Some Girls Are

Some Girls Are
Courtney Summers
246 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Source: bought for myself
★★★★☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

Regina was part of "the fearsome five some," a group of girls who tormented other girls at school.   Then at a party, there is an unfortunate event invoking Regina and her best friend's boyfriend.  When the other girls in "the fearsome five some" find out, they play it like Regina did something wrong (when she in fact did not) and she gets frozen out.  Suddenly Regina is on the other side and it's really starting to affect her.

The first thing that struck me while reading this book was that the main characters name was Regina... also the name of one of the main characters in the movie Mean Girls.  Mean Girls was an entertaining movie about a serious situation, but Some Girls Are is a serious novel about the same thing.  This novel took bullying amongst teenage girls to a whole new level, a level that I never witnessed or experienced in my time in high school, but I know these things happen in real life and frankly, it's appalling.

The plot drew me right away.  That alone made me want to keep reading (for a long time I thought I would be giving the book five stars) but the formatting really kept me turning the pages.  There are no traditional chapters in this novel, instead there are sections that detail what's going on in Regina's life.  Some of them are a few pages, some are a few paragraphs, but I really felt like the formatting got me into Regina's mindset and it really aided in telling the story.

I also really liked that Regina became friends with Michael, a boy she and her friends used to torment.  I was rooting for them to get together though out the book.  I really liked that they both had to overcome their opinions of each other.

What I didn't care for was the climax and the ending.  Without giving too much away, I will say that things got very intense near the ending and, again, I know these things happen in real life, but I found it quite disturbing.  Then, the very end was a bit of a shock to me; things ended so abruptly I didn't feel like anything was really resolved after I closed the book.  That's where the book loses a star from me.

Four stars!  I loved reading this book.  The plot combined with the formatting left me turning the pages late into the night, but the end of the book was so intense and the ending came so abruptly, that I have to give it four instead of five stars.  If you liked the movie Mean Girls, you're going to want to check out this more intense and intellectual version.

PS: As of posting time, Amazon has this book bargain priced at just four dollars.  Seriously, it's worth it!