Girls Like Her

By: Melanie Sumrow

Narrated by: Melanie Sumrow, January LaVoy

A raw, gripping, authentic, and boldly original novel about a fifteen-year-old Texas girl set to stand trial for murder—and the one person who might be able to help her clear her name.

A wealthy businessman is dead, and fifteen-year-old Ruby Monroe is in a Dallas jail awaiting trial for his murder. Ruby has no one she can count on—no one, except her state-appointed caseworker, a woman named Cadence Ware. In Ruby’s experience, that’s not anyone she can trust.

Cadence is familiar with the cold reality of Ruby’s situation, even before Ruby was arrested. Angry and alone, homeless and hungry, breaking the law just to survive, she is the kind of girl no one wants to listen to, especially not the prosecutor who wants to put her away for life.

But no one knows the story—the real story—of what happened the day Ruby met the man who would end up dead. As the layers of truth are peeled away and time is running out, Ruby and Cadence will both have desperate choices to make—choices that could mean the difference between Ruby spending her life in prison or her name being cleared.

Told through a collection of letters, meeting notes, news articles, court transcripts, and more, Girls Like Her is a riveting and unflinching tale of the truths so often lost in the American justice system, and one girl’s fight to be heard.

©2024 Melanie Sumrow (P)2024 HarperCollins Publishers

Outstanding

4.5 STARS

Remarkable.

GIRLS LIKE HER grabbed me from the first sentence and hasn’t yet let go.

Ruby is charged with killing a man with a reputation for helping needy children. The prosecution attests although she killed three victim at age fourteen, the murder was perpetrated in the commission of a crime and should be charged as an adult.

Cadence, her forensic social worker believes Ruby acted in self-defense and that the victim had a darker side. As Cadence fights to save her client, sometimes harder than Ruby herself, Cadence sees parallels to her own life.

I loved how Melanie Sumrow used court transcripts and letters as part of the storytelling, which added depth to GIRLS LIKE HER. Sumrow also used both Ruby’s and Cadence’s third person points of view, unusual for a YA novel yet very effective.

What kept GIRLS LIKE HER from being a whole five stars for me was that with a read through by a social worker or psychologist, Sumrow could have tied up some of the inaccuracies about Cadence’s testing and evaluation. I have a master of social work and doctorate of psychology, so these technical issues might not bother everyone. One example is a forensic evaluation complete with psychological testing would have been done, which with a doctorate Cadence would have been trained to do. The exercise with the cards where Ruby told stories about the characters is an actual test called the CAT-Children's Apperception Test, one of a battery of tests in an evaluation. The reason this matters is as an expert witness, Cadence should have referred to the test rather than her own similar exercise.

Still, I enjoyed GIRLS LIKE HER so much I decided to relisten while writing this review.