“Just like I know that the stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, or whatever – don’t come in a neat order. Sometimes they return over and over, like waves that alternate between pulling you under and spitting you back onto the shore”
― April Henry, Girl Forgotten
When I don’t know what to read, I turn to award lists. One of my favorites is the Edgar Award winners list, which honors the best in mystery fiction, nonfiction, and television published in the previous year. While looking at the 2024 Edgar Award winner list, I found that Girl Forgotten by April Henry won for Best Young Adult. I adore April Henry and have read many of her books already, so I decided to try this one.
Girl Forgotten is a young adult thriller that dives into podcasting, true crime, and how far you are willing to go to keep your past hidden. Seventeen-year-old Piper Gray’s life has been thrown upside down. After her life explodes, Piper moves in with her father, stepmother, and their two children, starts at a new high school, and deals with the fallout of events in her past. Shortly before school starts, Piper stumbles upon a seventeen-year-old unsolved murder cold case whose victim was a seventeen-year-old girl names Layla Trello. Layla attended the same high school that Piper is set to attend. When Piper learns that, as a senior, she is required to do a senior passion project, she decides to start a true crime podcast investigating Layla’s murder. With the help of classmate Jonas, Piper learns how to podcast and how to investigate! As she digs into the past, Piper receives anonymous threats warning her to back off or what happened to Layla might happen to her too. That doesn’t derail Piper’s investigation though because she is determined to get justice for Layla and her family. The killer has been living free for years. Piper will find them and bring them to justice. She has to.
This book contains many of my favorite elements: podcasting, true crime and true crime fans, citizen detectives, and unsolved mysteries. An element of standing up to authority also runs through this book. I wish I would have been able to find Girl Forgotten as an audiobook because this story is told through newspaper articles, podcast transcripts, and first person narratives. I would have liked to hear the podcast sections in audio, as well as the news-type reading of the newspaper articles. This book is compared quite frequently to A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson, so I think that will be a 2025 read for me!