"The Champions" by Kara Thomas

Set in the town of Sunnybrook, Hadley Daughtery, a newcomer to the town and aspiring journalist is assigned to cover the school football team, the Tigers. When one of the star players is poisoned, Hadley starts getting mysterious messages to stay away from the team but she doesn’t listen. The story follows Hadley teaming up with her academic rival, Peter, to uncover the truth before more lives are lost.

Kara Thomas is a popular American YA writer, most known for her thrillers such as The Cheerleaders, The Champions, That Weekend and Little Monsters. Thomas graduated from Stony Brook University. She wrote and developed the pilot the Revengers. Thomas states her inspiration for these books is from real life unsolved mysteries and personal high school experience. One of the most recent books that she wrote, 2024, was The Champions.

In the beginning, the entirety of the school assumes Hadley as a nerdy journalist who just moved there. Nobody thinks bad of her but nobody is really her friend except for Alix, one of the captains of the dance team, who thinks of her as friends. The story starts with Logan who flirts with Hadley and invites her to a party, where he drinks a shot and goes into a coma from tetrahydrozoline poisoning. In the middle, Hadley kind of changed from being some random girl, she wanted to learn more about the town, she even started asking Peter, her nemesis, to help her find out. Hadley became more hostile and did whatever she could to find out, even pushing her mom away and getting mad at everything. This results in all the ways she tried to find out who killed him, posting a poll to see what people think of the tigers but she gets revealed to the school, causing her to get death threats. Hadley doesn't stop being this bitter until the end of the story, when she finds out the killer of logan, the rape victims and perpetrators, she realizes that finding out the truth costed her ruining someone's life.

I like how much mystery there is in the book. There's no lie when I say that Kara Thomas is a really good writer. When I first started reading this it was only so that I wouldn’t fail the test but by the middle of the book, I started to get a little bit more than interested in how Hadley would deal with everything. 

I can recount the times that plot twists surprised me so much I audibly gasped and had to yap to my friends about what happened. Especially the ending, it was so juicy! If you’re looking for a story that is more realistic fiction but with a dark and mysterious turn, then The Champions is a good book for that. This books is a real page turner, with interesting plot and important themes of how lies can obscure truth in small communities and the systematic silence of victims from sexual assault. The underlying theme of the whole story depicts that honestly really is the best policy.