Man, this book wasn't what I was expecting! When the title, the synopsis and the first chapter telling us that Quinn died, I had certain expectations about what this story would be, and boy was I wrong. I hadn't read the synopsis in a while, so that didn't help, but oh, I loved this story!

I thought that this would be a murder mystery. But it's not-it's the story of two girls whose lives are brought together when their mothers begin a romantic relationship, and how they do not get along. And I totally understand why-Quinn was spoiled and selfish. And there were so many moments were I wanted to strangle her. But I didn't actually want her to die.

One thing that had me a little bit worried, was that relationship that she develops with Shawn. I was scared that he was going to use her-she has some body image issues, and he's popular, but thankfully, for my anxiety, it was a really great and loving relationship!

Emma does learn about not judging people, you don't know what's going on in their lives. There is a point where you have to keep them from hurting you, but to try and be kind. It sucks that it took this extreme to get to that point, but that's why the book exists in the first place.

This was a fantastic read, and I can't wait to read more by Eva Darrows!

Dead Little Mean Girl has been sitting on my Nook for three years and my review is thus way, waaaaaay overdue. Meanwhile, the book wastes no time and introduces us to the very dead mean girl Quinn Littleton on page one. Then, we backtrack to when main character Emma MacLaren first met Quinn after their moms became a couple and moved in together. Though this is a short book at just 256 pages, you'll be amazed by how much punch it packs.

Y'all, Quinn is wild. Among other things, she

lures a girl into sexual activity with her and then outs the girl as a lesbian the very next day just to cement her place among the popular people at her new school,
responds to her art teacher taking away her phone for two days by taking revealing photographs of herself with that teacher's phone and essentially forcing him to resign,
possibly drugs one of her fellow cheerleaders with ex-lax before a competition in an attempt to secure the cheer captain position for herself,

and that's only counting the full-blown incidents! That leaves out her general bad behavior like racism, homophobia, and virulent fat hate. What Quinn does is downright unbelievable at times and you're sitting there with your mouth agape like you just saw two trains crash into one another. Since you already know she's going to die, you wonder exactly how ends up dead in her garage with her rear end in the air. With all the people she makes enemies of, her death being the result of murder doesn't seem to be out of the question.

(It's not murder, though.)

Though Emma doesn't reflect on her interactions with Quinn and consider it until her quasi-stepsister is dead, this vicious, hateful girl has her own story and was just as much of a complicated human being as anyone else. Her father Alan was awful, her mother Karen didn't know what to do with her, and her parents' divorce really affected Quinn. She's shuttled between the two and just wants someone to pick her, to mean something to someone who sees past her behavior and not be abandoned by them.

However, she goes so far when she lashes out and hurts others that readers may not be willing to think as sympathetically of Quinn as the novel asks us to. Like, sometimes we can't bear the brunt of someone's racism, homophobia, and general bigotry and still keep our hand outstretched to them. Sometimes, they're just a bad person and retreating from them is how we protect and take care of ourselves. You can only help someone who is willing to help themselves and Quinn doesn't seem to be there.

The eponymous dead little mean girl is taking up a lot of real estate in this review, but our narrator Emma exists outside Quinn in case you're worried she's solely a proxy for the "real" main character. She kind of is, but Emma still has her own character arc and things going on in her life that have nothing to do with Quinn.

In the acknowledgements, the author details how the novel's idea came to her in part because of all the one-dimensional teenage mean girls in media and the role sexism plays in both how those characters are written and how the audience perceives them. It's a touching, truthful section of the book that I'm worried most readers will miss because they don't read the acknowledgements at all. Reading it made me reflect more kindly on what Dead Little Mean Girl was going for and also made me reconsider how I look at mean girl characters in any piece of media.

I had a hard time connecting with this book. The main character appeared as though she was meant to be clever and snarky, but much of her humor was too over-the-top to be macabre and just bordered on meanness. While the intention seemed to defy old "mean girl" stereotypes, the book rather seemed to play into them. The writing lacked polish, with clumsy phrasing and a lack of subtlety, and the dialogue was stilted. It was an interesting concept that fell flat in the execution.

Thank you for the chance to review this book, however, unfortunately, I was unable to read and review this title before it was archived.

Oh, god. I’m super late on this one. I’m just…. not gonna request books for a while on NetGalley cause I just have books coming out of my butt at this point. This base post was created in JANUARY. I read this in DECEMBER.

I’ve actually given up on reviewing the books I read in August ‘cause that was almost a year ago!

So anyway, thank you to the publisher for my e-galley of this book. The publisher’s kindness in no way influences my opinion of this novel. (I feel like I’m gonna get blacklisted for being so late lol).

Straight out, I’m wavering between 2 and 3 stars. I’m marking it as 2.5 because I’m just so back and forth that I’m sure my answer will change every week.

I don’t care about Emma. I really don’t. She’s a brat and the culmination of every holier-than-thou geek girl that I’ve ever read or interacted with. She and her crew are #1 and everybody else is a bitch. Which is pretty funny because it seems she hates Quinn for acting the same way.

It’s been a while that I can’t pinpoint exactly what I *liked* about the book, but in my notes, I liked the side characters a heck of a lot more than Emma. But what has stuck with me– through 20 books since I read this– is that this book instigated a deep dislike of the “humanizing the mean girl” trope/plot/whatever.

Yeah, people are mean. Yeah, they have their reasons (occasionally misguided or rooted in trauma as the case in this book and, say, The Secret Garden). But you wanna know what? They’re still mean. I don’t care if there’s a good reason for them being mean–we all know that mean people are still people. The mean girls who traumatized me through elementary and junior high school are people,. But that doesn’t mean I have to forgive them or think of them as anything but mean.

I get the message but there’s a complete disregard for the fact Quinn was mean beyond forgiveness. Like, Emma is like: I’m sorry Quinn outed a girl, ruined a teacher’s career, ruined a marriage, ect–but she had issues. Well, yeah. We all do.

Also if it takes a person’s death to realize they were actual people with actual feelings, maybe that’s wrong on you too (side eyeing Emma).

It is an acquired taste type book. I have several teens who will enjoy this. Just not for me.

Solid writing, but this one didn't really grab me.

When Emma's mom has her girlfriend move in, the girlfriend's daughter, Quinn moves in too. Quinn is a mean girl, a beautiful, mean, cheerleader, queen bee and bully whose parents have no control over her at all. Quinn delights in ruining people's lives including Emma's. When Emma finally stands up to her, Quinn moves back in with her father, for a while, then she is back. This book explores the high school stereotypes in a realistic way and is a very good read. It makes you think.

Sympathy for the Bully Dead Little Mean Girl gives us a story about two stepsisters – one a typical mean girl, Quinn, and the other a homely nerd, Emma, with the former having a mean streak a mile wide and a raging desire to ruin the latter’s life. Three-fourths of the novel is about how Quinn makes life miserable for everyone around her, especially Emma – she is the kind of toxic evil that even the Devil would probably come to her for pointers. The book delivers this regular bullying fare with some intermittent slapstick humor in the form of Emma’s narration, but you can’t ignore the impulse to wish Quinn dead. And she does exactly that – die, I mean. And then Emma has a change of heart towards her now dead stepsister.

Look, I get the intention with which the author tried to write this novel (as said in the acknowledgements)- she wanted to show that even mean girls deserve humanity and kindness. But when you have a 200+ page reason for hating Quinn, you can resolve that kind of vitriol in the last quarter of the book. Emma’s grief towards the end was begun mainly because she realized she had wrongfully accused her and inadvertently caused her death – and looking back, she realizes she never tried to understand her sister or give her chances. But if you reading this book in a stretch (like I was) you remember with perfect clarity how Emma was kind to her in the beginning of the book, before she realizes the brand of toxic that Quinn was. This wasn’t a simple case of a girl with a bad childhood or daddy issues.

Even if we account for her young age, the fact of the matter is that you can’t save people who don’t want to be saved. (Thank you, The 100 for that gem). Sure, we can feel pity for them, but some people cannot be reformed – maybe they can be tamed at most. Quinn’s bullying wasn’t just petty; she openly sought to destroy lives. If her bullying had caused a death (which she could easily have), this narrative wouldn’t have been about trying to humanize her. Which, I must clarify, the author doesn’t do a good job of, either. What exactly was human about Quinn that she deserved more than the level of kindness that was afforded to her? She wasn’t treated badly by people – on the contrary, people worshiped her despite her nastiness. I also get that teenage girls are demonized more easily than any other, but I can’t put aside her homophobia, racism, fatphobia, bullying and entitlement to justify this brand of white feminism. Worse is the fact that Quinn never faces any consequence for her behaviour.

So, you may wonder what I did like about this book? I liked the writing – the author builds a great narrative about the relationship between Emma and her mothers (I just wish they would have been called bisexual instead of lesbians), the wholesome friendship between Emma and her friends, and the build-up for Quinn. For once, a mean girl wasn’t just a cookie cutter character – she had complexity, which the author was striving for, and achieved. Granted, the last quarter of the book sort of fell apart, but until then a good narrative was being built. The way Shawn consoled Emma at the end, making her understand that it wasn’t her fault – that was a good thing, because I couldn’t take Emma blaming herself for it. It also portrays how death makes a person kinder in some one eyes, but as a person who once stood at a funeral for someone I loathed and tried to shed a tear out of decency, I cannot say I condone the ending of the book. It might bring some peace to others, or inspire to ‘kill it with kindness’ but it just wasn’t doing it for me.

This will go live on my blog on April 4. Kellyvision.wordpress.com

From almost the instant that Quinn and Emma met, they hated each other. Their moms are dating, and that would be hard enough (it is, presumably, the first lesbian relationship for both) but it's made worse by the fact that Quinn is a mean girl. (Like Heather Chandler mean, the kind of girl who will destroy others for fun and then forget about it because she doesn't even care enough to remember their names or why she wanted to hurt them in the first place.) And then, as the title implies, she dies.

I was expecting a guilty pleasure, but it ended up being much more than that. Quinn is, by any standard, a horrible person. But she's also so young and she never got a chance to be better. This story is a tragedy, even though it's one with a pretty stellar moral.

It's almost the counter to Heathers and a rebuke to the delight we feel in seeing awful people get their comeuppance. They're kids, and they deserve a chance to grow up and improve.

The cover caught my eye and the synopsis hooked me, so I pretty much read this as soon as I got approved.

I really liked Emma. She's smart and nerdy and I loved her friends. Nikki is amazing and I would love to get arrested with her. Shawn was sweet {after a certain thing was over} and I enjoyed seeing his relationship with Emma. Quinn...well, she's quite a mean person, but she's more than just the mean girl. She's toxic to anyone she touches. I get that there are underlying reasons, but I certainly don't agree with the way anything Quinn did was handled.

I liked the basis of the moms getting together and for the most part, they were awesome. My main complaint {besides everything Quinn related} was that there wasn't really a revelation. I was under the impression that there was a reason and while there was a slight explanation, I was left scratching my head rather than understanding. Perhaps that's the age difference from me to the target audience.

Overall, it was a quick and mostly fun read. I'll definitely be looking for other books by the author.

**Huge thanks to Harlequin Teen and NetGalley for providing the arc free of charge**

Even though it started out with a death, the first 50 pages made me feel this was going to be a fun, fluffy read that I would recommend for light tone and fast finishing. 3/4 of the way through, however, the story took a very serious turn towards the emo-dramatic that was completely out of sync with the rest of the story. It could be said that death makes us all reflective, but the narrator's voice changed so completely that it was jarring and took me out of the flow. I think this book was attempting something admirable -- drawing attention through caricature to the risks of leaving anger undealt with, the dangers of casual neglect, and the importance of strong boundaries -- but at the end of the story it didn't seem fair or realistic to have the teen protagonist shoulder that burden, and only after the antagonist was dead.
I applaud the author's positive treatment of different sexual orientations and a diverse cast of characters, most of whom didn't need to justify or defend their choices of partner. Any homophobic remarks were presented as negative behavior from wholly unlikeable characters. There were quirky moments and some witty dialogue notes, it was a book I read quickly and enjoyed about 40% of, but it left a poor taste in my mouth once finished. I'd recommend it to people interested in contemporary stories with diversity, with the reservation that it gets maudlin toward the end.