Review: The New Girl

The New Girl by S.L. Grey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ayyyy this book went full Downside.

This series messes with me so much. They're all standalone books but the experience is much more fulfilling when you read them in order. So taking that into consideration, this review may contain spoilers for the previous two books, The Mall and The Ward.

This book spoils us with three viewpoints: Ryan, Tara and Penter, with the latter giving us our very first glimpse into the mind of a Downsider. The blurb will make the uninitiated think this is about a pervert fascinated by the new girl at the school where he works, and a lonely woman who makes lifelike dolls and receives a rather strange commission. But those of us who know about the alternate world this series is based around will realise early on that there's something much more sinister happening.

The Downside plot has gone upside, with them making waves in our world this time. They're hiding in plain sight at a school this time, and their project involves something to do with children. But what is the connection to the strange baby-doll that has been requested of Tara? And exactly what is this fake family tasked to do?

I loved how much more information this unveiled about the Downside, yet I still long for more and more of this strange world. It's finally starting to become a clearer picture in this novel, but I feel like I will always have questions, and always want to know more. It was such a great experience reading the chapters from Penter's POV but it's still a puzzle to work out.

At the same time, this one was not quite as tense and puzzling as The Mall and not quite as horrifying as The Ward. There's a flicker of disgust at Ryan's perverted ways, and a clench of sympathy for Tara's twisted devotion to her lifelike dolls, but ultimately this feels more like a darker fantasy novel where the goal is just to provide more detail about the Downside. As such, it's more intriguing than horrifying.

While they can be considered standalone novels, I don't know that this one will be interesting to anyone but those like me who are thirsting for more knowledge of the Downside. Even then, I found myself hoping for more references or cameos from characters I'd met in the previous novels to properly tie it all together. But this is another section of their world again, so once again it's a foreign world that we know very little about. There's far more to learn here, though, and that was what I enjoyed most. I believe this is the last of the series and that makes me sad, because I still want to know so much more about it.

The story itself basks in the strangeness we have come to expect from this series, so if you're going in cold, prepare to be very, very confused. If you've read the previous novels, you won't get quite the same chills but you'll get a lot more information about this strange other world.

Not my favourite of the series for plot, but it felt like a fix I needed to feed my strange addiction to this world.

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