Early on in the forthcoming novel What Happened to Those Girls, a character remarks, “There’s a point in horror movies when characters realize they’ve left their reality where nothing bad ever happens, when suddenly they’re no longer a complex human being but a delicate sack of meat.” This succinct summation of horror’s essential terror drives Carlyn Greenwald’s latest propulsive thriller while also hinting at an emotional toll similarly themed stories frequently fail to acknowledge. With its surprisingly brutal moments of body horror and its refusal to paint character motivations as binary, the story resists sanitizing death or the complicated emotions that can follow and is a very welcome addition to the YA thriller catalog.
While the marketing material frames this story as Pretty Little Liars, I kept coming back to Mean Girls as a much more accurate film to describe the interpersonal dynamics between the girls. For a story about murdered young people, the casual violence people do to one another through exclusion, gossip and dismissal lands equally as hard. The novel centers on Emma, a frequently sidelined member of a friend group that includes Paisley, the queen bee; Opal, the confrontation-averse follower; and Harlow, the acerbic frenemy. When Emma is excluded from a camping trip she helped plan, her anger turns to grief upon learning that Paisley, Opal, and Harlow have died in what authorities claim are accidental deaths. But everything changes when Emma receives anonymous videos of her friends shot in the hours before their deaths, alongside a cryptic text from someone offering help. Joined by Beck, Paisley’s sister, Emma heads to the site of her friends’ demise determined to find out what really happened in those woods and to protect the secret she carries from that night.
Though the novel largely takes place in the woods adjacent to an isolated, myth-embracing community untrusting of outsiders, it doesn’t quite lean into folk horror tropes enough to be considered as such. Ultimately, this works to the story’s advantage as its resistance to being neatly categorized allows it to pull from a number of genre conventions, including thriller, mystery, and coming of age. Such a mashup is effective because it subtly destabilizes the reader’s expectations and this uncertainty greatly adds to the atmosphere Greenwald creates.
But what good is a secluded woods setting if it doesn’t also come with a folkloric legend? Here, that device is fulfilled by the legend of a witch who masqueraded as a school teacher and sacrificed her group of elementary students to the Devil. Greenwald does an effective if subtle job of showing how stories get transmitted and repackaged, particularly when they create the basis of a local economy. The question of whether something supernatural is occurring is not conclusively addressed until the final third of the book and I enjoyed the way the mythos of the community factors into the story’s resolution.
Still, the emotional heartbeat of the story is how it grapples with grief when it goes hand-in-hand with resentment for having been treated poorly by people no longer able to explain themselves. None of the characters are presented as all good or all bad and it is in these shades of gray that Greenwald’s story locates most of its narrative power. Relationships, whether friendships, parent/child, or sibling, are complicated and can require boundaries in order to be healthy. It is an important lesson in autonomy, particularly in a novel aimed at young adults. Greenwald also attempts to give an agency to the murdered girls via brief chapters from their perspectives, albeit to mixed results. While this approach does ensure that the girls are given a voice and identity beyond how others viewed them, these interludes left me somewhat frustrated because they upended how I viewed these characters and left me wanting to know more. But perhaps that’s the point. How people are remembered, particularly complicated people, depends less on their own views of their behavior and more on the impact they had on the people left behind to tell their stories.
That point aside, I do think What Happened to Those Girls would benefit from two or more scenes that include all the girls interacting. Those dynamics directly tie into how the story unfolds and, as a reader, I would have appreciated a couple of more instances in which I could draw my own conclusions about these relationships. Similarly, the budding romantic relationship in the story felt somewhat incomplete. There is a layered quality to this relationship that while very sweet doesn’t negate the strong trauma bonding element at play. Considering these two characters discuss the positive impacts of therapy, this felt like a missed narrative beat to explore. Ultimately though, these quibbles are minor and will not likely impact a reader’s investment in the mystery behind the murders.
I received an advanced review copy of What Happened to Those Girls for review from Sourcebooks Fire. The book is set to release on June 30, 2026 and can be pre-ordered from your preferred book-buying platform.
