Author: Leila Sales
Release Date: October 5, 2010
Published By: Simon Pulse
Goodreads Rating: 3.88 stars
Amazon Rating: 4.46 stars
Synopsis: The higher you aim, the farther you fall….
It’s Violet’s junior year at the Westfield School. She thought she’d be focusing on getting straight As, editing the lit mag, and figuring out how to talk to boys without choking on her own saliva. Instead, she’s just trying to hold it together in the face of cutthroat academics, her crush’s new girlfriend, and the sense that things are going irreversibly wrong with her best friend, Katie.
When Katie starts making choices that Violet can’t even begin to fathom, Violet has no idea how to set things right between them. Westfield girls are trained for success—but how can Violet keep her junior year from being one huge, epic failure?
Review: I was so excited to read this for a couple reasons. One, it has an adorable cover - I love covers that have simple images on plain backgrounds yet still provide a tone for the book. Two, I won it, and everything's much better when it comes in the mail, all nice and shiny. I wasn't really sure what to expect because I only read two reviews of it beforehand, but it seemed like it would be a great read.
At the end of the first page, I knew I was going to love this book.
Serious books can make awesome reads that really make you think, but sometimes you really just want to sit back and relax with a hilarious read. And trust me, Mostly Good Girls wasn't short of hilarity. Violet was such a funny narrator, from her discussion of the only male teacher's strange smiley face tattoo to the literary magazine's not-so-discriminating selection process. It was fun to read about her crazy antics with her best friend, Katie, and I found myself laughing out loud multiple times throughout this.
But I think what I loved just as much was that this book wasn't all humor. There were actual complex issues that many teens would struggle with, things like friendship and parental pressure, that were dealt with in a natural way. Just as I laughed out loud in places, I felt worried and sympathetic for Violet as she tried to measure up with Katie.
There are a lot of books where the main character's best friend is a shallow or slutty or bossy and/or one-dimensional. This was absolutely not the case with Mostly Good Girls. Katie was just as well-developed as Violet, and her decisions were complex. I didn't always understand why she did what she did at first (like suddenly getting a high school drop out for a boyfriend), but everything makes sense when you learn more about her.
Overall, the only thing I'd say about this book that could possibly be negative was that Kate and Violet often felt younger than seventeen. They seemed a lot more like fourteen or fifteen, but that's not really a big deal. I would highly, highly recommend this book to anyone for a hilarious but still relatively serious read. I normally don't buy books for people as gifts because there's really no telling for people's tastes (I always feel guilty if I get someone a book and they didn't like it), but this was so good, I had to get my friend a copy for Christmas!
Grade: A+
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