Early on in Only If You're Lucky I began to describe it to people as "The Secret History meets Mean Girls". As the book goes on the Mean Girls comparison becomes a little less apt, but now that I've finished it I still stand by that as an elevator pitch for the novel.

This is exactly what I'm looking for in a thriller. It's packed with mystery, layers upon layers of them, the reveals slowly peeling back to reveal something I don't think I ever could have predicted. There are parts that I saw coming, of course, and it felt great to be proved right when the reveals finally came, but they just serve to make the unpredictable parts even more surprising. I loved the characters here and I loved the world, and although I really wanted to get to the end to see everything come together I also wanted it to keep going so that I could spend more time with everyone. 

One question I've been asking myself is whether this falls under the "dark academia" banner or not. It's set in a school, it's very much a "howdunnit" in the style of The Secret History or If We Were Villains - though not as straightforward a howdunnit as either of them, blending blends some elements of "whodunnit" along with "what did they actually... dun?" into something that feels like it's in conversation with the genre without just replaying the hits. The academic aspect of things and constantly references to literature are much lighter on the ground here than we might expect from that genre, but I think it still falls under that umbrella and is a good addition to the canon of "dark academia".