The It Girl

The It Girl Review

April Clarke-Cliveden was the kind of person who made everyone around her feel simultaneously chosen and peripheral. Brilliant, reckless, magnetically cruel, she dominated the Oxford college she and Hannah shared a decade ago — until she was murdered at the end of their first year by John Neville, the college porter, a crime that seemed conclusively resolved. Now Neville has died in prison insisting he was innocent, and a journalist contacts Hannah with evidence that the conviction may have been wrong.

Hannah, heavily pregnant and trying to build a stable life, is pulled back into the most destabilizing year she ever lived through.

The It Girl is Ware’s strongest literary novel, and it stands apart from her earlier work in ways that are immediately apparent. The Oxford setting carries a specific kind of weight — the closed world of an old college, with its hierarchies and traditions and the particular intensity of first-year friendships — that gives the book an elegiac quality her other thrillers have not needed to reach for. Ware writes the past with warmth and the present with strain, and the contrast illuminates what losing April cost Hannah beyond the obvious horror of the crime.

What distinguishes the novel within Ware’s catalog is its central preoccupation: not what happened to April but who April actually was. The investigation, as Hannah re-interviews former friends and classmates, keeps circling back to that question. April was impossible to know clearly because she was always performing. The thriller is built around an absence — a personality too dazzling to see through — and Ware handles that structural difficulty with considerable sophistication.

The mystery mechanics are sound, the Oxford social world is precisely rendered, and the emotional core — the friendship between Hannah and April, which was never entirely healthy — is the most fully realized relationship in Ware’s body of work.

Oxford as a Closed World

The Oxford college setting gives The It Girl something Ware’s other thrillers haven’t required: a world with its own internal hierarchy that is specifically constituted to intensify certain social dynamics. The college in the novel — old, architecturally beautiful, full of traditions its students inherit without having chosen — functions like the sealed rooms of Ware’s other thrillers but with a social rather than physical mechanism. You don’t need an avalanche or a cruise ship to trap people together when you have a first-year student body living in close proximity, taking shared meals, competing for the same academic recognition within a closed institutional structure.

April Clarke-Cliveden’s power within this world is precisely calibrated to the college’s hierarchies. She would not have been what she was in a different setting. The college amplifies her charisma in the same way that a high-pressure corporate environment might amplify other kinds of personality. Ware understands this and uses it.

April as an Absence

What distinguishes The It Girl structurally is that its central character is dead before the first page. April exists only in Hannah’s memories, in the accounts of other survivors, in the institutional record of the college. She is constructed rather than encountered, which means the reader assembles her from fragments the same way Hannah does. The difficulty of knowing April — really knowing her, underneath the performance — is both the novel’s theme and its method.

This creates a different kind of thriller engagement. Instead of tracking what a character will do next, the reader tracks who a character actually was. The investigation is retrospective and inferential, and Ware manages the ambiguity with care: April is never fully explained, because fully explaining her would betray the novel’s central insight, which is that some people are constitutively unknowable.

The Hannah-April Dynamic

Hannah’s relationship with April is the most psychologically developed relationship in Ware’s body of work, and it is developed in precisely the ways that such relationships resist development: through imbalance, through the intensity that first-year university friendships generate, through the specific vulnerability of a young woman who arrived at Oxford unsure of her own worth encountering someone who made her feel simultaneously special and insecure.

The retrospective framing — Hannah as an adult with a stable life and a pregnancy revisiting these memories — gives the emotional material a doubled quality. The young Hannah who loved April and the adult Hannah who is investigating her murder see the same events differently, and that difference is one of the novel’s quiet pleasures.

The Cold Case Structure

Cold cases are structurally well-suited to Ware’s method because they require the reconstruction of a social world rather than the investigation of current events. The ten-year gap between April’s murder and the novel’s present allows Ware to work in two time periods — the past rendered in warm detail, the present in the cooler light of adult perspective — and to use the contrast between them as a source of both elegy and irony. What seemed overwhelming in the first year of Oxford looks different from a decade’s distance. What seemed settled — the conviction, the closure — proves to have been neither.

Ruth Ware and the Modern Domestic Thriller

Ruth Ware spent years working in publishing, as a press officer and then as a teacher of English as a foreign language, before her 2015 debut In a Dark, Dark Wood turned her into one of the most reliably bestselling thriller writers in the English-speaking world. She is frequently described as an heir to Agatha Christie, and the comparison is apt in one specific sense: Ware is a master of the closed-circle mystery, the scenario in which a small group of people is sealed off — by a snowstorm, a remote cruise ship, a stranded train, a sprawling country house — so that the suspect pool is finite and the tension claustrophobic. The Woman in Cabin 10, The Turn of the Key, One by One, and The Lying Game all work variations on this template. The It Girl extends her range by trading the locked-room device for a locked-world one: the closed society of an Oxford college, where the walls are social rather than physical. It is widely regarded as her most ambitious and literary book, the one in which the human relationships carry as much weight as the puzzle.

The Campus Novel Inheritance

The It Girl sits consciously in the tradition of the dark academia campus novel, and its clearest forebear is Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, with its small coterie of brilliant, beautiful, morally compromised students at an elite institution. Ware borrows that genre’s atmosphere — the seductive glamour of intellectual privilege, the intoxication of being admitted to an inner circle — but bends it toward the cold-case structure she handles so well. The result is a hybrid that should appeal both to readers who love the propulsive twists of her earlier thrillers and to those drawn to the more reflective, character-driven pleasures of literary suspense. It rewards patient reading; the payoff lies as much in understanding who April was as in learning who killed her, and readers willing to sit with that ambiguity will find it Ware’s richest book.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Ware’s most literary and emotionally nuanced thriller, a cold-case mystery that doubles as a meditation on obsessive friendship and the unknowability of those we love.