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A review by hayleybeale
Bad Girls Never Say Die by Jennifer Mathieu
3.0
It’s an intriguing idea to remix S. E. Hinton’s iconic The Outsiders with young women instead of young men. But for me, this didn’t quite hit the spot as I found it overly stylized and a bit of a trudge.
Evie, Connie, Juanita, and Sunny are “tough girls”, which, in 1964 Houston, means that they wear heavy eye makeup, smoke, and skip school. They have contempt for the “tea-sippers” from the other side of the tracks.
15 year-old Evie is the youngest of the group and the most innocent. She is almost raped by one of uppercrust boys, but is rescued by Diane who stabs him and accidentally kills him. Though Diane presents as a tea-sipper, she is living with her aunt in a small dingy house on the wrong side of town and goes to the same school as Evie. United by their shared trauma, Evie and Diane become friends, though the shadow of what happened looms over them both.
I read The Outsiders a long time ago and had very little recollection of it (probably not helped by getting it confused with Francis Ford Coppola’s film version), so I did a quick read of the Wikipedia page to see how the two books compare. While the set up for both books is similar, Bad Girls diverges on a major plot point, introducing a star-crossed Romeo and Juliet relationship.
The author intelligently highlights issues that were relevant to girls at the time (and still resonate today). The novel is very strong in its advocacy for the power of female friendship in an era when girls and women were more defined in relation to the men in their lives. Evie’s mother’s ambition for her daughters is for them to be married and settled with nice, steady men. But Evie doesn’t want this and it takes much of the book for her to be able to articulate the desire she has to just be able to choose for herself and make her own decisions.
I found much of the novel to be rather slow-paced and somewhat repetitive. Though written in a style that feels somewhat appropriate to the 1960’s and to pulp novels, the novel also has a modern sensibility that doesn't always sit comfortably. I thought the feminist ideas were a little shoehorned in (Evie’s sister is reading Betty Friedan) and Evie’s ideas about desegregation and civil rights, while admirable, felt rather too contemporary and adult, and seemed out of character (though I suspect this would be unnoticed by today’s teens). Conversely, thoughts about sex and sexuality are noticeably absent.
So, overall this was an okay read for me, but I have already purchased it for my library as I know many of my students really loved Ponyboy, Johnny, and the other greasers, and will be excited to read this new iteration.
Thanks to Roaring Brook and Netgalley for the digital review copy.
Evie, Connie, Juanita, and Sunny are “tough girls”, which, in 1964 Houston, means that they wear heavy eye makeup, smoke, and skip school. They have contempt for the “tea-sippers” from the other side of the tracks.
15 year-old Evie is the youngest of the group and the most innocent. She is almost raped by one of uppercrust boys, but is rescued by Diane who stabs him and accidentally kills him. Though Diane presents as a tea-sipper, she is living with her aunt in a small dingy house on the wrong side of town and goes to the same school as Evie. United by their shared trauma, Evie and Diane become friends, though the shadow of what happened looms over them both.
I read The Outsiders a long time ago and had very little recollection of it (probably not helped by getting it confused with Francis Ford Coppola’s film version), so I did a quick read of the Wikipedia page to see how the two books compare. While the set up for both books is similar, Bad Girls diverges on a major plot point, introducing a star-crossed Romeo and Juliet relationship.
The author intelligently highlights issues that were relevant to girls at the time (and still resonate today). The novel is very strong in its advocacy for the power of female friendship in an era when girls and women were more defined in relation to the men in their lives. Evie’s mother’s ambition for her daughters is for them to be married and settled with nice, steady men. But Evie doesn’t want this and it takes much of the book for her to be able to articulate the desire she has to just be able to choose for herself and make her own decisions.
I found much of the novel to be rather slow-paced and somewhat repetitive. Though written in a style that feels somewhat appropriate to the 1960’s and to pulp novels, the novel also has a modern sensibility that doesn't always sit comfortably. I thought the feminist ideas were a little shoehorned in (Evie’s sister is reading Betty Friedan) and Evie’s ideas about desegregation and civil rights, while admirable, felt rather too contemporary and adult, and seemed out of character (though I suspect this would be unnoticed by today’s teens). Conversely, thoughts about sex and sexuality are noticeably absent.
So, overall this was an okay read for me, but I have already purchased it for my library as I know many of my students really loved Ponyboy, Johnny, and the other greasers, and will be excited to read this new iteration.
Thanks to Roaring Brook and Netgalley for the digital review copy.