A review by kingrosereads
Squad by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

adventurous tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

A sapphic paranormal upper YA about high school mean girls with werewolves! 

Becca is a new girl in her junior year of high school and she catches the eye of the three popular girls: Amanda, Ariana, and Marley. In a quick “Mean Girls”-esque montage, they dress her up and give her rules to follow by. Then one night, the girls show Becca their secret: they’re werewolves and every month they have to feed on human flesh. They choose to eat “bad guys” only. Becca agrees to join their pack and things are going well until a boy from their school dies and ruins everything. 

As a short YA graphic novel, it was an interesting fast pace story. It’s definitely predictable but still entertaining. I kind of wished it was a short series rather than a short stand alone so it could expand on the story and characters. 

The basic storyline is entertaining and interesting to me and the artwork is just beautiful. The art style reminds me of the Archie comics. 

The girl power feminism is very surface level with the anger for toxic masculinity and using murder to avenge the actions of predators. I’m kind of over the story line of women killing abusive and predatory men and the leader of the women ends up just painting all men with the same brush and they end up killing innocent men. Just let women kill rapists and abusers in these books! (For legal reasons, this is a joke). Also, the story is filled with micro-aggressions against the main East Asian character and the Black side character. These micro-aggressions are just ignored or brushed off. Also, Amanda (the only black character) is the one character that’s brushed aside despite playing a very important role. Not addressing the micro-aggressions just felt weird and pointless. 

Also, in stereotypical mean girl fashion, dieting and obsession with one’s weight was also prominent and never challenge. Literally they were criticizing one of the girls for being a size 4 and not a size 0 or 2. It made it even more obvious there was no mid to plus size representation. 

The bones are there but the execution was problematic and lackluster. 
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