The Lives of Desperate Girls

by MacKenzie Common

Penguin Random House Canada

Penguin Teen
Teens & YA

Pub Date 19 Sep 2017

I am reviewing a copy of The Lives Of Desperate Girls Through Penguin Teen and Netgalley:

Helen Commanda only sixteen is found dead outside of Thunder Creek Ontario. Her murder would have likely been forgotten accept for the fact that it may shed light on the earlier dissapearance of Chloe Shaughnessy. She was rich, beautiful and white, and had nothing in common with Helen who is plain and lived on the reservation. They had one other thing in common they were girls from an unforgiving small town. Only Chloe’s best friend knows exactly how unforgiving the town is.

The adults have failed so Jenny starts seeking answers about Helen’s life and death, trying to understand the town and her best friend but can she succeed where the adults have failed? Does Jenny have a role in this conspiracy of silence.

I give The Lives Of Desperate Girls five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

DNFed at 37%

The idea behind this book is interesting, the execution, not so much. I picked this up because I'm always on the lookout for YA thrillers. The first 20% worked out quite well in this regard, as we follow a girl named Jenny whose best friend has gone missing. Also around this time, another young girl from the same town has been found dead.

Things were off to a good start with this and I was gripped. Then all of a sudden, the plot just went stale, the writing went into describing lots of random boring things, and my attention started wavering. I thought this may just be a dull spot, and so tried to ride through the storm. 17% later, I realised this just wasn't picking up still, and made the decision to save my own sanity and quit. I also found myself having problems with some instalove, or at the very least, instalust, which just didn't feel natural in the slightest.

I do think that this book would be good for some readers, it just wasn't what I was looking for, which was a thriller. As far as I read, the book did seem to be touching upon some important topics such as racism, which I almost kept reading for. Overall though, I just couldn't put myself through it.

Pieces of this book deserved different star ratings...It averaged out to about 3 stars, though. I liked it overall. The point of the book was (and still is) a little fuzzy. Murder mystery / coming of age / paranormal / commentary on the treatment of Indians in Canada / rebellious (desperate) teenagers. It was all over the place but I liked the writing style and I did end up liking the main characters, Jenny and Tom.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for a free digital galley of this book!

The story takes place in a small town, Thunder Creek. When Jenny’s best friend Chloe goes missing, the town turns out in force to assist in the search. When Helen, a girl from the local reservation goes missing, not much happens. The police are diligent in their search for Chloe, the child of wealthy white parents but slight resources are used in the search for the girl from the rez. I hate to say, typical, but sadly our world is still a work in progress and we’re not there yet. And we get to share some of Jenny's teenage angst, always an uncomfortable time. Descriptions and characters were fleshed out and believable.

The Lives of Desperate Girls by MacKenzie Common set out to do something really important and contained a lot of important and impactful messages. For that, I loved what this book stood for and what it was trying to accomplish.

Things started strong: two missing girls, one found dead, and the makings of a good murder mystery with some important racial and humanist overtones. Not to mention, this took place in a small northern Ontario (Canada) town, so it hit really close to home for me and focused on a lot of things I hear about regularly. But the further I read, the more problems I had with certain phrasing that made me, more than once, pause and cringe. Frankly, I didn’t like how this was written.

We have the lead character, Jenny, molded to be the one questioning the racist and questionable actions and reactions of the townsfolk who ultimately care more about a missing white girl than a murdered Native girl. She is the voice that is trying to bring awareness to a very real and unfortunate reality, but I found that a lot of her comments in regular conversation were so flippant and held these backhanded judgements or accusations. There were a lot of conversations that put a certain characteristic of someone into a really small cliched box and that, to me, defeats the purpose of trying to raise awareness of everyone else doing the same thing.

A lot of very sensitive subjects are touched upon here, including racism and prejudice, but also slut shaming and bullying. I have a read a lot of books about the later and have seen how delicately and still effectively these topics can be talked about and I just didn’t feel that here. Again, Jenny was defending her friend from being blacklisted as a whore, but in the next sentence, she would make a comment attributing certain actions as trashy and applying the same unfair judgement to someone else. It isn’t intentional, the book clearly tries to bring attention to this as a problem, but at the same time, the character trying to raise that awareness is doing the exact same thing over and over again. I had a really, really hard time getting past this.

I also had some issues with the descriptive prose; when speaking about the horrible murder, we were told endlessly that it was gruesome, but we were never made to feel that awfulness. The words used their definitions to tell us, as opposed to using other words to actually describe it to us, and I also have a big problem with just explaining as opposed to describing. I want to feel something, even if it’s something awful, not just be told how I should be feeling. 

But I don’t want to cut too much into this book because I honestly feel that it stands for something so good and what it’s trying to raise awareness about is a very real situation, especially in Canada, and this deserves the attention for trying to bring light to that.

​U​ltimately, the story itself is driven ​ and it definitely starts to find its footing more towards the end. I ​didn’t mind following Jenny on her travels to uncover the truth, even if I didn’t always agree with the actions she was taking to do so ​ (which opens up a whole other faucet of opinions on my end, but I will spare you this time).​ I felt that the core of the story was a worthwhile read, ​ though perhaps it took on a bit too many big topics to cover in one go, and​ there was just a lot of other stuff to get caught up on along the way that probably really took away from the overall feel of the book.

This is a beautifully written book that unfolds slowly. I've read some negative reviews about this one. I can't say that I don't agree with any of the points they make, but I still felt a bit surprised. It's not an action packed book, but I still enjoyed it so much. It made a lot of excellent points and featured some very poignant quotes, some of which I'll include in my review. Topics touched upon include racism, bullying, shaming, and rape. That's a lot for a book of only slightly over three hundred pages to cover, and I think it did it well.

Jenny is a sixteen year old girl missing her other half. Not a significant other... her best friend. She disappeared one winter night and nothing has been the same for Jenny since. Chloe left no note, no clues for her parents or the police as to her whereabouts. She simply vanished. The police hound Jenny for information, rightfully believing that she's holding out on them. She is. She's not as clueless as everyone else is... but she's also not willing to share.

A body is found locally, and it's a teenage girl... but not Chloe. A girl has been murdered: Helen. Jenny is immediately interested in the case. Her interest increases as a response to noticing that everyone else's dies... none of her fellow students are talking about Helen. The police are concentrated on finding Chloe, who is still missing, and not getting justice for Helen and finding out who brutally murdered her. This confuses Jenny, but she soon realizes the difference between the two girls: Chloe is white. Helen is Native.

Soon Jenny is learning about the history of violence against Natives in Canada. Crimes go officially unsolved, murders go unpunished... it's a disturbing part of history that isn't staying in the past... it's still happening.

Some reviews mention a dislike of Jenny. I didn't like her at first either. What we need to remember is that she's sixteen. She's naive, she makes bad decisions, she does things the reader won't understand.... but she's in the process of becoming the person she's going to be. I ended up appreciating her even with all her flaws. Lots of us make terrible mistakes without the excuse of being a teenager!

Along with calling attention to the real problem of violence against Natives and the apathetic response of both civilians and the police, this book touches on other important topics. Sometimes the author described a thought or feeling so well I had to go back and read it several times because it was like something I have felt or could have said, though her version is much more eloquent than I could manage. Including a couple of those here:

"The inequality in life was clear. Men treated the world like an extension of their living room, a safe place where they could do whatever they pleased. Women spent their entire lives on guard against rape and abduction. We walked home with our house keys cutting indents into our palm because a streetwise cousin told us to. We looked back constantly to make sure that every person and car that passed us at night kept going. And like everything else that bothered me this year, this wasn't likely to change. Life would always be a playground for men and a survival course for women."

"Everyone loves to blame a victim; it lets them believe that bad things don't happen to good people."

I thought this was a very well written debut and I'm looking forward to seeing what else the author comes up with. It was slow and at times frustrating and you may never get all of the answers, but I thought it was done so well.

I received a copy of this book from Net Galley and Penguin Teen, thank you! My review is honest and unbiased.

The first chapter of The Lives of Desperate Girls chilled me to the bone. Set in the northern Ontario winter, this chapter details the discovery of a body covered in a dusting of pre-dawn snow. It read so honestly and vibrantly that I was sure that the rest of the book would keep pace.

Sadly, I was mistaken.

I really have got to stop forming opinions so early on.

#LearnFromYourMistakes #StopJudgingBooksByTheirCovers

The premise of the book as a whole was engaging. A small town in Northern Ontario, from which a “white” girl is currently missing, experiences another tragedy when a “native” girl is found dead – almost certainly murdered.

The way in which the story was told, however, really made this book hard to truly love.

Overall, the narrative was exceptionally inconsistent.

While there were some really compelling pieces, there were also these large segments of perfunctory and utilitarian text that were just… clunky. Unfortunately, the author couldn’t have just cut these sections. For each one, there was a purpose… It was just that the purpose could have been accomplished so much more eloquently.

I do acknowledge that not every element within a plot can be narratively compelling. In this case, though, these necessary-though-not-exciting (and, TBH, not terribly well written) chunks were so weak that they really stood out in contrast to the comparative strength of the more compelling pieces.

I found myself actively questioning, “Why didn’t the author spend more time on this section?” The word choice was off. The tone didn’t match. And it just... was not fun to read.

And it’s not just the quality of the prose that was an issue – the overall believability also varied wildly.

Near the start of the book, the protagonist details a traumatic experience that set her best friend on a self-destructive path. This section felt true and honest. It was nearly as good as similar works, like Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, or Allegedly by Tiffany D. Jackson, which we previously awarded 5 out of 5 cocktails.

But unlike these other books, the author fails to maintain this believability throughout.

For example, later in the book we are supposed to believe that our protagonist just happens to meet the cousin of the native girl who was just found dead as this cousin hitchhikes home at the start of a snow storm.

Possible, yes.

Probable, no.

Were it just one such occurrence, you could chalk it up to serendipity. But there are only so many instances like this that can take place in the course of a 310 page book while still giving the novel as a whole the ring of truth.

And, unfortunately, as the book progresses it only got worse. The protagonist, upset by the death discovered on page 4 and frustrated that this girl’s death isn’t getting as much attention as the disappearance of her white friend, mounts an investigation in an attempt to find the killer.

How do I even describe this “investigation”?

Well…

You know in movies when the lead character needs someone’s email password, so the character looks around the person’s desk, sees a picture of the person’s dog, types “Fido” in to the password field and (voila) the email opens? That’s kinda how believable the investigation as a whole seemed.

So, I’m reading along, thinking, “Okay… This is going to get better.”

And then it jumped the shark.

The protagonist’s mother finds out that she’s launched a DIY murder investigation and she’s okay with it.

Mkay.

When I was 16 my mom didn’t let me go to Meijer’s in PJ pants, but I’m supposed to believe that this mother is all, “Well, you can try to find out who murdered this girl, but be safe about it.”


Yeah, I don’t think so.

Despite this shark jumping, I read on. #NotAQuitter

I kept thinking that, of course, all of these loose ends would come together into something meaningful.

Well, *Spoiler Alert* they didn’t. Or at least not in any satisfying way.

As the book drew to a close, the author started to spell things out. Like, painfully explicitly.

Now, granted, the intended audience for this book is young adults, but even when writing for less experienced, less worldly readers, explicitly telling the them what conclusions they are supposed to draw from the tale you laid out feels like pandering.

Ultimately, this book left me wishing that it was something more than it was.

The setting was well described and the plot had serious potential, but the author failed to drive home a satisfying read.

MacKenzie Common's novel The Lives of Desperate Girls follows the story of Jenny, living in a small town in Canada where everything is normal and nothing bad happens. Until it does. Jenny's best friend Chloe goes missing and then another girl from the local reservation, Helen, turns up dead on a trail. Trying to cope, Jenny goes on her own little investigative journey with a new friend to try and figure out what happened to Helen, a girl she never knew.

Common's characters are all small town characters. She has them down to the ones that want to escape and go find something bigger and better down to the ones who are convinced small town life is where they will end up. Being from a small town, I understood these characters, their feelings, and the forever feeling of boredom that is instilled at a young age. Mostly I loved the truth about how people from completely different walks of life can be friends, especially when in a small town.

The characters were great, and I enjoyed the storyline, but I felt at times that the story dragged on. Many chapters felt like duplicates of previous chapters as we followed Jenny through her activities. I understand wanting to create a timeline, a feeling of a characters life, but this felt a bit much. I would have enjoyed the book a little more had some of these chapters, or pages, been left out. The book could have easily been 25-30 pages less.

Other than the dull moments and repetitive moments, this story was great. It had a twist at the end I was not expecting, which was nice. I love when an author can take me off guard. I felt satisfied with the ending even though it wasn't technically a happily ever after. This was just a satisfying book to wrap up and see where all the characters ended up. Common wrote an intriguing, suspenseful, and sad story of bullying, desperation, and heartache, with a story of friendship and loyalty twisted in. All in all a great story.

It took me a long time to read this one and a long time to get into it. I liked the concept, but the execution was very slow and suspense was not building well.

I thought that this book took an interesting direction by having one of the focuses be racism. Two girls are gone with one missing, possibly dead and the other murdered but the police are focusing on the missing white girl rather than the native young woman that was murdered. I'm not sure how realistic I found some the events in the book or the memories that people spoke about. Some things seemed to be a bit far-fetched which made them hard to believe. Although, I assumed that the book was set in present day but if it was set sometime in the past it would be more realistic to me.

The portions of the book that I enjoyed the most were the moments that were focused on Chloe. However, they seemed as if they were few and far between so I found it difficult to keep reading. I wanted to delve more into her "secrets" in order to understand her mind set and what happened to her but the book focused more on Jenny and her reactions to everything. I found Jenny to be bland and uninteresting. Her reactions to things seemed blunted to me and her priorities were odd. It seemed like the book didn't have a focus. There were so many topics that were discussed that it was difficult to pinpoint where my attention was supposed to be. Is it Helen? Chloe? Jenny? It began to be confusing not to mention the romance aspect that is focused on quite a bit in the book.

Not a favorite of mine. The book was WAY took long and half of it probably could have been cut out yet the plot would have remained the same. WAY too many details and tangents. The main character, Jenny is really unlikable and unemotional. She lies to the police about her best friend's disappearance and then she starts to investigate on her own with her suddenly new boyfriend Tom....I read it to the end because I wanted to know what happened to the missing girls but the ending was less than satisfying so all in all I was totally disappointed.

This was a quick read centering on Jenny, her missing best friend and a murdered native girl. I expected it to be a straight forward mystery instead it delved in to an exploration of social injustice. At first, as much of the town of Thunder Creek, I wasn't that interested in what happened to Helen, I wanted to know what happened to Chloe. As I learned more about the people at the reservation, I realized their was story was more interesting than I first expected. I have spent some time reading about residential schools in Canada since finishing the book, as I had never heard about them in the past.

I wish there was deeper character development. I don't feel like I really got to know any of the characters. I was curious to know more about Helen, Jenny's mom, Tom, and Chloe herself. Chloe seemed one sided, but I do think there was more to her than even Jenny noticed.

When I love a book I don't want it to end because I feel like I have become friends with the characters and have a vested interest in their loves. I didn't feel that here, but I did enjoy the book. I was hoping for a happier ending for Chloe, maybe a second chance in a new town, but I understand this wasn't written to be a fairy tale.

There are more adult themes in Desperate Girls than the other two books. Chloe holds many of the same characteristics of Margo and Hannah. Jenny holds many of same characteristics of Q and Clay. If you've read both of those books, you know how different they are, but I think that this book is that perfect combination of themes in them. 

There is also an early episode of Law and Order Speical Victims Unit where an African Amerian Girl and a rich white girl disappear at the same time. It feels like Ice-T's character is the only one that is trying to figure out what happened to the African American Girl; while there are so many resources trying to find the missing white girl. This book reminded me a lot of that episode. 

I read this book in two sittings, I feel like it could have been a one sitting book if I started it on a weekend. I found Jenny a thoughtful and compassionate narrator. She clearly is worried about Chloe and in trying to figure out what happened to Helen she is trying to heal herself. I think that the book talks about racism and prejudice in a real way. 

Jenny has a little bit of a romance with a character named Tom, that seems to come out of nowhere, but the more the story goes on, the more Jenny leaning on Tom makes sense. I think that understanding how Jenny feels dealing with Chloe being missing, makes Tom's character and his relation to the story make sense. 

I connected with Jenny. She is trying to figure out what's happening in her town. She is grieving but doesn't know if what she's grieving. She just wants what happened to make sense, and honestly, things like what happened in this book, rarely make sense. Real life isn't anything like what happens on TV, and I think this book shows that.

I really enjoyed this book. I am a big fan of murder mystery stories and stories that tend to be a little bit darker. Most of the movies and TV shows I watch are close to that, while the books I read tend not to be as depressing. I recommend this book to people who enjoy a good mystery.

The main character of this book lacked a voice and it was hard to stay interested in the book. The Canadian setting is interesting but the mystery and detective elements didn't really grip me like I had hoped.

I want to start with what I liked: I liked the messages resonating in this book. It tackled political issues such as racism, sexism, and sexual assault. I liked the Native American element because it's rare to find in YA books. The setting is also interesting and fresh, considering many YA novels take place in well known cities.

Try as I might, I couldn't bring myself to like the characters. The main character, Jenny, lacks emotion and, at times, behaves in a way you wouldn't expect given what we know about her character.

Although she's constantly thinking about Chloe and telling me how close they were but never actually showing or expressing that closeness. For example, how did they manage to become and remain friends? Girls in school often fall out by the time they reach High School. How did they avoid that? Chloe and Jenny are portrayed as opposites but there must be some complimenting factor or common ground that brought and kept them together.

Jenny's relationship with Tom is also strange to me. It's sudden, it's out of the blue, and it feels like the typical "good girl meets bad boy" trope, which is somewhat disappointing. Jenny takes Tom along for her investigations and they make out a lot but not once did I sense it was a lasting or true relationship. Where were all the feelings?

I think, overall, this story would have been AMAZING if the characters were more rounded and relatable. Ultimately, the characters are what killed it for me - no pun intended!

Unique read and I appreciate how local the setting is to me, however I found the plot had many slow parts, and a disappointing ending.

For awhile now I have been wanting to read this book and when I received a chance to read it by netgalley I was very excited! However I couldn't get into this book at all usually with thrillers I love when you get sucked in by the first couple of chapters but this one took way to long to even try to get into and at that I just couldn't get into the thriller part I felt like the main character was talking to much about her life than getting into the mystery at hand! the main character felt overly whiny to me and made me lose more interest in the book!

Thunder Creek, Northern Ontario Canada. Jenny's best friend Caitlin is missing and a young girl from a local reservation named Helen is dead. However, the police in the community appear to be only interested in solving Caitlin 's disappearance. This book tackles the racism that runs rampant in the Canadian justice system. For this the book received a 3 star for bringing to reader's attention the plight of missing and murdered women from across Canada.

But Jenny as a character is an idiot and a terrible choice to start this discussion. Yes, we have the white girl from the small town that becomes more self aware, but there's just too much YA drama involving her and the "bad boy" from Vancouver. Jenny, herself, is a desperate girl. Desperate to lose her virginity and emerge from the shadow of her missing friend. I just couldn't care enough about this character and read until the end only curious to see how the story would unfold. I am a bit disappointed in the resolution and expected far more than what I was given.

I started this book really enjoying it. I really enjoyed the mystery feel to the book, but the middle killed it for me. It turned into more of a semi-romance with some small pieces of mystery thrown in. Kind of disappointing. Meh.

I was really excited to read this book, but I have to admit I was disappointed. The plot was intriguing but it could have been executed so much better had it not been for the immensely unlikable narrator.