Junior year, the suburbs of Philadelphia. Alex, Mollie and Veronica are those girls: they're the best of friends and the party girls of the school. But how well does everybody know them--and really, how well do they know one another? Alex is secretly in love with the boy next door and has joined a band--without telling anyone. Mollie suffers from a popular (and possibly sociopathic) boyfriend, as well as a serious mean streak. And Veronica just wants to be loved--literally, figuratively, physically....she's not particular. Will this be the year that bonds them forever....or tears them apart for good?
A free copy was provided to me through Netgalley in exchange for a review.
Those Girls, as you can probably tell from the summary, is a book mostly about issues and friendship. Reading through it, I think the biggest impression I got was that it was kind of a cheap version of Pretty Little Liars and all the other books and shows that have come out lately that center around the problems of upper-class teenagers. Unlike those other titles, though, I found myself not necessarily caring about any of them.
The book is told from three point of views, each of the girls who are friends and, at the beginning, it mentions that two of them have been best friends all their lives, while the third, Veronica, got into their circle starting in fifth grade. It might just be me, but the way they treat each other does not scream ‘best friends’ so much as ‘you have things I want so I tolerate you a lot.’ There is very little to show they’re friends anywhere in the book other than talk of it, while in the present they’re pretty much treating each other like crap. Which is okay considering what’s supposed to be going on, but I felt like maybe the book should’ve started a little earlier or not tried to put so much emphasis on what good friends they were and more on how they were falling apart.
I also found myself not really empathizing with the characters, because their three point of views were so jumbled and confused that there really wasn’t a way to tell them apart from each other, other than a few defining characteristics that ended up being interchangeable anyway. I could sort of see what the author was going for, which seemed to be that your friends don’t always know things and often have different impressions of you than is the truth or than you do of yourself, but it wasn’t really passed off that well.
I did find myself enjoying the times when Alex was practicing and playing with the band, and I felt like that was the best part of the novel and sort of wished there was more of it.
I think the worst part of the book is that it centers so much around drugs and alcohol, when I felt like a lot of scenes could have happened exactly as they did without mention of them getting high or even drunk. I’m not against using those as plot devices in fiction, let alone YA fiction, but other than a few instances, it felt sort of forced and like the author felt like she had to have her characters be drunks and stoners when she really didn’t.
All in all, it’s an okay book, but the redeeming qualities in don’t make up for the bad in my eyes, so I’d probably say pass this one up.
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