She Started It by Sian Gilbert
If you’re thinking about checking out She Started It yourself, don’t worry about spoilers. The first part of my reviews are always spoiler-free so you can see if the book is your cup of tea. After a quick summary and a basic review, I’ll give a spoiler warning and do a deep dive into everything I loved and hated about She Started It.
According to her Harper Collins page, Sian Gilbert studied history at the University of Warwick before becoming a teacher. She was born in Bristol and now lives in Cambridge. She Started It is her debut novel and a Book of the Month pick for June 2023. If you’re interested in Book of the Month, you can use my referral code to get started.
She Started It by Sian Gilbert
Content Warning
I always like to give a quick content warning for any sensitive topics. These are some content warnings for She Started It:
Abuse.
Alcohol or drugs.
Blood.
Death.
Fatphobia.
Home invasion.
Homophobia.
Mental illness.
Murder.
Nudity.
Self-harm.
Stalking.
Suicide.
Violence.
Quick Synopsis
She Started It is the story of four friends who accept invitations to an island in the Bahamas. They’re going to a “hen” party (which is British for bachelorette party), but they weren’t exactly friends with the hostess. What they hope is going to be a fun, and maybe awkward, getaway turns out to be much more.
My Rating
Everybody has to come up with their own system for judging and rating books, and here’s mine:
One star: I couldn’t finish the book. (DNF)
Two stars: I struggled to finish, but I did.
Three stars: This book was okay and worth reading.
Four stars: I liked this book and I would recommend it to a friend.
Five stars: I’d read this book again, and it’s going on my favorites shelf.
My Rating Scale
By no means do I think this is a perfect rating system, but I had to come up with something that would help me avoid arbitrarily assigning ratings. This provides a solid guideline for rating qualifications.
I gave this She Started It three stars, because I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend or read it again. If you’re into thrillers and books about women, you may enjoy this one. If you’re a stickler for fancy prose and top-of-the-line writing, you may want to look somewhere else for your next read.
If you liked She Started It, you may also like:
The Guest List by Lucy Foley
All the Dangerous Things by Stacy Willingham
The Villa by Rachel Hawkins
Summary
We’re now entering the spoiler-y part of this review. If you think She Started It sounds like your cup of tea, click away, read it, and come back to see if you agree or disagree with my critique. If you like the sound of the book but you don’t want to read it, don’t worry, I’ll give you the full rundown.
SPOILERS
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SPOILERS -
She Started It begins with Annabelle’s narration. Annabelle is the leader of a group of girls who bullied Poppy mercilessly in elementary and high school. The story alternates between narration from the group and entries from Poppy’s diary.
There are four friends we hear from in this book, including Annabelle, Chloe, Esther, and Tanya. Annabelle is in a loveless marriage where she’s forced to be a housewife, and to cope she spends most of her time stealing expensive clothing from stores.
Chloe is a famous Instagram influencer, and is just about to his the one million follower mark. She’s self-centered and impulsive, and wants to take the trip so she can get photos and post them on her account. Esther is a workaholic investment banker who cares more about her job than anything else.
Tanya is the final friend in the group. As a kid, she wanted to be an actress, but she ended up as an event planner. Being around parties all the time made it easy for her to fall into a cocaine addiction, which also helps numb the guilt from bullying Poppy. Tanya and Poppy had been friends before Tanya defected to the bullies.
This group and Poppy were not friends in school, so it’s surprising when Poppy sends them invitations and plane tickets to an all-expenses paid trip to an island in the Bahamas for her bachelorette party. Wanting the trip, and thinking they can stand the awkwardness, they accept.
When they arrive on the island, Poppy greets them, and tells them she wants to leave everything in the past. They’re all shocked at how different she looks, as she lost weight and got prettier. She says the four of them shaped her life, and that’s why she wanted to do a separate bachelorette party with them.
Right away, the party is off to a weird start. Poppy asks them all to put their phones in a box for a technology-free weekend. She brings up details of the past, including when they made it look like she had wet herself and when they tricked her into thinking a boy had asked her out. The women assume she wants to make them feel uncomfortable for what they did in the past and decide to power through.
The discomfort worsens when Poppy sends them on a scavenger hunt across the island, each item a reminder of previous bullying instances. Some of the women feel bad, and sorry that Poppy is still hanging onto it, while Chloe and Annabelle are angry, and ready to confront Poppy.
They play truth and dare, and during the game, Poppy asks pointed questions that reveal secrets they’ve been keeping from one another. Esther is dared to go skinny dipping, and Poppy is dared by Annabelle to shave her eyebrows. She outsmarts Annabelle by shaving them into a nice shape, rather than shaving them completely off.
Later, after the tension has risen considerably, Poppy brings out the box of phones and starts detailing what she’s done to ruin each person’s life while she had them. It’s revealed that Annabelle’s husband has been cheating with Chloe, and Poppy posts a video of Chloe saying something homophobic on her Instagram, making her lose hundreds of thousands of followers.
Poppy uses a video of Esther skinny dipping to send inappropriate emails to her colleagues, ruining her reputation and getting her fired. She also makes Tanya’s struggle with drug addiction public, and reveals that Esther is the reason Tanya lost her job.
After revealing everything, Poppy goes for a walk and the four women drink together, seething about what Poppy’s done. They express their anger, and how much they wish Poppy was dead.
The next morning, the women wake up with different objects from the scavenger hunt scattered around. When they go to confront Poppy, they find her bedroom is covered with blood, with dragging marks leading out the door. They immediately begin to suspect on another of the murder.
Chloe goes snooping through their rooms and finds a bloody knife under Tanya’s bed. Believing she murdered Poppy, the women take her back to her room and lock her in. The next morning, they find her dead, with a knife buried in her chest.
The three remaining women become more hysterical as a thunderstorm descends on the island. They decide to lock themselves in the main house to stay safe, but Chloe gets angry and stalks out into the storm to try and get the power back on. Annabelle and Esther look for her, and when they don’t find her, they go back to their rooms alone.
Chloe’s body is on the beach the next morning, and it’s clear someone hit her over the head with a rock. Esther and Annabelle begin fighting, each believing the other to be the murderer now that it’s just the two of them. They get in a fight and Annabelle wins, stabbing her multiple times.
As soon as the fight is finished, Annabelle rushes into the ocean to vomit. Behind her, she hears clapping and sees Poppy, watching her. Rather than killing her, Poppy tells Annabelle that everything was a set up, and that she killed both Tanya and Chloe. She explains that her plan was to pick them off one by one, leaving Annabelle behind to take the blame.
Annabelle asks why she’s doing all this, and says that what happened between them when they were kids wasn’t that big of a deal.
Through Poppy’s diary, and Annabelle’s retelling, we discover that Poppy got in to a nice art school, and had one final project to finish to cement her admission. The four girls snuck into the art room and defaced her painting with animal skin and dog poop.
The art teacher thinks this is another of Poppy’s attempts to be adventurous with her art, despite the teacher’s warnings not to, and fails her. This takes her out of the running for the art school and causes her to fall into a depressive spiral.
Annabelle argues that Poppy turned out okay in the end, so she doesn’t understand why she’s going to all this trouble. Poppy reveals that she’s not Poppy at all, she’s Poppy’s sister, Wendy, who had to watch as the group’s actions led her sister to take her own life.
Wendy created the entire scheme to punish them for what they did, and she escapes on a boat just as the caretaker for the island comes to pick them up from their fun trip. The book ends with Wendy conspiring to find and punish a boy from Poppy’s art class who helped the girls come in and ruin her painting.
Deep Dive
Praise
I always like to start with what I liked about a book first. I think the opening line of this book is fantastic, and draws you in straight away. The starting line, and the prologue, also serve to introduce an extra character, the island care taker, who is another potential suspect for the murder later on, when the women are trying to figure out what’s happening.
“There’s only the bride waiting for me, and she’s covered in blood.”
The part right in the middle of the book, when all the women are fighting and Wendy is methodically destroying their lives, is very interesting and has excellent pacing. I also appreciated the twist at the end. As the tension ramped up, my guess for the reveal was that something they had done caused Wendy to take her own life, or otherwise hurt Wendy, and that was driving the revenge scheme.
I appreciated the scene at the end, when Esther and Annabelle go at one another, believing the other to be the murderer because they were the only two left on the island. It had tons of tension and I truly didn’t know what was going to happen.
Criticism
While the pacing (in the latter half of the book) and the setting were highlights for the book, characterization is where it fell short for me. Though we get to read from each of the women’s perspective, I often found myself tapping back to the beginning of the chapter to remind myself who was speaking. And though we learned about each woman’s problems and secrets, it still felt like something deeper about each character was left unexplored.
The second fault I had with the book is actually a couple of smaller details that made it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief. First, knowing what those women did to Poppy in high school, it’s unbelievable that they would all agree to come to the island. The only character that I find myself believing is Chloe, who may stand to benefit enough from the trip to make it worth the potential discomfort.
There are several times when things happen and it makes it hard to stay in the story. For example, when Poppy and Tanya die, there’s very little the rest of the women do to try and get help. They could start fires, send a ton of smoke up into the air to potentially get help from the mainland, but they just look for the flares and give up.
Additionally, when they find out Poppy has cut the emergency phone line, that doesn’t immediately send them into panic mode. It seems like, with each completely unacceptable thing Poppy does, these characters just think to themselves how weird it is.
When Esther, Chloe, and Annabelle huddle up in the main house to try and stay safe, Chloe makes the decision to venture out into the storm by herself, and the other women barely try to stop her. With the knowledge that others have been murdered, and the faint suspicion that there might be someone else on the island with them, it doesn’t make sense that Chloe would venture out by herself, where a well-prepared murderer would have the upper hand.
I felt the writing improved as the book went along, but in the beginning I found it a bit clunky. I would expect Poppy’s diary entries to be a little more wordy, but the narration from the women, as full adults, feels a little winded and like it could be tightened up. I felt that slowed down the pacing in the beginning and made it difficult to dive into the story, but once you hit the middle, it improves.
Everything considered, I thought She Started It was a fine summer thriller with some great conflict. I’d recommend it if you love thrillers or want something set on an island for the summer vibe.
These area some books I may read next:
The Spare Room by Andrea Bartz
Will They or Won’t They by Ava Wilder
Business or Pleasure by Rachel Lynn Solomon
Hello Stranger by Katherine Center
