Reckless Girls | Rachel Hawkins

This is more of a RANT, than a review.

This book was supposed to be a murder mystery thriller that happens in a mysterious island with a bunch of relatively unknown people in it. The place was there, the people were there, the murder happened but I'm still trying to remember where the thriller part was. Maybe I'm sounding too harsh about this book, but it's been so long that I felt I read something bad.

Let's start with the lead, Lux, who is young girl who last her mom to cancer and is still trying to come out of it. She loves going on adventures and lucky, she meets a handsome guy in the bar she is working, Nicholas (Nico) who is from a filthy rich lawyer family, but does not want family money so he is away from them. They start going out for a while and he asks her to meet in Hawaii before they go on their magical adventures on water in his boat which is named after his ex-girlfriend. It takes 6 months before they go on their adventure because Nico's boat got damaged while sailing to Hawaii and they are trying to fix the boat with whatever job they can find in Hawaii.

I can't understand why a person would still be with Nico at this point. He promised they can go on many adventures, but for 6 months they are in Hawaii doing nothing. Idk how Lux can trust him at this point because every time when something comes closer to discussing serious matters, he doesn't care about it. He behaves like a total jerk and what does Lux does at that point? Ignores it and believes he is going to take her on a boat adventure, which somehow happens. One day Nico meets two girls at a bar and they ask Nico if he can take them to this mysterious island. Because they are on a phase where they travels to different countries and want to be out of the normal world (which is fine).

Nico tells Lux about this and she thinks they should use this opportunity to fix the boat and go on their first adventure along with the girls. They don't have money to fix the boat, but Nico says the girls are willing to pay for it. How much money?? 50k Who does pay 50k to fix a small boat and take them to an island? They might as well but a new boat with that money.

Anyways, they fix and they set on the journey. On their way, in a storm Lux almost gets thrown off the boat due to the waves and gets hit in the head during the process, but Nico doesn't even care to ask her what happened. What does our girl Lux do? IGNORE!!

I don't get who wants to be with a person like this. These two were supposed to the people who take us through this story, but their characters were very poorly structured that it's hard to even like them a bit. Skipping ahead a bit, they meet a couple (Jake and Eliza) on the island, who seem to be good people at the start, but we know they aren't the best people you want to have in your life. They drink, swim and enjoy the life away from the real world.

After a while we come to know that the girls, Amma and Brittany who paid for this trip had some rough past in which Brittany's family were killed in a car accident and Amma last her boyfriend too. They meet in a relief group and become friends by being there for each other and decide to go travel the world until their hearts are healed. In that trip around the world they meet a girl who literally steals watches and money from guys who hit on them (WTF!!) On the other side, Eliza is with Jake who she has known for a long time. Back from when her mom used to work at Jake's house as a servant, these two dated and she gets dumped by him. Eliza's mom had an affair with Jake's dad and she was arrested for having drugs which was owned by Jake's dad. These two meet after years and Jake begs Eliza to come on a boat trip with him. She thinks this is the right time to get a revenge on Jake.

One night on the island, Nico sleeps with Amma and what does Lux do? Surprisingly she doesn't ignore it this time, instead she does something else stupid, she sleeps with Jake. Talk about a way to get a good revenge (duh?) One more unrealistic thing that one of the characters in this book does is that Brittany doesn't not even completely know who Amma was. She doesn't look about Amma online or research about her. She just gets along with her and go on trips across the world. Who is even like this in 21st century? GOD!! But, the girls who steals (Claire) finds out that Amma was a wealthy person and her boyfriend was the one who killed Brittany's family in the car accident (take about a twist, right?). Amma feels bad and she wants to be support for Brittany. That's how she found her. How did Claire came to know about all this, by just a simple Google search, which Brittany did not care to do.

At this point, I was like why? What is the point of this book? Now these 3 girls are very angry because the people who they believed doesn't deserve them, as they don't care about them and they are very rich with all the money in the world. The author is fixated on the point that wealthy people don't care about other people and they always act like a total loser. So, she wants to kill all the rich people. Nico, Amma and Jake are killed in some usual ways which was definitely not thrilling. At the end, the 3 girls get together and give a speech about how the rich doesn't deserve their love and they should be together and continue on many more adventures.

So, what was the moral of this story? NOTHING. Were the people who came from the rich in the story awful? Yes, they were awful like all other characters. Did it gave the license to kill them because of that? No, it was a stupid idea. Were the girls reckless? No, they were stupid and ignorant. They made bad decisions and did not want to accept the obvious facts that happened with the people they chose to have.

Finally about the mysterious island. I was intrigued to pick this book because the blurb said this happens in an unknown island where a ship crashed during WW2 and men died by eating each other off. I was really hoping that the characters would find something real bad about this island and it would be responsible for how the story panes out. But, no. It had nothing to do with the island. even though every time it was said this is a mysterious island, nothing unusual happened. Idk why the author went hard to make us believe there was something eerie about the island with articles, letters and interviews with people who were on the island before between the chapters. There were a lot of such things in the book and none of it had any meaning. If the story happened in Chicago in a perfectly normal neighborhood, it would not have changed anything.

It would have made much more sense, if this book was titled Stupid Girls/Ignorant Girls.