Tolog Review: The Girl is Murder

The Girl is Murder
by Kathryn Miller Haines
reviewed by Samantha Fung

The Girl is Murder starts off with a girl named Iris, a girl who attended a private school for most of her life, attending a public school for the first time. Iris’s father is a detective, who is struggling in his business and all Iris wants to do is help with his cases. She had just recently moved to the other side of town, which meant a fresh start for her and her dad. On her first day at public school, Iris meets a girl named Suze, who is part of a group of troublemakers at school called “The Rainbows”. Iris ends up becoming friends with her through a lie that she told Suze. Later on, Iris becomes friends with another girl at school named Pearl, who helps Iris solve some of her father’s cases. But, when a mysterious disappearance of one of the Rainbows lands on a case for Iris’s dad, that’s when everything goes wild. Iris starts hanging out more and more with the wrong crowd and lying to all of her friends and her dad. She adopts a fake personality and keeps lots of secrets in order to solve the case. Iris gets caught up in the world of being a detective. 

This book includes an important point: social division. In the novel, it discusses two opposite parts of the town: the Lower East side and the Upper East side. The Upper East side was made of more wealthy people while the Lower East side was more dangerous and includes areas that were notably dangerous. It wasn’t very often that people of the Lower East side went up to the Upper East side and vice-versa. Haines incorporates this sort of idea that people should not be separated by what their status is. 

I think the author chose to write this book because she wanted to tell readers that it’s not good to get caught up with your own feelings and ideas, you need to be aware of your friends’ feelings and the people around you. 

I felt like this book really got me really interested to keep reading more. I enjoyed this book very much and I will definitely be reading the second book in this series.