Stars: ★★.5/5
Climbing to the top of the social ladder is hard—falling from it is even harder. Regina Afton used to be a member of the Fearsome Fivesome, an all-girl clique both feared and revered by the students at Hallowell High… until vicious rumors about her and her best friend’s boyfriend start going around. Now Regina’s been “frozen out” and her ex-best friends are out for revenge. If Regina was guilty, it would be one thing, but the rumors are far from the terrifying truth and the bullying is getting more intense by the day.
She takes solace in the company of Michael Hayden, a misfit with a tragic past who she herself used to bully. Friendship doesn’t come easily for these onetime enemies, and as Regina works hard to make amends for her past, she realizes Michael could be more than just a friend… if threats from the Fearsome Foursome don’t break them both first.
Here’s the thing.
If I can find an aspect of a book I really liked, it can change how I feel about the rest of the book. So even if a book suffers in other areas, if it really pulls at me emotionally in other places, those initial things don’t matter as much. With Some Girls Are, I tried to find something to hold onto, something that made me root for the book. Which, for me, was that so many people have loved this book and, after that didn’t work, the writing. Focusing on how much I liked the writing helped, but not near enough.
At some point, every girl in high school is going to be at the end or beginning of a rumor; it just happens. It’s normal. It might not be great, but it’s normal. Like in shows and movies and books like Some Girls Are, there really are popular girls, and an inordinate amount of them may be cheerleaders and sometimes they are not nice at all. But sometimes they are, even if you don’t know them. That’s a little of what I was hoping for, something that felt real. Something that was fair, something that didn’t play the popular, bitchy, rich girl card. But it did, and, for me, a little too unbelievably.
I’m a firm believer that unlikable characters are interesting, especially when they’re the protagonist, someone we’re supposed to root for. So when we kind of hate them and we’re stuck with them for three hundred plus pages, I just automatically hope for great things. I expect an author to work their magic. I expect to come to begrudgingly respect, even love, this character in the hands of a capable author. This is what I expected from Regina, and why it was so frustrating when I finished the book disliking her more. She’s supposed to be someone we come to like, someone who sees who she was, who she is now and who she could be; someone who changes and grows and learns from her mistakes. But she doesn’t.
All Regina learned was that, if first your revenge doesn’t succeed, just try a little harder.
This is Regina, start to finish:
“There's always this one girl. She's desperate and she's weird and she's jealous, and you're stuck with her, no matter how hard you try to get her off your back. Just throw some really fucked-up self-esteem issues into the mix and you have Kara.”
I wanted so much out of Regina, but she spends all of Some Girls Are learning things about herself and about being a decent person and then…unlearning it.
Some Girls Are…what? Nasty? Hateful? Terrible? I’m not really sure what anyone here learned, or what I’m supposed to believe about high school or growing up. I’m confused about the message of this book. It gave me nothing. I found a lot of Some Girls Are to be exaggerated and unbelievable. All in all, it was a lot of little things that didn’t seem right, that didn’t feel as though they really could have or would have happened.
Rancid raw meat trashed into Regina’s locker and absolutely no staff intervention, stealing journals and photocopying the pages to blackmail Regina into servitude, a small, prized group of It Girls having their way with the school, again with no staff intervention. Assault unseen by any staff in large, crowded halls. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen in isolated cases, but high school just didn’t feel like this to me. It just doesn’t really happen, and so I had a lot of trouble relating to any of the characters in Some Girls Are, mostly because I’ve never met any of them — in high school or otherwise.
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