Not Your Final Girl

When you reunite with friends you haven’t seen in a long time, you’re spending time with the people you knew back then, twenty, ten, even five years ago, and that makes it easy to revert to the person you were back then, too, and the old dynamics resurface, good or bad.

When that long ago time was your teenage years, it can be even harder because you weren’t fully baked, everything was melodrama, emotions were dialed up to 11, insecurities and anxieties and overblown egos ran amuck.

So, that makes it easy to relate to the characters in Mikayla Randolph’s Not Your Final Girl, a group of friends from high school reuniting several years later at a lakeside cabin where they spent a lot of time as youths.

For you English lit types like me, this is also a slasher reimagining of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, so you know it’s going to be kind of tragic.

Told from the PoVs of several of the friend group (plus a newcomer - the girlfriend of the “leader” of the group and who is as clueless as we are about the group’s history), Randolph does a good job at making each character distinct with their own emotions and motivations without giving so much away that we can immediately identify the killer.

What I liked most about Not Your Final Girl is that Mikayla Randolph hooked us with the first pages like a classic slasher but then took time to let us get to know and understand the characters before the slaying begins.  A fun (and satisfying) read!

Randomlings:

• They have s’mores Pop-tarts?

• Why are IPAs still a thing when you could just chew pine needles?

• “a waterfall of intestines” - nice.

Thank you to NetGalley and CLASH Books for the advance copy for my unbiased review. Pub. Date: 5/5/26