REVIEW: Stella - Helen Eve

GENRE: Contemporary
PAGES: 368

PUBLISHER: Macmillan Children's Books
FORMAT: Paperback
BUY IT: Waterstones
RATING: 5 Stars

This review refers to an uncorrected advance edition.

SUMMARY

17-year-old Stella Hamilton is the star blazing at the heart of Temperley High. Leader of the maliciously exclusive elite, she is surrounded by adulation; envied and lusted after in equal measure. And she is in the final stage of a five-year campaign to achieve her destiny: love with her equally popular male equivalent, and triumph as Head Girl on election night. By contrast, new girl Caitlin Clarke has until now lived a quietly conformist life in New York. With the collapse of her parents' marriage she has been sent across the Atlantic for an English boarding school education, only to discover that at Temperley, the only important rules are the unwritten ones. It's a world of the beautiful and the dangerous, and acceptance means staying on the right side of Stella Hamilton, the most beautiful and dangerous of them all. Not everyone is happy to be under the Hamilton rule. But fighting the system means treading the same dark path as Stella - and if Caitlin puts a foot wrong, it's a long way down ...

REVIEW

This is a fantastic YA thriller - think Mean Girls meets Pretty Little Liars with a heck of a lot more venom thrown in!

The dual narrative by Stella and Caitlin was brilliant, it allowed insight into each characters thoughts as things got more and more complicated and heated. Each chapter provides more revelations into Stella's past and Caitlin's developing character and your alliances to characters change consistently. 

This is a really dark tale of friendship, romance, obsession and power play... I loved it!

- Gem.