Get Even by Gretchen McNeil Series: Don't Get Mad #1
Genres: Mystery/Thriller, Young Adult
Published by Harper Collins on September 16th 2014
Also by this author: Get Dirty, Ten
Format: Audiobook Source: Scribd
Goodreads • Amazon • Barnes & Noble
The Breakfast Club meets Pretty Little Liars in Gretchen McNeil’s witty and suspenseful novel about four disparate girls who join forces to take revenge on high school bullies and create dangerous enemies for themselves in the process.
Bree, Olivia, Kitty, and Margot have nothing in common—at least that’s what they’d like the students and administrators of their elite private school to think. The girls have different goals, different friends, and different lives, but they share one very big secret: They’re all members of Don’t Get Mad, a secret society that anonymously takes revenge on the school’s bullies, mean girls, and tyrannical teachers.When their latest target ends up dead with a blood-soaked “DGM” card in his hands, the girls realize that they’re not as anonymous as they thought—and that someone now wants revenge on them. Soon the clues are piling up, the police are closing in . . . and everyone has something to lose.
Pardon my language, but what the actual fuck? I struggled with this book because I alternated between loving it and hating it throughout. Rating this one is a struggle for me and is based purely on comparison. I literally went to my ratings page and compared the book to the books under the 2.5 stars and 3 stars categories. I was leaning strongly towards 3.5 throughout the book, but towards the end found it slipping to 3… and now based on the final ending, it’s dangerously close to 2.5 territory. (Endings are very important to me!)
So ummm where do I begin? This book was interesting. It’s about a group of girls who start “Don’t Get Mad” (…get even) in order to right some wrongs committed by people in their school. They target bullies and as a result do some bulling themselves. Whatever. Okay. The hypocrisy of these kind of things don’t bug me that much. Then, someone turns up dead and the members of DGM are the main suspects. The school is trying to figure out who’s in the group, while the girls are trying to figure out who the murderer is.
But let me tell you – these girls are kind of stupid and annoying. They have the typical group of “opposite” girls from each circle in the school. Olivia, the popular drama star with a crappy home life; Bree, the rebel with a politician father; Kitty, the “Asian girl who isn’t good at math” (that’s exactly how she’s characterized) and is student body president; and Margot, the overachiever because her parents are psychopaths. OF COURSE they all have their secrets. OF COURSE the mystery killer tries to reveal them. Everything you’d expect happens. These girls are barely characterized beyond some of the obvious character traits that they need to prove just how ~different~ they all are from each other. This was kind of a worse version of Pretty Little Liars + The Perfectionists.
THE WORST PART is that even though I didn’t particularly enjoy this book, I have to read the second one. There is absolutely no closure at the end. View Spoiler » The “clues” are not really coming. Nothing is really happening at all.
Whatever I don’t even wanna keep writing this review. The book definitely annoyed me while simultaneously KIND OF entertaining me. I am invested in the story just because I need to know if my theory is correct.
Um…. those characters. :/ I have this on my TBR pile but I’m not going to jump at reading it any time soon. lol
I don’t blame you!