THE REVENGE GAME

Young women at a New York prep school fight back against a misogynist game—until a popular lacrosse player goes missing after prom night.

Alyson Benowitz is a hopeless romantic who’s just experienced a humiliating rejection from a summer co-worker. So the new school year at her recently turned co-ed prep school in the Adirondacks will be a great opportunity to start over in her search for love. Alyson gets paired with athletic, well-liked Brenton Riggs Jr. for a class project, and soon they start to date. However, Alyson, best friend Jess Quigley, and other girls at the school learn about the King’s Cup, a secret contest where boys earn points for different sexual encounters with young women on campus. The girls unite to create a Queen’s Cup, their effort to take back power by rejecting the boys in public as a form of revenge. As Alyson helps her friends with the Queen’s Cup, she wonders if Riggs is also involved in the sexist scheme and whether he’s been using her all along. The novel opens with a news article covering Riggs’ disappearance before going back seven months to September to trace the unfolding story. Interspersed throughout are additional news articles, along with transcripts, press conferences, and social media posts. A predictable ending mars this otherwise engaging page-turner in which women go above and beyond to support one another. Major characters read white.

An empowering and timely feminist mystery.