Girls With Rebel Souls: Suzanne Young

We meet again!

Here we are, reaching the end again. I read Girls With Sharp Sticks in December, so I’m technically not finishing the entire series in 2022, but it will be the second series that I have finished this year. And with that, let’s dive into the end of Philomena’s tale. Here we go :)

Brief Synopsis:

Mena and the other girls really don’t know which end is up anymore. After even more betrayals that they did not see coming, they’re once again on the move. Leandra gave them the names of the other investors and suggested that they go and find them before it’s too late. It’s time to put a stop to Innovations Academy once and for all, but it’s definitely not going to be easy. For the first time, the girls are going to voluntarily split up.

Mena and Jackson are on their way back to Colorado, where they discover that the investor is a lot closer to home than they expected. It’s… Jackson’s father. Before they go to his house, they stop at the house that Jackson and Quentin shared and discover that it has been turned upside down, by somebody that’s clearly looking for some answers. After that, they visit the Academy and find Annalise’s work: she and Quentin burned the god-awful place to the ground.

At Jackson’s dad’s home, it gets worse. They find that someone had already visited and murdered his father. They also find Quentin and Annalise there, but they swear up and down that they had also found Jackson’s father like that and that they did not have any part in it. Though Jackson is emotionally wrecked, they search the house for answers before leaving and find proof that his dad had purchased Valentine; their fellow girl that they had believed was killed for good.

Even weirder, is that the town that housed Innovations Academy is now a ghost town. Besides Jackson’s father’s corpse, they don’t see another living soul while they’re there. What in the heck happened? They decide to all stay at the hotel that Quentin had booked on the edge of the next town while they try and figure things out. There, they connect with the other girls and discover that Sydney was involved in a pretty close call with another investor turning up dead. Who’s killing these investors before the girls have a chance to confront them?

The girls agree that it’s time to band back together and Quentin conveniently has a cabin in the woods that used to belong to his grandfather that is off the grid, and he offers it up to the girls as a place to be safe. Before heading up there, in a totally cathartic moment, Mena and Annalise visit a salon and get their hair changed pretty drastically, finally realizing what it really means that their lives are up to them.

Jackson pulls a Houdini move and decides that he’s going to meet with a sheriff that they believe they can finally trust to show her his dad’s body and try to explain the situation to her, so Quentin takes Annalisa and Mena to the cabin, where they begin preparing for when the other girls are going to show up. Not long after, they call Jackson and learn that the sheriff has requested that Quentin also visit Denver to give his own side of the story. He agrees when Mena and Annalise assure him they’ll be fine as soon as the other girls show up.

Now, we all know that wasn’t the smartest thing to do.

The girls show up and everything is hunky dory, but Annalise has also invited Raven the hacker to the cabin. Did I mention before that they discovered that Raven is also an AI? Well, she is… anyway… Raven shows up, and she’s not alone. She brought Anton, one of the men that the girls thought they could trust at the Academy. Raven also isn’t Raven. She’s Valentine. I know, I know, it’s getting so confusing. They had shut Raven down temporarily and Anton had Valentine “fixed” and installed in Raven, to be left dormant until he needed her. When Raven found out that she was also AI, she did some digging and found Valentine, and they did some planning of their own. While Anton thought that Valentine was on his side, she turns on him at the cabin and helps the girls.

FINALLY, it seems that they’ve reached their goal of dismantling the Academy once and for all and everything is fine. Right? Wrong. Because they still have to deal with Rosemarie, who created them, Lennon Rose and Leandra. The other girls of the Academy are still vulnerable and they don’t totally know who they can trust. When they get to Rosemarie’s, they find the other girls already shut down and Rosemarie is ready to do it to them, too, until Lennon Rose steps in and poisons Rosemarie. I know, it really seems like nobody knows who they can actually trust in these books, huh?

They follow Leandra back to Winston Weeks’s home, who isn’t actually dead but they thought he was, and she’s seriously hurt but fighting back fully for the first time. There’s a major showdown, and Annalise shows up with Valentine/Raven. Annalise tells Mena she can probably stop the killswitch in their brains and take them out permanently, but the first time around will be really tricky… like the subject has to die, be reset and refreshed and brought back tricky. Of course, Mena volunteers. She wakes up SIX MONTHS later to a world that she’s fought hard for.

My Rating:

I’m giving this one a solid 9/10, and the series overall gets a 10/10. I really enjoyed it, though there were parts of it that tended to be really predictable.

Devastation Rating:

Mmm. Let’s go with a 7/10 here. Really messed up things do happen but the important people mostly make it out unscathed.

My overall take on the series:

Like I said, as a series overall I thoroughly enjoyed them. The way it ended did seem like there was a possibility for more stories in the future? I guess time will tell.

Check out my Goodreads (Traci Bishop) to see what I’m currently reading and to see a good chunk of the books I have already read. My Instagram can be found on the home page and I will share whenever a new post is up as well!

Until next time <3