Sure, she already felt bad about some of this before the tide turned against her, but she still did it. I do sympathise with Regina, and I definitely do not feel that she deserves what happens to her, but I also find it hard to like her, and to forgive her for her sins, as she did some truly horrible things herself. The other thing that makes it so hard to read is that Regina used to be one of the bullies herself and was arguably one of the worst. It brought up a lot of stuff for me that I thought I had buried. So yes, I’ve been there (albeit when I was quite a bit younger than Regina), which was one of the reasons I found this so difficult to read. You’re just immersed in this hellscape the whole time from which there’s no way out. This was very well executed as by far the bulk of the novel happens in or around the school itself, and parents and other authority figures only exist in the periphery and don’t really seem like they can provide any help or comfort. And because school is most of your life at this age (either you’re at school, you’re doing homework, you’re hanging out with friends from school, playing sports with people from school etc), by extension – life becomes a nightmare. Not only that, she becomes the victim of the clique’s intense bullying, which she was once on the other side of. Regina Afton is the It Girl Anna’s best friend, but after Anna’s boyfriend assaults Regina at a party the truth of what happened gets twisted beyond recognition and Regina is ousted from the clique. It was kind of like “if this is a solution why wasn’t it just solved earlier?”. I guess if a book upsets me this much it’s really worthy of five stars, but there were a few things that bothered me about it, like the ending wrapping up a bit too neatly/quickly.
By which I mean the plot, not the writing, obviously. It took me a few days to even land on a star rating, as at first I thought I couldn’t possibly think of this in terms of stars, it was just too horrible. They will downright ruin people’s lives, drive them into depression or even towards suicide.
These girls do truly horrible things to each other because of their own insecurities, and the need to become/stay popular. Except it’s not funny, and nobody is hit by a bus*. Actually, scratch that, this is exactly Mean Girls. Just because this is a book about high school girl cliques and one of the girls is called Regina, don’t make the mistake of thinking this is Mean Girls.
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