Mostly Good Girls by Leila Sales

[description from goodreads]

The higher you aim, the farther you fall….

It’s Violet’s junior year at the Westfield School. She thought she’d be focusing on getting straight As, editing the lit mag, and making Scott Walsh fall in love with her. Instead, she’s just trying to hold it together in the face of cutthroat academics, Scott Walsh’s new girlfriend, and the sense that things are going irreversibly wrong with her best friend, Katie.

When Katie starts making choices that Violet can’t even begin to fathom, Violet has no idea how to set things right between them. Westfield girls are trained for success—but how can Violet keep her junior year from being one huge epic fail?

Review:

Violet, welcome to my Ace Gang. You're funny, you're smart, you're in the same Junior Year Hell as me. You'll fit in to the gang nicely.

Mostly Good Girls is so scarily realistic that I often had the impression that Leila Sales took some of Violet's thoughts directly from my brain (I'm still not totally convinced that she didn't). Violet's thoughts on the stupid-smart people at her school, the emo poetry received for the literary magazine, the pressures of competitive classes, and everything else were so similar to things I have thought before and so honest that I couldn't help but think "A-FREAKING-MEN." It also didn't hurt that Violet was hilarious-- her humor was more of the witty type, rather than the "OH LOOK AT ME I AM SO FUNNY HAHAHA" type. It was smart humor that matched her intelligence, and that's my favorite type of funny.

Mostly Good Girls does not have a definite plot until the middle and is mostly made up of short little snippets that look into the lives of Violet, Katie, and their prep school peers. I'm not really of fan of this vignette format, but because Violet is so funny and real, I didn't really mind. I also didn't mind because through these little snippets, I was able to see the relationship between Violet and Katie in its ~natural habitat. There were no crazy, out-of-the-blue dramatic things thrown at them to mess up, so their relationship seemed much more realistic. This friendship introduction also helped set up the rest of the book, but I'll not go into detail about that because of ~spoilers.

Mostly Good Girls is one of the funniest and most realistic books I've read this year-- perhaps I've read ever. Loved it.

Book details: Simon Pulse/Hardcover/$16.99

Source: BEA