I adored this book because it perfectly captured the general hilarity of two best friends. The conversations between them are worth the read. It's teenager girl patter to a T. Also, it does a nice job of capturing the subtle transitions that happen as friends change and grow. Very well done. I'm disappointed that Multnomah County Library doesn't have her 2011 book called Past Perfect, because I can't get enough of Sales' writing. It’s Violet’s junior year at the Westfield School. She thought she’d be focusing on getting straight As, editing the lit mag, and figuring out how to talk to boys without choking on her own saliva. Instead, she’s just trying to hold it together in the face of cutthroat academics, her crush’s new girlfriend, and the sense that things are going irreversibly wrong with her best friend, Katie.When Katie starts making choices that Violet can’t even begin to fathom, Violet has no idea how to set things right between them. Westfield girls are trained for success—but how can Violet keep her junior year from being one huge epic failure?Oh, goodness this book was good.Nerds gone wild, that’s how I described this book to Ames. It’s the only thing that I could think of that fit in with what this book was about. This book follows Violet as she goes through her life at Westfield with her best friend in the whole wide world, Katie. Violet and Katie are nerds. They’re not that popular at school but they were pretty hot damn cool in my opinion. They had me cracking up at their different projects and their shared crush on Scott Walsh.Violet and Katie may be best friends but there are a lot of differences between the two of them. Violet is not rich but is really smart. She has to work at keeping her grades up and she’s very serious about school. Katie is rich and just as smart but she doesn’t really have to try at anything. She’s just naturally good at…everything. At first, this is okay with Violet because she loves Katie. They have so much fun together and Katie gets Violet’s humor. They have an off kilter kind of humor that had me bent over at times, laughing my guts out.The first time they tried getting drunk together? Hilarious. The dance where they found out Scott Walsh had a girlfriend and didn’t return their love for him? Not hilarious but when they left the dance and got caught in the sprinklers? Yeah, that was hilarious. The Harry Potter tours at Westfield? Haha, hilarious. When Genevieve is absent from school and everyone thought she was in the hospital from being anorexic? Violet’s response to Genevieve’s mock outrage over the rumors when she just had the flu? Freaking hilarious. The things that both Katie and Violet get into had me cracking up.Over the course of the story, things pop off. Katie starts acting strange. Her grades start slipping, she doesn’t bow down to pressure from adults and she gets a boyfriend. Violet doesn’t know how to react to all of these changes in her best friend and she stumbles over trying to do the right thing by her best friend and figure out what is happening to the best friend that she’s known for years. I really enjoyed getting to know both Violet and Katie over the course of this book. They were both entertaining characters that were going through changes in their lives that they were both just trying to get through.The solidarity between is what I enjoyed most about the book. They did everything that they put their minds to doing, together and when they started fighting, you wanted them to make up and be friends again. They were the perfect match for each other and I really enjoyed watching them come into their own. They were both going through totally different things and I liked the people that they came out to be after all was said and done. This book was good and I can’t recommend it enough. If you’ve read Past Perfect by Leila Sales then I have every faith that you’ll enjoy this one too.As much as I loved this book, the ending got a little slow and it took me a little bit to get throught it but it all ended well and I was super thrilled with the way that it ended so it gets a B from me.
What do You think about Mostly Good Girls (2010)?
This was a decent read for a first novel.
—CoolerboyJ
