I really hated these bitches

So I read Girls on Fire immediately after the lovely summer romance of Aristotle & Dante, and while listening to the audiobook of The Rest of Us Just Live Here (which I’m about to review, but let me just say here that it featured some of my favorite YA characters/relationships EVER). So maybe those warm and fuzzy feelings just accentuated the awfulness of the girls in this novel. But really — I totally wanted to actually set these bitches on fire.

“I took up space. I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents’ expectations and evidence of their disappointments.” — I TOTALLY AGREE, HANNAH.

Hannah Dexter, a very nice (and SO DULL) teenage girl, gets taken under the wing of Lacey shortly after one of the popular boys at school shoots himself in the woods. Lacey molds Hannah (now “Dex”) into her own image — a flannel-wearing, grunge-loving (it’s set in the early 1990s) little shit who smokes, cuts classes and makes her parents miserable. In Lacey’s defense, her parents ARE pretty awful. But still — these girls are awful, and seem hell-bent on wrecking their little town. Oh, and Lacey maybe wants to sleep with Hannah’s dad?

The whole plot here has to do with what really happened to that boy in the woods — did he actually kill himself? Why? I will admit that the reveal at the end was pretty good, and the only reason I gave this two stars. I admire the author’s creativity there — and she did get me hooked enough to read the whole thing. But the antics of Lacey and Dex wear down quickly, and when popular girl Nikki gets involved, it’s even worse. The whole book is just an excuse to watch a couple of teenage girls self-destruct to the soundtrack of Kurt Cobain.