Some Girls Are, Courtney Summers

Regina Afton has worked hard to get to the top of the high school hierarchy. She's sacrificed a lot: her friends, her integrity, her conscience. When an incident at a party sparks off vicious and untrue rumours, she finds herself despised and alone, learning first-hand just what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the bullying she used to help deal out.

The mean-girl drama is nothing new in teen literature. I've reviewed similar books here at the blog: Speak, Before I Fall and Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood - and, of course, the name Regina not-so-subtly recalls Mean Girls. Some Girls Are was a pretty dark version of the story, unflinching in dealing with the inventive cruelty of teenage girls. In many such stories the victim wins out with their goodness, or rise above the pettiness of their peers by discovering their inner depths. But in this novel, the bad guys getting their just desserts would not be satisfying: after all, that is what this story's all about.

Regina's been a mean girl too long. She demonstrates feelings of regret and self-loathing for the popular girl she used to be, but she has faked so much in order to fit into the inner circle that she's lost touch with her inner goodness and decency. It's in there, but buried so deep that no one can see it any more. Regina is a complex narrator, and I wasn't quite sure how to view her. I wanted to sympathise with her, but she'd done some terrible things. Did she deserve all the abuse heaped upon her? "Nobody deserves that," said Michael, the closest thing Regina has to an ally all through her ordeal. We're not shown Regina's former cruelty first-hand, and though we see the results, she holds back from telling too much about what she'd done to make two thirds of her school actively hate her. I felt that Regina was an unreliable narrator, toning down the events of the past, censoring herself so as not to utterly alienate her audience. Something didn't quite ring true between how Regina presented herself on the page, and how her classmates saw her - 300 enemies are a lot. I also wanted to shake Regina at times for walking into the mean girls' traps, and giving them power over her.

Regina is not one to take bullying lying down, and it turns into an ugly war of revenge for revenge, spiraling out of control. For me, like for Regina, it was temporarily satisfying to see the bullies getting a taste of their own medicine, but that satisfaction is quickly replaced with unease and anxiety for what would happen next. I felt sure that the situation would escalate into disaster or tragedy, because I could not see either side backing down. Ultimately, I found the conclusion hugely anticlimactic and boggled at the author's decision to end the book the way that she did. Is that it? I wondered.

It's reading books like this that I feel grateful that I was never popular at school, with fewer expectations to live up to or compromises to make. Not that I was entirely guiltless in these matters, still moderating my Katie-ness (in fact in those days I was Kathy, not Katie, a more significant thing that you might think) in an attempt not to give people within and outside my "friendship" group reasons to pick on me. But the cost of fitting into a clique such as the Fearsome Fivesome is too high to ever be worthwhile.

Mini-reviews: The Boy in the Dress & This Perfect World

The Boy in the Dress, David Walliams

I've never liked Little Britain, and when I saw one of its stars had written a book with a title like The Boy in the Dress, my expectations weren't high. I was pleasantly surprised when in a quiet moment at work, I picked up Walliams' debut novel and found myself immediately charmed. I need not give too lengthy a plot synopsis - the clue is in the title! Walliams' narration is reminiscent of Roald Dahl's, full of humour and authorial asides to the reader - even a sly reference to "Small England, or whatever that show's called," and the Dahl similarities are highlighted by the illustrations by Quentin Blake. There is enough childish humour to appeal to 9- to 12-year-old boys, but not so much it alienates older readers. There is a great cast of characters, my favourite being the wonderfully overzealous corner shop owner with his cries of "three for the price of two! Eight for the price of five! Thirteen for the price of eleven!" or his offer of "buy two packets of crisps get one free." (One crisp, that is.) Yet there is a sensitivity that you wouldn't get with Roald Dahl. On my first encounter with the cross-dressing protagonist's father, I mentally compared him with Mr Wormwood of Matilda, or perhaps Harry Potter's Uncle Vernon, but as the story progresses we get to see that he's not the miserable grump that adults often are in kids' books, but a loving father who's not good with the soppy stuff, and who is heartbroken about his wife's desertion. A humorous book with a heart, for children aged around 9-12.

David Walliams has written two other books for children: Mr Stink and Billionaire Boy.

This Perfect World, Suzanne Bugler

This Perfect World is the next on the list of books selected by Richard and Judy for their Book Club. The Richard and Judy Book Club has been quite a significant event for encouraging people to read and discuss books that maybe they wouldn't otherwise. Formerly featured on their afternoon show, the Book Club has really helped to publicise such books as The Time Traveller's Wife, My Sister's Keeper, and The Lovely Bones in the UK. I've had mixed reactions to the R&J selections, adoring some and being very indifferent to others. This should be expected, really, as the books are chosen to appeal to a wide audience.

This Perfect World wasn't one of the "adores" for me. The story revolves around Laura Hamley, former school bully and centre of the "in-crowd," whose life is shaken up when she receives a phone call from the mother of Helen "Heddy" Partridge - one of her former victims. Heddy is has suffered a mental breakdown and is in hospital, and Mrs Partridge wants Laura to help her to get out. Laura is not so keen.

I find it difficult to enjoy a book if I can't like the central character, and I'll be blunt: I felt nothing but disgust and loathing for Laura. Reading This Perfect World so soon after Cookie, my own memories of being bullied were still close to the surface and Laura, and her friends were horrible. All through the book, she is reluctantly persuaded into helping Mrs Partridge, driving her to the hospital or looking after Heddy's child, but constantly Laura's thoughts are of getting rid of the "problem" of Heddy, keeping her in the past so that she doesn't have to think about her any more. We see how childhood bullies have grown into snobs and bigots, and how the playground politics seem set to influence their own children's relationships with each other. This Perfect World was a quick read which nonetheless provoked a lot of thought, but ultimately I found it bleak and depressing and I wasn't sorry to finish.

Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood, Eileen Cook

When she was in eighth grade, Helen's best friend Lauren humiliated and betrayed her in order to start high school in the popular group. Helen moved away with her family for three years, but now she's back and she wants revenge.

I started reading this book a little bit on my moral high horse: Revenge is bad, forgiveness is good, and at first that interfered a little with my enjoyment of Lauren Wood. On the other hand, there was that little dark side of me that remembered being bullied in school and appreciated seeing the nasty kid getting her comeuppance, quite safely within the pages of a book.

I wasn't quite convinced by the realism of this book. Firstly I debated whether it was believable for a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl to still be obsessing over an event that happened when she was fourteen. And it is obsession - in her three years away from her old school she stalks Lauren through her Facebook (that girl seriously needs to sort out her privacy settings on her profile page!) She is unable to put this event behind her and move on. Then again, she was fourteen, a very vulnerable age at which anything that happens is the most important thing in the world, and Lauren had been her best friend for her whole life up to that point. I know from experience that it is harder to get over trust issues caused by a supposed friend than a known enemy, because you've let that person inside the walls that keep others out, making it a more devastating sabotage to your life.

But we are expected to believe that Helen has changed enough over three years to make her unrecogniseable, by losing some weight, cutting her hair and having a nose job, so that she can call herself by her middle name (Claire) and mother's maiden name. I didn't think so, but was quite willing to suspend my disbelief to watch the drama unfold. The plot was fairly predictable, and although Helen-Claire, the boy she liked, and Brenda, the friendly girl who wasn't part of the in-crowd and therefore had to be befriended in secret, were pretty well realised, Lauren could quite easily be Regina George from Mean Girls and her two closest friends, Bailey and Kyla (why are there always two cheerleader/popular girl minions?) looked in my mind like Brittany and Santana from Glee!

All in all, Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood was a trashy but enjoyable guilty-pleasure read. And it has a brilliant cover.

If you enjoyed this, you might like:

Pink - Lili Wilkinson
Just As Long As We're Together - Judy Blume
Film: Mean Girls

Thirteen Reasons Why, Jay Asher

I'll be honest, I didn't want to read this book, but there was something about it that pulled me in against my will. I couldn't tell you what that "something" was. Not the cover in all its greyness, and I felt very uncomfortable about the story premise: a suicide note recorded on thirteen sides of cassette tapes and posted to the people indirectly responsible for the girl's death. It seemed unspeakably cruel. And yet part of me, a morbidly curious twinge in my mind wanted to know. It must have been the cassette idea, the thirteen different sides to the story, that struck me as original and intriguing, but I recoiled somewhat from the subject matter and resisted reading this book.

Obviously, I didn't resist forever, as proven by the existance of this blog post. I was encouraged to read Thirteen Reasons Why after seeing several other reviewers reassuring their readers that this book was worthwhile.

After Hold Still, Thirteen Reasons Why was the second book I read this month that contained a teenage suicide and its effect on those left behind, but this time the book concentrated on the events that drove Hannah to take her life. The events seem small enough at first: a few words, a rumour, and some of the people involved protest, "Surely she didn't do this because of that!" But through her tapes, Hannah demonstrates how small events trigger reactions the instigators couldn't forsee, and how they chip away at her: her trust in people, her sense of security, her self-worth and even her innermost thoughts. By the end of the book, I dare anyone to say that Hannah's reasons are petty and insignificant!

There are two narrators of this book, by necessity: Hannah, in her recorded messages, and her classmate Clay, who hears them and responds to them. At first I found this a little distracting and found it difficult to follow the rapid switching between voices, and for a while I wished that we could just hear Hannah's side of the story (while simultaneously feeling disgusted with myself for being so nosy about such a dark subject. But through Clay, the reader is given someone else to identify with, and we feel an extra layer of suspense, wondering what is coming next and where he fits into this story. As Clay listens to the tapes on a stolen borrowed Walkman, he visits the locations of some of Hannah's traumatic experiences. Seeing the places through two different sets of eyes gives an extra layer of realism to the story. And Hannah's story challenges Clay to think of how he relates to others around him, and how he can learn from his mistakes regarding Hannah.

My first impression of the story was that it was cruel, and at first I could not shake this off. Hannah's voice in the first few tapes has a thin veneer of cheerfulness over a lot of anger and bitterness. The chirpy tones at the beginning are all the harsher due to the knowledge of her intentions at the time of recording. It really feels like this is her revenge: to make her tormentors live forever with the knowledge of what they've done. As the book progresses, and the incidents become not just one-offs but part of a bigger snowball effect, you sense her despair and it seems more like a warning: we can't know how our actions will affect others, what is going on beneath the surface.

Despite in one respect being an easy read, Thirteen Reasons Why is an uncomfortable book, and it took me a while to shake off the feelings of guilt as if I was a voyeur into someone's - even a fictional character' - misery. However, it is extremely thought-provoking and informative. The book demonstrates through an incident in a Peer Communications class that depression and suicide are still taboo subjects, and where a subject is not spoken about, then it cannot be acted upon. Thirteen Reasons Why gives information on the signs to look out for, which tragically went unobserved in Hannah's case.

One of those Really Important Books.

Now for a BBC moment:
If you have been affected by the issues raised in this book, you can contact the Samaritans (UK and Republic of Ireland) details here.
If you live outside the UK and Ireland, you can find details of helplines for your country through the Befrienders' website here.