Book Review: Dangerous Boys by Abigail Haas

Three teens venture into the abandoned Monroe estate one night; hours later, only two emerge from the burning wreckage. Chloe drags one Reznick brother to safety, unconscious and bleeding; the other is left to burn, dead in the fire. But which brother survives? And is his death a tragic accident? Desperate self-defense? Or murder?

Chloe is the only one with the answers. As the fire rages, and police and parents demand the truth, she struggles to piece together the story of how they got there-a story of jealousy, twisted passion, and the darkness that lurks behind even the most beautiful of faces…

Credits to Goodreads.com

4/5 ⭐️s

Some of you are well familiar already how I loved Dangerous Girls by the same author. That book blew me away – read it entirely in one sitting and mind blown the hours after. It was super amazing. Now, if you’ve read it and liked it as much as I did, your first question probably was – “Is Dangerous Boys better than Dangerous Girls?”. And my answer is – for a larger reader population, I COULD NOT TELL, but if you ask me? Okay, NO. Dangerous Girls will always be my champion.

While i was blown away by the amazing story line, twists, thrills, mystery and craziness of DG, I was f*ck*d up when I was reading DB. Man, it was dark. Real dark thoughts. Seriously, what the hell is going on in this author’s mind. And I do not mean that in a bad way, no. Definitely not. How do I explain this? The writing was just explicitly evil that I cannot help but feel frightened upon every written words.

Let’s start off with the characters. Chloe, the smart, good girl with an ambition and a beautiful face full of pretensions. So Chloe has a broken family, dad leaves, mom’s depressed, hates her hometown, dreams to go to college to leave everything behind, meets a boy, meets another boy, and the epic, twisted, dark plot begins. You know what, this girl reminded me of someone from a book I dearly loved as well. The similarities is uncanny. I don’t want to say it here since I would probably be giving away an important detail of this book already. But if you know WHO i’m saying, please let’s talk about it. 😀

Ethan, the good guy, the people pleaser, the too good to be true knight in shining armor. There is something about this character that is both likeable and annoying  at the same time.

And then we have Oliver, the metaphoric, genius, sarcastic yet charming guy. Although to be honest, I never found his charm a good one. I knew from the very first sentence written for him that there is something’s about to happen because of his uncalled for presence.

So the entire plot line revolves around how a girl hates her life but had no choice but to go on, good boy came and made her forget her life struggles, another boy who has all the personality, guts and luck that she is looking for came, a “kind-of” a mixed up love story but … uhm, no. Probably not. I would not say this story has a fair amount of LOVE in it’s plot line. When I tell you it’s dark. Consider an octopus-smeared-you-with-its-ink dark. Okaaay, that’s not a very good comparison but you get it.

What’s frightening about this story is you could easily relate to the character AT FIRST, making you feel invested on her/him and then suddenly it takes on a dark twisted path that you cannot easily extract yourself from, making a few of the events quite predictable – it’s scary.

I don’t really want to say that  much because what’s the fun in all this mysterious kick if I give it all away. I want you to be as a mess as I was when I was reading this. If you are looking for that page turning, heart pumping, uneasy read, then definitely this book is for you. It somehow had that Dangerous Girl vibe in it where you keep on guessing what the hell happened. This is again one of those books that you cannot afford not to finish in one sitting. It really pulls you in.

So it is recommended, not for very young readers though. 🙂

Enjoy!