The It Girl

“Only sometimes, in the middle of the night, she wakes up with a picture in front of her eyes, a picture different from the grainy Polaroids of the police photographer, with their careful evidence markers and harsh floodlit lighting. In this picture the lamps are dim, and April’s cheeks are still flushed with the last glimpse of life. And she sees herself running across the room, tripping over the rug to fall on her knees beside April’s body, and then she hears the screams.”

Setting the mood for the narrative and establishing the novel as a psychological thriller, this passage from the book’s opening chapters reveals Hannah’s mental distress. Her intrusive thoughts about April’s death illustrate how the event still haunts her 10 years later.

“As Hannah stood there, watching the beat-up Mini drive away, she had the strangest feeling—as though, in stepping out of the car, she had sloughed off her old identity like a second skin, leaving a sharper, fresher, less worn version of herself to face the world—a version prickling with newness.”

Establishing control of identity is a theme that Ware develops in the opening chapters. Hannah feels a lack of belonging to the community in which she grew up, and she feels certain she can find a sense of belonging at Oxford.

“[T]he terrifying unpredictability of the internet, the horrors of a reality where you could be ambushed at any moment by a reporter or a curious stranger, or by the death of your best friend—into a world where everything was ordered. In books, a bad thing might happen on page 207, that was true. But it would always happen on page 207, no matter what. And when you reread, you could see it coming, watch out for the signs, prepare yourself.”

April’s murder and the subsequent media attention decimated Hannah’s carefully crafted life plan. Instead of confronting her past or letting go of it completely, Hannah runs away both literally (by living in Edinburgh) and figuratively (by turning to books to escape). The trauma from her past—and the lingering guilt she experiences—prevent Hannah from moving on with her life. She’s trapped in a middle ground from which she wants to escape.