Review copy provided by the publisher
All These Beautiful Strangers follows the contours of a CW show, unfolding its mystery with quiet intensity.
Boarding school. Secret society. Family drama. Mysteriously disappeared parent.
I think I’ve been conditioned by years of watching CW shows to expect the highest highs and lowest lows. I didn’t think it was a problem until I read All These Beautiful Strangers. Although it follows the contours of what we think of as a CW show — boarding school, a secret society, teenagers being terrible to each other — All These Beautiful Strangers is more methodical and somehow quieter than you might expect.
17-year old Charlie Calloway is invited to join “the A’s”, a secret society at her boarding school and must carry out a series of increasingly difficult and morally compromising tasks to gain admittance. Once you’re in, you’re in for life. At the same time, she’s starting to uncover details around her mother’s disappearance and its connection to the A’s. What’s different here is that her parents AREN’T absentee and figure into the story significantly. And actually, for me, there was huge untapped potential in the relationship between Charlie’s dad and his brother, Teddy. And in Charlie’s relationship with Grayson.
All These Beautiful Strangers is an enjoyable read if you don’t go in expecting high drama. Told in alternating timelines between 17-year old Charlie and her parents Alastair and Grace Calloway, there’s a tick-tock quality to All These Beautiful Strangers. Charlie uncovers something, then the real details behind it are revealed in one of her parents’ chapters.
Knowing what the A’s were putting its initiates up to, I was hoping for a more diabolical resolution than we ultimately get.
3.5 stars.
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