Mostly Good Girls

Image of Mostly Good Girls
Author(s): 
Release Date: 
September 5, 2011
Publisher/Imprint: 
Simon Pulse
Pages: 
347
Reviewed by: 

Most girls in high school are not the prettiest, the smartest, or the most experienced with boys. Most girls in high school are “mostly good girls.”

 

Take 16-year-old Violet Tunis, a junior at Westfield, an exclusive, all-girl prep school on the outskirts of Boston. She’s your everyday girl: trying to keep her grades up, spending good times with her best friend Katie, and nursing a hardcore crush on a boy seemingly just out of her reach. She’s a girl that most girls can relate to. She’s not uber rich and not totally popular—she’s better because she’s real

In Leila Sales’ debut young adult book Mostly Good Girls, Sales shows us that normal is not only okay, but unique in its own right. Channeling every girl’s high-school experiences such as crushes, wanting to fit in, and that relationship with your best friend that seems to click like no other, Sales delivers a winning book with which teen girls can not only relate, but also laugh out loud.

In her sarcastically funny, vignette-style chapters, Sales manages to make Violet Tunis a character you wish you could be friends with in real life. Every experience or event in Violet’s somewhat average life becomes instantly alive, shining with witty humor and personality. She makes you laugh, she makes you smile, and she makes you feel like you’re not alone.

Violet’s relationship with her best friend Katie is also a riot. But people change. Readers will find themselves drawn in as Violet and Katie fight to hang on to what they have while each forges her own destiny. Katie may be Violet’s other half, but what happens when your other half becomes all that you want to be and you’re still stuck behind at sweet 16, never been kissed, lacking a perfect PSAT score? As Sales puts it:

 

“I’ve watched Katie cry and I’ve watched her sleep; I’ve watched her try on a Versace dress; I’ve watched her bite into a whole onion and I’ve watched her fight with her mother—but there was just something weird about watching her stick her tongue into a stranger’s mouth. Like she was a stranger herself.”

In a greatly relatable tale about what life really is like in high school, Sales gives girls a wonderfully stylish book about real life. Mostly Good Girls is not Gossip Girl, but it’s pretty darn funny—and impossible to put down.