The Champions
Author: Kara Thomas
Book Cover Rating: 5.5/10
(By the way, I have literally no qualification to rate this and am purely rating it on how I feel like it looks)
Pages: 336
Genre: Young Adult, Realistic Fiction, Mystery
Subplots: Thriller
Series: The Cheerleaders #2
Published: 2024
Hook:
Eleven years later, the girls' killer has been brought to justice, and the town just wants to move on. By the time Hadley moves to Sunnybrook, though, the locals are more interested in the Tigers, the high school's championship-winning football team. The Tigers are Sunnybrook’s homegrown heroes--something positive in a town with so much darkness in its past. Hadley could care less about football, but shortly after she gets assigned to cover the team's latest championship bid for the school newspaper, one of the Tigers is poisoned at a party, and almost immediately after, Hadley starts getting strange emails warning her to stay far away from the football team. It's becoming clear Sunnybrook's golden boys have secrets, and after a second player is mysteriously killed, Hadley’s beginning to suspect that someone wants the team to pay for their sins. Or does this new target on the football team have something to do with what happened to the cheerleaders all those years ago? As an outsider in Sunnybrook, Hadley feels like she's the only one who can see the present clearly, but it looks like she’s going to have to dig up the darkness of the past to get to the bottom of what’s happening now. Luckily, there are still some Sunnybrook High grads who never left--people who were around eleven years ago—and if she can just convince them to talk, she might be able stop a killer before another Tiger dies.
Overall Book Rating: 4.8/10
I would probably not recommend this book
Review: Hmmmmm. This book was not my favorite. I was really hoping to like this, but it just didn’t do it for me. I was not the biggest fan of the writing, and I felt like the main character was handed a lot of information. I also wish book one (The Cheerleaders) could have tied into this more (it did a little, but just not quite enough in my opinion). I did like Hadley as the main character, but most of her relationships seemed a little too forced. The plot was interesting (I didn’t want to stop reading it (but then again, when do I ever want to STOP reading)). It did have a couple twists, but, well, I guessed who the secret problem maker was at the very start (that ALWAYS sucks). I also DID NOT like the ending AT ALL. It tied things up, I guess…. but it just didn’t make me feel particularly good about this book (no, that’s such an overstatement. It made me feel badly about this book). Overall, this book wasn’t necessarily awful (except the ending), but I just didn’t have a great time reading it and my final impressions don’t make me ever want to re-read it.
Main Characters
Hadley- Hadley is the main character. She is a senior in high school, and lives with her mom. She has a bit of an attitude, but (for the most part) only when it kinda makes sense. Also, she LOVES writing for the school newspaper.
Peter- Peter also writes for the school newspaper. He’s kind, and his older sister is the main character in the previous book. He and Hadley originally don’t like each other.
Alix- Alix is also a senior in high school and she is kinda friends with Hadley, though they're not particularly close. She is on the dance team.
Character Rating: 8.2/10
Setting-
This book takes place in Sunnybrook, New York. The setting is not really described in this book, but I think it was described more in The Cheerleaders. All we really know is that it is in upstate New York.
Setting Rating: 6.8/10
Buy on Amazon:
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“KARA THOMAS is the author of the YA novels The Darkest Corners, Little Monsters, The Cheerleaders, and That Weekend, as well as the adult novels Out of the Ashes and Lost to Dune Road. Kara's books have been sold in multiple languages and have been nominated for the International Thriller Writers Award. In 2013, she wrote and developed the pilot The Revengers with Rashida Jones and Will McCormack for The CW. She lives on Long Island with her husband, son, and rescue cat, where she spends way too much time on Reddit Unresolved Mysteries trying to solve cold cases.”
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