ARC REVIEW: THE ACCIDENTAL BAD GIRL BY MAXINE KAPLAN

Thanks to ABRAMS Kids/Amulet Books for providing me with an e-ARC of this via NetGalley!

This was...not what I was expecting. Okay, let me qualify that statement. To be fair, I hadn't really expected much of this book. Given the title and the reviews I'd been looking at, I gathered that it was a contemporary about slut-shaming in a high-school setting. And it was about that, but it was also way larger in scope than I thought. First and foremost, I wanna say that the messages The Accidental Bad Girl puts forth are unabashed and unapologetic. Kendall's character arc is well-done and, I have to admit, pretty badass. The ending in particular is a nice moment that's a succinct rebuttal of rape culture and slut-shaming and gender double standards. That being said, I think this book was way too plot-heavy for my taste. Frankly, the plot was exhausting. Past a certain point in the story the plot revelations were just never-ending: one revelation would lead to the next would lead to the next would lead to the next so that by the end I just felt spent. And it wasn't just the amount of plot that I had a problem with, it was also the content of the plot itself. The climactic scene in the end in particular felt like it was straining for a grandiosity that it just didn't have. Above all, though, I think my biggest qualm with The Accidental Bad Girl is that I couldn't tell what kind of book it was trying to be. At times it felt like your regular contemporary, others like a mystery/thriller, sometimes veering into detective or action-y territory. To put it simply, I understood where it wanted to go, but I didn't understand how it got there.

Despite its flaws, The Accidental Bad Girl was a compelling read. It moves along quickly and has a pretty fierce protagonist. If you want to read a feminist takedown of the notion of the "bad girl" in society, The Accidental Bad Girl is the book for you.