Addy Hanlon has always been Beth Cassidy’s best friend and trusted lieutenant. Beth calls the shots and Addy carries them out, a long-established order of things that has brought them to the pinnacle of their high-school careers. Now they’re seniors who rule the intensely competitive cheer squad, feared and followed by the other girls — until the young new coach arrives. Cool and commanding, an … an emissary from the adult world just beyond their reach, Coach Colette French draws Addy and the other cheerleaders into her life. Only Beth, unsettled by the new regime, remains outside Coach’s golden circle, waging a subtle but vicious campaign to regain her position as “top girl” — both with the team and with Addy herself. Then a suicide focuses a police investigation on Coach and her squad. After the first wave of shock and grief, Addy tries to uncover the truth behind the death — and learns that the boundary between loyalty and love can be dangerous terrain. The raw passions of girlhood are brought to life in this taut, unflinching exploration of friendship, ambition, and power. Award-winning novelist Megan Abbott, writing with what Tom Perrotta has hailed as “total authority and an almost desperate intensity,” provides a harrowing glimpse into the dark heart of the all-American girl.
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I didn’t really like this book but at the same time it was ok. I wanted to read this after seeing the TV series. I wanted to see how and what happened in the book version. I knew the characters are mean and unlikable. Same with the book as the show, something just keeps drawing you back.
TW/CW: disordered eating, eating disorder, lesbian slurs, depression, suicidal thoughts, child loss
At first I thought about giving this book 2 star. Then I asked myself what I liked about it to leave 2 stars and couldn’t think of an answer.
The narrator, Addy, is not good. I wouldn’t call her an unreliable narrator though. Although she could be …
A+ writing! Abbott gets you, the reader, inside these shallow, powerful, high school-ruling, cheer-stomping, enemy-squashing, damaged girls’ heads and doesn’t let you go. Tense, can’t-put-it-down plot. I just bought everything else she’s published.
Fans of Mean Girls, Heathers, Jawbreaker, Jennifer’s Body, Ginger Snaps, The Craft, and other similar “mean teen” films will find a lot that is familiar here: a suspicious suicide, the right hand girl who’s grown tired of her role, the queen bee with a seriously crooked moral compass, the literal and figurative bloodshed, the cutthroat competition …
Once again, Megan Abbott creates some unbelievably horrible high school girls and I’m intrigued.
This time, the girls are cheerleaders and they are twisted, mean, manipulative and just plain bitches. Even their coach is horrible.
None of them realize how good they have it, with their nice homes, their cell phones and their varsity jackets. …
Megan Abbott takes the Mean Girls trope to extremes in her novel Dare Me, about a team of high school Cheerleaders who revel in their sense of entitlement and perceived immortality. Addy Hanlon is the sixteen-year-old narrator who identifies herself as the “lieutenant” to her best friend and Team Captain, Beth. Even as she kowtows and follows …