Review : Some Girls Are
Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers
Pages : 246
Genre : YA, Fiction
Stand Alone
My Rating : 
What it’s about, in my words :
Regina’s happy life at the top of the school’s social ladder just ended : after she is wrongly accused of trying to steal her best friend’s boyfriend, Regina is frozen out of her group, the Fearsome Fivesome. In Regina’s world, being frozen out doesn’t only mean that she can’t sit at the cool table anymore : it also means that he life will be hell, and that she’ll be forced to face her past actions.
At the risk of not getting the popular vote, I have to admit : Some Girls Are was a good, if difficult read, but I wasn’t amazed with it as most readers seemed to be. Even though Summers’s writing is still strong, my disconnect with Regina didn’t allow me to fully appreciate the story.
First, I have to applaud the author for dealing with a subject such as bullying. There was an honesty in the way she presented the problem, cold and terrifying and crude. There’s no pretension on Summers’s part of knowing what is the solution to this problem. From start to finish, the story gives you a lot to think and talk about and the reader has a lot of space to make his/her own conclusions.
Some of the questions the book presents through the story are extremely difficult to answer – unless you have very strong opinions in black and white with no gray zones in between. I think the strongest question is : does Regina deserves forgiveness? How should her past actions should be considered once she admits her faults? And to this day I still don’t have a clear answer.
I couldn’t help but feel it was extremely convenient for Regina to start feeling guilty once she started suffering what she had done to others. I know it’s a truth of life, too : we often don’t realize how much we have hurt other people until they hurt us back. She was definitely on a path of redemption though, but it’s a tough one : considering the terrible consequences her choices have had on others, I had a really, really hard time to sympathize with her. I’m not saying she deserved it for what she did : absolutely NOT. No one deserves that. But I just had a hard time feeling much for her. Despite Summers’s strong writing, I had a difficult time to stop seeing her as one of the villains. Because she and her friends are real mean girls, in the worst way possible.
In the end though, I kind of did. Regina is a complex character, and she’s not “just” a villain. There is more to her and her story and it definitely kept me reading. I couldn’t drop the book until I knew how it ended. Fans of Summers’s first novel will probably appreciate this one too, and I’m looking forward to her new book coming out this December.
If you have read this one, I would love to hear your thoughts on these questions, to. Did you see something in Regina that I didn’t?
I haven’t read this one, but it does sound like it takes on a tough subject that kids really need to read more about.
I agree Kathy, there’s definitely room for books on the subjects in the YA books world. It needs to be talked about, and though this book is hard, it’s perfect for discussion. Not for too young teens I’d say though.
Awesome review. You’re right about bullying.
i like reading books like this that make you think about your actions and how they affect others, but i’ll probably have to be in the mood to read something about bullying just because it’s a tough topic to read about. i haven’t read anything by summers yet, but i definitely have heard some great things about her writing.
I read so many good reviews about this one, I found “cracked up to be” difficult to like but at the same time exceptionally well written and rather compelling. I am not exactly the forgiving-I-am-giving-you-another-chance type so I might react badly to a character like Summers.