The It Girl by Ruth Ware
- Simon & Schuster Audio, 2022
- Narrated by Imogen Church
Surprise, surprise. When I went to enter this book on Goodreads, I discovered that I had finished the audiobook on November 1, 2023. I did not remember this book AT ALL. How could I have listened to the name April Clarke-Cliveden spoken so many times without remembering it? I could understand if I didn’t remember details of the story, but how could I not remember that I had even read (or listened to) the book at all?
Obviously, I didn’t find this a memorable book. This time around I reduced my rating from 4 stars to 3. Seeing that I had originally given it 4 stars amazed me. This is nowhere near a 4-star book. It’s way too long, with lots of unnecessary repetition and very poor pacing.
I also found the narration annoying. The voicing of April was way over the top. The dialogue itself adequately created April’s persona, but the audio narrator kept emphasizing the snark behind April’s words with long, drawn out expressions that quickly became grating. Similarly, the narrator turned almost every statement by Hannah, the naive and diffident protagonist, into a question by elevating the pitch at the end of the sentence.
I don’t know whether to attribute my not remembering anything about this book to (1) the fact that I listened to it instead of reading it in print or (2) its being a not well told story. Probably both factors contributed.
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
