Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Five novels that explore "mean girl" culture

Avery Bishop is the pseudonym for a USA Today bestselling author of over a dozen novels, including the newly released Girl Gone Mad.

[The Page 69 Test: Girl Gone Mad; Q&A with Avery Bishop.]

At CrimeReads, Bishop tagged "five novels that, while they may not mainly focus on mean girl culture, certainly contain aspects that are important to the plot; in some of the books, bullying is what sets the story in motion." One title on the list:
Dare Me by Megan Abbott

Gillian Flynn has described Abbott’s novel as “Lord of the Flies set in a high-school cheerleading squad,” and there’s really no better way to describe it. This is the quintessential “mean girl” novel. There’s Abby, the narrator, and her best friend, Beth, who’s captain of the pep squad. When a new coach enters the scene and Beth sees her as a threat, all hell breaks loose. As the coach remarks early on in the book: “There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”
Read about the other entries on the list.

Dare Me is among Kelly Simmons's six books to buddy-read with your teen or twentyish daughter, Katie Lowe's top eight crime novels for angry women in an angry world, Kate Hamer's top ten teenage friendships in fiction, S.R. Masters's seven thrillers that capture some of the darker aspects of tight-knit friendship groups, Jessica Knoll's top ten thrillers, Brian Boone's fifty most essential high school stories, Julie Buntin's twelve books that totally get female friendship, L.S. Hilton's top ten female-fronted thrillers, Megan Reynolds's top ten books you must read if you loved Gone Girl, Anna Fitzpatrick's four top horror stories set in the real universe of girlhood and Adam Sternbergh's six notable crime novels that double as great literature.

--Marshal Zeringue