Eva Darrows

When proud geek-girl Emma's new stepsister, mean-girl Quinn, moves into the bedroom next door, Emma's world is turned upside down, but when Quinn dies suddenly, Emma realizes there was more to her stepsister than anyone ever realized.

Dead Little Mean Girl

Laura

Quite a few times, I've gone into books expecting one thing and having the actual outcome be completely different. Occasionally, I'll end up enjoying it regardless- I thought Everything I Never Told You was a mystery, for instance, and it not being one didn't impact my rating at all- and sometimes (most times) I'll hate it- like All the Rage, another contemporary I thought was a mystery. 

I say all this because I thought this book was a mystery with a lot of contemporary elements (it's always mysteries...) and it ended up just being a straight-up contemporary. And not a very good one. In fact, for most of the book, I couldn't help but think it truly must be a parody of Heathers or Mean Girls. I was searching so hard for the message this book promised, the one that says not all jocks and cheerleaders are bullying morons, not all nerds are wonderful people, and didn't get that at all. I hoped this book was about a girl who dismissed her stepsister as being shallow and mean, but after her untimely death she finds herself searching for her stepsister's killer and discovers all kinds of things about the girl she had thought she knew but never really had known. That wasn't it. That wasn't it at all. Instead, we got an amazing nerd girl and a sociopath for the first 200 pages (aka, most of the book). The stepsister is a beautiful blonde idiot, a venomous cheerleader. Hell, she wasn't even a convincing sociopath- sociopaths are typically geniuses, with cool calculating minds. It seemed like she wasn't smart because in YA literature, the only smart people allowed are the likeable ones, you know, so they can take down the bullies with some witty quips. 

Yeah, so for the first 200 pages, this was going the way of most really bad YA contemporaries. Cliched family backgrounds all around, in which the mothers are glorified, who needs fathers. Even when the father has a good excuse, like Emma's father- of course he's not around much, he's a goddamn pilot. Quinn is even said to have gotten all her negative qualities from her father, I suppose because it's easier to say that than to let her mother's character be slandered in any way. It would be interesting if her mother was at least extremely manipulative, and more unique than just saying that her father's a complete dick. I think my least favorite character actually ended up being Karen, because for someone who professed to love her daughter as much as she did, she didn't seem to give a damn about her wellbeing at all. Hell, she probably didn't give her much of a choice as to where she wanted to live or which house was better for her to live in. I don't know. The more I was told to like Karen, the less I ended up actually liking her.

Continue reading this review on my blog here: https://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/2...

Dead Little Mean Girl

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