Dead Little Mean Girl by Eva Darrows Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“Everyone should have a chance, even the mean girl. Perhaps especially the mean girl, because she might have just needed someone to listen to her.”- Dead Little Mean Girl, Eva Darrows

Quinn Littleton was a mean girl—a skinny blonde social terrorist in stilettos. She was everything Emma MacLaren hated. Until she died. 

A proud geek girl, Emma loves her quiet life on the outskirts, playing video games and staying off the radar. When her nightmare of a new stepsister moves into the bedroom next door, her world is turned upside down. Quinn is a queen bee with a nasty streak who destroys anyone who gets in her way. Teachers, football players, her fellow cheerleaders—no one is safe. 

Emma wants nothing more than to get this girl out of her life, but when Quinn dies suddenly, Emma realizes there was more to her stepsister than anyone ever realized.

Quite a few times, I've gone into books expecting one thing and having the actual outcome be completely different. Occasionally, I'll end up enjoying it regardless- I thought Everything I Never Told You was a mystery, for instance, and it not being one didn't impact my rating at all- and sometimes (most times) I'll hate it- like All the Rage, another contemporary I thought was a mystery. 

I say all this because I thought this book was a mystery with a lot of contemporary elements (it's always mysteries...) and it ended up just being a straight-up contemporary. And not a very good one. In fact, for most of the book, I couldn't help but think it truly must be a parody of Heathers or Mean Girls. I was searching so hard for the message this book promised, the one that says not all jocks and cheerleaders are bullying morons, not all nerds are wonderful people, and didn't get that at all. I hoped this book was about a girl who dismissed her stepsister as being shallow and mean, but after her untimely death she finds herself searching for her stepsister's killer and discovers all kinds of things about the girl she had thought she knew but never really had known. That wasn't it. That wasn't it at all. Instead, we got an amazing nerd girl and a sociopath for the first 200 pages (aka, most of the book). The stepsister is a beautiful blonde idiot, a venomous cheerleader. Hell, she wasn't even a convincing sociopath- sociopaths are typically geniuses, with cool calculating minds. It seemed like she wasn't smart because in YA literature, the only smart people allowed are the likeable ones, you know, so they can take down the bullies with some witty quips. 

Yeah, so for the first 200 pages, this was going the way of most really bad YA contemporaries. Cliched family backgrounds all around, in which the mothers are glorified, who needs fathers. Even when the father has a good excuse, like Emma's father- of course he's not around much, he's a goddamn pilot. Quinn is even said to have gotten all her negative qualities from her father, I suppose because it's easier to say that than to let her mother's character be slandered in any way. It would be interesting if her mother was at least extremely manipulative, and more unique than just saying that her father's a complete dick. I think my least favorite character actually ended up being Karen, because for someone who professed to love her daughter as much as she did, she didn't seem to give a damn about her wellbeing at all. Hell, she probably didn't give her much of a choice as to where she wanted to live or which house was better for her to live in. I don't know. The more I was told to like Karen, the less I ended up actually liking her.

So I was all set to give this book an extremely low score and then the last 50 pages and Darrows attempted to make amends for everything she had written in the first 200. Well, too little, too late. Yes, that message was important, but it would have been so much more effective if it wasn't so tacked on. You could feed me all kinds of bullshit about how Darrows did that on purpose, so that we grew to hate Quinn like Emma did and we never understood her and blah blah blah, but the thing is I never hated Quinn. I pitied her and wished someone a bit more skilled could write her, but I never hated her. Instead, I started to hate both Emma and Karen, characters I probably was supposed to like. And frankly, if she wanted to do that, she shouldn't have left it to that last fifty pages, even if it was supposed to be commentary on how we never truly get to know someone until their life is over. It would have been far more effective to split the book in half- before and after. Normally, I think that's a bit gimmicky, but it would work in this case. Because the thing is, I genuinely liked the message (no matter how cliched Emma's musings on grief may have been) at the end and I genuinely felt like Darrows believed what she was saying, that you never truly know that mean girl as well as you think you might. And I did like certain things, like seeing her dad torn up with grief and seeing Emma's interactions with her own father, but again, too little too late. 

I know I said in my My Sister's Grave review that I'm an ending person and not a beginning person. That I'll give a book a higher score if I like the ending more than the beginning, but a lower score if it's vice versa. In this case, I think my opinions stayed the same. Really the ending just disappointed me, got me thinking about the book it could have been. In the end, pick this book up if you want a strangely addictive little contemporary with some light and cliched thoughts on grief and maybe a message at the end. Don't expect anything life changing or even particularly original, though.

5 out of 10