in law enforcement and legal matters;
- The detective or sleuth character uses cool skills and not just luck to uncover the truth. All stories with female detectives who discover killers by being kidnapped need not apply and should maybe have their feminism cards revoked.
The Ivies does hit the majority of this criteria well, but where it doesn’t drags down the other good points into a rather disappointing whodunnit.
The Ivies did surprise me with multiple red herrings, it kept me guessing between three candidates for the murderer and each nugget of intrigue was nicely explained by the end. Not only who was the killer, but the secrets that the victim and all other suspects were hiding, plus even the legal realism was pretty on the nose. Minus a reasonable suspension of disbelief for a teenager amateur sleuth, The Ivies shows realistic legal consequences and police investigation. This realism is stretched only a reasonable amount to create more for our sleuth character, Olivia, to do, which leads to my main complaint about The Ivies: as a main character/sleuth, Olivia falls so flat the whole book starts to fall apart.
Olivia is a tough character to connect with, and at times so inconsistent she’ll make your head spin. She wants to claw her way to the rich and privileged position her friends are in, yet she’s constantly criticising them for their privilege. We never even understand why she wants this. She’ll lecture on the virtue of gender equality in the ordering of Starbucks drinks, but is ignorant enough to ask her Canadian classmate if there are journalism schools in Canada. From the prologue to the final lines, I wasn’t sure what made her tick. She was so back and forth I couldn’t get invested in her.
As an amateur sleuth, Olivia is also pretty bad. Writers of amateur sleuths need to create circumstances where readers accept that the protagonist shouldn’t call the cops or a lawyer. On this, Donne does a pretty decent job, but what makes an amateur sleuth great is a character that has unique skills or knowledge that allows them to see things the cops can’t. Olivia doesn’t have any of this. She is, of course, a student journalist, but she doesn’t just lack cool skills, she is frustratingly terrible at sleuthing. She misses most major clues, finds most of her leads through her sleuthing buddy or dumb luck, and her plans for catching a suspected killer lack the ingenuity I long for in a good amateur sleuth.
Olivia is also constantly having to be rescued, and she still misses the mark until people are confessing their misdeeds to her face. She is presented as a scrappy, highly intelligent character, but the evidence of her actions argues otherwise. Her spinning moral compass is also giving me motion sickness.
The closest The Ivies gets to a savvy, quick-under-fire girl detective is Olivia’s friend Avery. The queen bee herself is an unforgettable love-to-hate character, who I was rooting for even when I wanted to smack her. Also of note in the supporting cast is Olivia’s love interest and fellow teen sleuth, Ethan, the Canadian kid who’s really nice. He’s another student journalist with a desire to crack the case and questionable motivations. Plus, he’s Canadian, and have we mentioned he’s Canadian and therefore nice? His first few scenes will make every Canadian reader roll their eyes and want to send Rick Mercer to Claflin Academy for a reboot of Talking to Americans, but despite this shaky introduction, Ethan turns into a complex and interesting character.
Donne also mentions the COVID-19 pandemic in The Ivies as a past event, despite the fact that the main action takes place in December 2020. Acknowledging a major global event like this is a tough call to make, however on this, I think this was the wrong call. Mentioning that Olivia and her classmates were doing online school for the pandemic as a distant thing from last year when they’re now at the end of 2020 only dated the author’s knowledge and drew attention to all the facts that are now so obviously wrong. No one wears a mask, people are going out to eat, travelling, throwing giant parties, and no one is social distancing. There is no way Donne could have known what December would look like when she wrote this, but these inaccuracies will only make the book look sloppy as it ages and instead the timeline should be ambiguous. Acknowledging world events is great, but when it comes to the pandemic, it’s just smarter to wait until it’s in our rear-view mirror and authors don’t have to take a shot in the dark about what teens’ experiences will look like post-COVID.
Alexa Donne is a talented writer who builds a compelling world at Claflin Academy with an intriguing mystery that is, sadly, told by a frustrating main character. Combined with some execution issues, The Ivies is bingeable but too disorganised to merit a reread.
The Ivies is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of May 25th 2021.
Will you be picking up The Ivies? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
Everyone knows the Ivies: the most coveted universities in the United States. Far more important are the Ivies. The Ivies at Claflin Academy, that is. Five girls with the same mission: to get into the Ivy League by any means necessary. I would know. I’m one of them. We disrupt class ranks, club leaderships, and academic competitions…among other things. We improve our own odds by decreasing the fortunes of others. Because hyper-elite competitive college admissions is serious business. And in some cases, it’s deadly.
Alexa Donne delivers a nail-biting and timely thriller about teens who will stop at nothing to get into the college of their dreams. Too bad no one told them murder isn’t an extracurricular.
i’m so excited to read this book! seems a bit off about the mentioning of the pandemic though. i read a book that mentioned it, but it was in the future a few years so it was okay, but this one just seems strange.