"The Champions" By Kara Thomas

Imagine being wrapped up in a murder investigation all because you volunteered to write an article for your school. Well, that is exactly what Hadley Dougherty’s situation is. The Champions by Kara Thomas is an exciting young adult thriller about a 17 year old girl named Hadley who just moved to Sunnybrook, a town infamous for the death of 5 cheerleaders. Hadley’s a part of the newspaper club at her school, and is hoping to be assigned the role of editor in chief; she believes she deserves it the most because she gives the club the most effort, and she wants to put it on her college application to Columbia. To get on the club’s advisor, Ms Kirk’s good side, she volunteered to write an article about the school’s football team, which she has little to absolutely no interest in. After attending a party one of the players asks her out to, things take a dark turn when he is poisoned and Hadley gets mixed up in all of the seemingly perfect team’s dark history. Now, with help from her old friend, now foe, Peter and a little investigation skills, she tries to figure out why anyone would try to poison a football player, and what other secrets the team is hiding . However, she needs to be careful, or she could end up the next victim. 

According to “kara-thomas.com”, “Kara Thomas is the author of the YA novels The Darkest Corners, Little Monsters, The Cheerleaders, and That Weekend, as well as the adult novels Out of the Ashes and Lost to Dune Road. Kara's books have been sold in multiple languages and have been nominated for the International Thriller Writers Award. In 2013, she wrote and developed the pilot The Revengers with Rashida Jones and Will McCormack for The CW. She lives on Long Island with her husband, son, and rescue cat, where she spends way too much time on Reddit Unresolved Mysteries trying to solve cold cases.”

As I said before, when the protagonist, Hadley, is invited to a house party by Logan, a football player, a regular game of beer pong ends with Logan having a seizure. Hadley has to drive him to the hospital and the party gets shut down. The next few days, everyone that was at the party became extremely worried when they heard that Logan entered a coma; everyone assumed it was alcohol poisoning, including Hadley, but she starts to doubt that things are that simple. Before the party, Hadley received a series of anonymous emails from a user named “SportsFan” warning her about the party; she thinks they may have something to do with the poisoning, but her suspicions are debunked. She asks her former friend, Peter, if he knows anything about it, but he denies any knowledge. So, with hardly any understanding of the poisoner’s motives, Hadley and Peter attempt to piece together a story to help Logan get justice; along the way, they find out some pretty shocking and disturbing things about Sunnybrook's football team. In the end, they find out that the real villain of this story isn’t who it appears to be at first. In the beginning of this book, I feel that Hadley would be characterized as a quiet, smart, chill girl. She doesn’t talk to many people, but doesn’t have problems with anyone besides Peter. She’s also very hardworking and passionate about newspaper/ journalism. Hadley herself doesn’t exactly go through any changes throughout the book besides becoming more aware, however people definitely start to see her differently when they find out that Hadley was the one who sent out an anonymous survey basically trying to dig up dirt on the football team; Hadley gets harassed at school, harassed at home, and even physically assaulted, however she doesn’t really seem to regret what she did. At the end of the book, Hadley seems more mature, and compassionate; she was even willing to become friends again with Peter, who, through Hadley’s perspective in the beginning of the book, was pretty much her mortal enemy . 

Something I liked about this book is the way that I couldn’t guess the plot twist a mile away like I sometimes can for other books. The story kept me constantly interested and excited to see what would happen next. The main character was surprisingly likeable as well. I’m not going to lie, when I started reading, I assumed that Hadley was going to be this stuck up, corny, “I’m not like other girls” type of main character; however the book soon proved me wrong, and it was a nice change of pace from other books, or TV shows centered around a high school girl. I also appreciated how the author didn’t choose to write the “villains” as misunderstood, sad characters, and instead wrote them as quite simply just bad people who refuse to take accountability for their actions. In my opinion, this book is absolutely worth the buy. People who would like this book the most would probably be teenagers who are into murder mysteries, and are tired of boring, predictable endings. Or maybe just people who hate their school’s football team and have some suspicions about them, but sadly, no proof. Overall, this book is great for those who want a little more mystery/ teenage drama in their life. It also serves as a reminder to form your own opinions about people, not just follow the majority, because you never know what people could be hiding.