Author: Lauren Saft
Publisher: Hachette
Rating: WARTY!
Those Girls isn't a very original title; there are several others with this title or a variation on it, so make sure you check for authorship before you pick one of those girls to buy. For me, I won't be buying, because it failed to entertain me at all and I can't recommend it. I expected better from a master of fine arts, but what I got was more like something written by a mistress than a master. It was published by Little, Brown Books for young readers (now owned by Hachette), but I in no way would ever recommend a book like this for a young reader - or anyone else.
One good indicator of whether you liked a novel or not is that it stays with you when you've read it - or it fails to. It wasn't very long ago at all that I read this, yet I barely remember it as I write this review. I do recall a lot of words which came to mind as I read it, though: words like "disappointment" and "poor" and "incredible" - that last one unfortunately in a very negative sense. It's never a good sign if a novel is so lacking in distinction that it floats away as soon as you've closed the cover, and this one floated more like the Titanic.
From a purely technical PoV the writing was not bad, and by that I mean that there were no gross spelling or grammatical errors, so if you set your sights low enough you might enjoy this. There were some amusingly mis-worded sentences, however, such as when one of the three main characters is purty-ing herself up in the car as her friend drives, and we read, "She pulled her silky blonde hair into a ponytail, opened her mouth and applied eye-liner in my rear view mirror..."!
There are at least two kinds of wrong here. She's applying eye-liner to her mouth? Interesting! Who knows? Teens do crazy stuff, so maybe she was. It just sounded wrong to me, but then I'm neither teen nor female. I just play one on TV. No, of course I'm kidding! My only other question is did she apply the eye-liner to the rear-view mirror or to her mouth? Or did she actually apply it around her eyes and the sentence was just badly written?
But those faux pas are no big deal. They're amusing, and we've all written something like that and read it back later and wondered what the heck we were thinking! It's what makes writing fun no matter which side of the page you're on.
The problem wasn't with the technical writing, it was with the entire story itself. I can forgive some poor grammar and spelling, and even some poor writing if I get a really good story, but I can't forgive a really poor story. If this author "masterfully conveys what goes on in the mind of a teenage girl," then I'd hate to read one which tosses it on your table without even wiping the Formica first, because that's what this felt like.
I do believe there are some people like those girls, but I cannot honestly believe that sixteen year old girls in general are anything like this. If they are, then I despair for them and for our future.
The story is of three rather clueless and vacuous teens. At first I thought they were seventeen; now I think they were sixteen, but even so, their behavior was juvenile, and all three of them needed to seriously get a life. Even at sixteen you need to be looking at what the heck you're going to do after graduation. Hopefully it's college but if not, you still need a career plan.
Not a single one of these girls had a single thing go through their mind that wasn't either a bitchy thought or an obsessive thought about boys or sex. I am not kidding. Not a one of them had any interests, hobbies, or pastimes - not even relatively frivolous ones like dancing in clubs. I mean they literally had zero interests - they were that shallow. Not a one of them had any occupation - and yes, I know they were spoiled-brat rich kids, but you'd think that one or two of them might like to get some job experience and an independent source of income. The sole exception was Alex's joining a band. More about that anon.
Now I know that too many teenagers are very narrowly-focused for the most part, but no teen worth reading about is as narrowly-focused as these three were. Amy Heckerling made a very amusing and successful movie about a clueless teenage girl, but this novel wasn't that movie by a long script. The novel wasn't funny at all. It was sad, and not in a happy way. I charge the girls with multiple counts of gross cluelessness - about their lives, about their families, about their boyfriends, but worst of all, about each other.
They were tunnel-vision, seeing everything through a telescope turned on themselves blinkered. And it was boring. Not a single one of them showed any sign, throughout the entire novel, of growing up, or of realizing how shallow they were, or of changing for the better, or of even thinking that anything was really wrong. I can't empathize with people like that. I can't like them. I sure don't want to read about them, but I actually read this to the end hoping something good would come out of it. It didn't. It needs to be re-titled Those Clowns.
Why did I pick it up?
I picked it up for the sole reason that the blurb mentioned that Alex was secretly in a band, That's what I was interested in - a sixteen year old girl with something to say and a voice to say it with. I got none of that. The thing with the band was for all practical purposes irrelevant and immaterial to the story. It went nowhere. It played no meaningful part in the story. I felt robbed with this bait-and-switch in the blurb, but this is what happens when you let Big Publishing&Trade; effectively own your work. You get misleading blurbs, and a cover which says - and very loudly too - don't worry what's in this girl's head, just take a look at her hot bod. That's all she's worth. Ironically, it's the perfect cover for this story. We're told of Alex that she's "...secretly in love with the boy next door.." but she's too clueless to know she's in love. That's how dumb she is, and she never wises-up.
None of the girls is smart enough to realize that all they know is a tiny insignificant part of the world, and until they get out there and really explore it, they will remain clueless, ignorant and unadventurous as they are. Alex is clueless, Mollie is ignorant of the fact that she's in a co-dependent relationship, and Veronica, the one who appears most adventurous of all, is held fast in her lifestyle by a cheap and gaudy leash of her own making. They act far more like thirteen than ever they do sixteen, and they have the mentality to match. Spin the bottle? Truth or dare? seriously?
Why I think it should be put down.
All of "those girls" are painfully stupid. The are borderline alcoholics, and they routinely have unprotected sex without a thought for the sexual history of their partner. They have a pedophile teacher in their school which not a one of them even considers reporting to the authorities. All of them smoke heavily and indulge regularly in drugs, like those lifestyles are completely risk-free. And none of their behavior has any real consequences or teaches them a single thing. On addition to this, there's chronic slut-shaming going on throughout the novel even between the three supposed friends. There is nothing appealing about any of these characters and nothing interesting about their loser life story. I cannot recommend this at all.
