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Hope, Ash, and Caro are friends who met in an online book club: they were the only three who showed up to a Covid-era bookstore event. Since then, they have met online every month and become fast friends. But they have yet to actually meet in person.
Hope is a famous actress who only revealed her true identity after a number of Zoom sessions where she didn’t show her face. Ash is a wife and mom who’s found satisfaction and success from a floral business she started to help pay her husband’s way through grad school. Now she’s wondering what’s happened to the marriage she thought was so happy. Caro is a doctor who recently lost a patient and is trying to figure out how to come back from it.
Now Hope proposes it’s long past time to get together in person. And she has the perfect idea: to simply disappear for a few days and tell everyone in their lives they will be unreachable. No one will know where they went. They all manage to make it work and meet up at the beautiful Eden National Park in southern Utah. There they will stay at a glamping resort and then hike through a slot canyon.
Of course, there are hiccups, and then there are major problems. Things don’t go according to plan. And each woman is hiding a little something (or something big) from the others. Will they have a successful getaway? Or will someone not come home?
I haven’t read any of Condie’s books other than this one and her previous mystery/thriller, The Unwedding. Other reviewers on my site have posted their takes on her popular YA books, Matched and its sequels. All I can say is she delivers average mysteries, ones that may or may not have gotten as much attention if she hadn’t been an established writer. This one felt kind of all over the place; it felt like it needed to be reined in a bit or given a stronger edit.
So I’m underwhelmed by The Girls Trip. I suspect Condie will probably turn out another of this type, but we’ll see where she goes from here. I wish her all the best but I will probably wait to try out her writing in another genre.
Rated: Mild. Profanity includes 8 instances of moderate profanity, about 40 uses of mild language, and a few instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sex is just referenced briefly. Violence includes stalking and a past murder.
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*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
