The Girls I've Been by Tess Sharpe
When seventeen-year-old Nora O'Malley, the daughter of a con artist, is taken hostage in a bank heist, every secret she is keeping close begins to unravel.
If you were raised by a con artist that made you do questionable things as a child, how do you think you'd turn out? You'd probably think everything you and your parent did was normal; that you'd do whatever you could to make your parent proud. And that's exactly what Nora did with her mom...until she didn't.
Needing to save her own skin was her main focus, and she did, getting help from her older sister Lee who escaped years prior.
Now, living with her older sister in a more 'normal' life, best friends with ex-boyfriend Wes and kind-of, sort-of, secret girlfriend Iris, Nora's able to do normal-people things; like school, work, or going to the bank with Iris and Wes and being involuntarily involved in a bank robbery.
Now, to attempt to keep Wes and Iris safe, Nora must rely on everything her mother taught her to outsmart the robbers and try to get everyone out alive.
I really got sucked into this read (audiobook in my case), and was pretty excited to get to the end; to solve the questions that were raised and to finally get to piece everything together. Which thankfully, the author did.
Learning the complete backstory of Nora and who she was before she became her current self really hit my hard emotionally. Nora's past involves some pretty heavy topics (mentioned below in the trigger warnings), but so do Wes and Iris'.
If you can handle the rough topics and trauma, and the plot interests you, I highly suggest this read!
Rating: 5/5
Trigger Warning: physical abuse, psychological abuse, (child) sexual abuse (not explicit), parental abuse, domestic abuse, murder, violence, depictions of trauma, depictions of blood