Publisher: Delacourte Press
Publication Date: August 2024
When a mysterious accident befalls a member of the all-star high school football team, the town's deadly history stands to repeat itself—and the price of discovering the truth is higher than anyone could imagine.
It was the deaths of five cheerleaders that made the town of Sunnybrook infamous. Eleven years later, the girls' killer has been brought to justice, and the town just wants to move on. By the time Hadley moves to Sunnybrook, though, the locals are more interested in the Tigers, the high school's championship-winning football team. The Tigers are Sunnybrook’s homegrown heroes--something positive in a town with so much darkness in its past.
Hadley could not care less about football, but shortly after she gets assigned to cover the team's latest championship bid for the school newspaper, one of the Tigers is poisoned at a party, and almost immediately after, Hadley starts getting strange emails warning her to stay far away from the football team.It's becoming clear Sunnybrook's golden boys have secrets, and after a second player is mysteriously killed, Hadley’s beginning to suspect that someone wants the team to pay for their sins. Or does this new target on the football team have something to do with what happened to the cheerleaders all those years ago?As an outsider in Sunnybrook, Hadley feels like she's the only one who can see the present clearly, but it looks like she’s going to have to dig up the darkness of the past to get to the bottom of what’s happening now. Luckily, there are still some Sunnybrook High grads who never left--people who were around eleven years ago—and if she can just convince them to talk, she might be able stop a killer before another Tiger dies.
I really enjoyed The Cheerleaders, so I was excited to see a sequel to the book. The Champions takes place years later and features Hadley, an aspiring journalist, who gets tangled up in another mystery involving athletes from Sunnybrook High School. I wish I could say I liked this one just as much, but sadly, it fell short for me.
First, there were way too many characters to keep track of in this book. None of the teens were likable. It's hard to like a book when there is no one to root for. Even Hadley annoyed me. It was also not realistic. The lack of attention from the teachers (including Hadley's mother) to a potential cheating scandal among the athletes was astonishing. The survey she sent out was fine. I thought the upset over it by everyone was way over the top. I felt like the book was really unfocused. I found myself zoning out toward the end and when the reveal happened, I was underwhelmed. I'm not sure I would recommend this one. Stick with the first book.
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