I Am Margaret Moore by Hannah Capin

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press, Wednesday Books

Date of Publication: March 15th, 2022

Genre: Young Adult, Mystery, Thriller, Paranormal

Purchase Links: Amazon | Audible | B&N | WorldCat

Goodreads Synopsis:

Lyrical and haunting, Hannah Capin’s I Am Margaret Moore is a paranormal thriller that tests the hold of sisterhood and truth.

I am a girl. I am a monster, too.

Each summer the girls of Deck Five come back to Marshall Naval School. They sail on jewel-blue waters; they march on green drill fields; they earn sunburns and honors. They push until they break apart and heal again, stronger.

Each summer Margaret and Rose and Flor and Nisreen come back to the place where they are girls, safe away from the world: sisters bound by something more than blood.

But this summer everything has changed. Girls are missing and a boy is dead. It’s because of Margaret Moore, the boys say. It’s because of what happened that night in the storm.

Margaret’s friends vanish one by one, swallowed up into the lies she has told about what happened between her and a boy with the world at his feet. Can she unravel the secrets of this summer and last, or will she be pulled under by the place she once called home?

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First Line:

It is summer again and we are alive.

i am margaret moore by hannah capin

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When I got the email from NetGalley that I Am Margaret Moore was available to “Read Now,” I jumped on it. I had this book on my TBR since I saw that Hannah Capin was publishing it. I had loved Foul is Fair and had high expectations for this book. Well, I Am Margaret Moore fell short of my high expectations.

I Am Margaret Moore is the story of Margaret and her friends. The summer before, Margaret was involved in a scandal with another camper and was sent away. This summer, she was going to move past the drama and enjoy her summer. But things don’t go the way she wants. Her friends want the truth about what happened last summer, and Margaret isn’t telling them. Because if she tells the truth, she’s afraid no one will believe her. What happened that night?

I will be very blunt; I wasn’t a fan of how the author wrote this book. There are no chapters. Instead, once a scene ended, some headers separated them (example: The Girls with paragraphs describing Margaret’s friends). I get why the author chose to write the book she did, but I like cut-and-dry chapters.

The flow of I Am Margaret Moore was choppy, and the timeline jumped around a lot. I couldn’t tell if I was in the past or present. Again, I get why the author did this, but for me, it didn’t work.

I wasn’t too sure about how I felt about Margaret. During the first half of the book, I couldn’t connect with her at all. But, by the second half of the book, I did start to like and pity her. Yes, pity. She had so much happened to her in a short amount of time.

Margaret’s friends were the true backbone of the book. They were determined to find out what happened to Margaret. That led to disciplinary action from the naval school, but that didn’t deter them.

There are a couple of twists in the plot that I saw coming. I guessed the first one right away, and once certain events happened in the second half of the book, I figured that out too.

I wasn’t a fan of the end of I Am Margaret Moore. Again, it was choppy, with events playing out of order—the choppiness and the fact that the HEA seemed thrown on as an afterthought.

I would recommend I Am Margaret Moore to anyone over the age of 16. There is implied sex, some kissing scenes, mild language, and mild violence.