I tried to like this one after seeing some positive reviews of it. It was taking a while for me to really get in the groove of it and I figured it would come towards the end when the redemption came. It never did. I feel like I need a breather after this.
The book is about bullying in a highschool setting. You have the protagonist who used to be part of this clique that was notorious for being the bullies in school. It seemed like no one was safe because everyone was scared of them. One night, she encounters this horrible incident and it blew up in her face. Her group quickly did a 180. They spread rumors, got people to turn on her, harassed her to no end and basically made her everyone's target.
It was awful. It was one bad thing after another. I get that this is a book about a sensitive topic but I didn't understand what the point was because the ending was, well, pointless. It started and ended with a hell lot of nastiness thrown around. For what? What are we getting at here? Are you trying to demonstrate how awful the world is? Because WE'RE WELL AWARE OF THAT. I found all the bullying efforts to be over the top annoying. Imagine all the bullying-themed movies combined and add steroids on it. You annoyed yet?
Plot hole: is this a world of teenagers alone? Where are all the adults? I get that sometimes adult supervision is low and that's why these stuff happen but for all the shit to continue unchecked is a bit of stretch. All the adults here would easily shrug things off based on whatever lie the teenagers say. To be fair though, if someone did intervene then we wouldn't have a plot. The bullying would end and it'll be a short book. (I would rather it be a short book.)
The characters were plain evil without any kind of context so it was really hard to relate to any of them. I need my villains to make sense. Sadly they don't have any in this one. Even the protagonist failed to gain my sympathy. She was not above retaliating. I didn't see much growth and it's just sad.
In the end the book left me feeling down and out. The only redeeming quality I found was Summers' writing technique which was undoubtedly good. The plot was just terrible. Some books are tragedy porn and I'm completely fine with those. In fact, I can get on board with those kinds of books AS LONG AS THEY MAKE SENSE. This is just one long laundry list of vengeful things people can do to each other. No thank you.