People Like Us
Dana Mele's 2018 debut is set at the elite Bates Academy, a New England girls' boarding school where Kay Donovan, a soccer star and the school's reigning queen bee, finds the body of an unknown classmate floating in the lake the night of a victory party. Within days an anonymous email arrives on Kay's laptop, leading her through a digital scavenger hunt designed to publicly destroy the lives of every girl in her clique, one by one, unless she follows instructions. The book is told in Kay's tight, calculating first person, and it slowly excavates the secrets she has been working very hard to bury since middle school, including a buried friendship and a long, complicated attraction to a girl named Bea. Mele writes the elite-prep-school setting and the queer central romance with a level of bite that put the book on the shelf with Karen M. McManus and E. Lockhart for a generation of teen thriller readers.
Where People Like Us keeps showing up
Two of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about People Like Us
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
At an elite Vermont boarding school, Kay Donovan and her field hockey friends find a girl drowned in the lake. A blog post starts assigning them tasks, and refusal will cost them their secrets.
Multiple novels share this title. The most commonly searched in YA is People Like Us by Dana Mele (2018), a queer murder mystery set at a New England boarding school.
Yes. People Like Us is YA mystery suitable for readers 14 and up. The boarding-school murder premise is in dark academia territory with queer protagonists.
People Like Us is 381 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, People Like Us takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
People Like Us is a standalone novel by Dana Mele, not part of a series.
People Like Us is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
