Mostly Good Girls
Author: Leila Sales
ISBN: 9781442406797

Mostly Good Girls by Leila Sales tells the story of Violet Tunis, a junior at a private high school, the Westfield School. Violet has many goals for her all-important junior year including getting a perfect score on the PSAT, making her crush Scott fall for her, improving the school’s lit mag, which she’s editor of and more. Along the way, Violet wants to have fun with her best friend Katie.

Junior year isn’t what Violet thought it would be. School is HARD, her extracurriculars are time-consuming and Scott isn’t paying any attention to her. To make matters worse, Katie has gone and got herself an older boyfriend and her and Violet’s relationship is quickly taking a turn for the worse.

I couldn’t have been more excited when I learned I won this book from The Book Scout’s giveaway. I mean first of all, the title is amazing. The cover is super cute (I love those shoes!) and I knew the book was going to be great after chatting with Leila Sales during a WriteOnCon chat a few weeks ago. Needless to say, I had high hopes for this book and I was definitely not disappointed.

The best part about this book was how funny it was! During the WriteOnCon chat, Leila Sales mentioned that her agent pushed her to make sure that every page was funny. That tactic definitely worked because the humor was spot-on throughout the book. There are so many laugh out loud moments in Mostly Good Girls and there are other moments where the humor is more understated, but you’ll still notice and appreciate it.

Besides being super funny, every girl can relate to Violet and her friendship with Katie. We’ve all had that best friend that started to change and grow as we got older, even though we wished that it wouldn’t happen. We’ve all had friends that we’ve drifted apart from and I think Sales captured the emotions of those tumultuous times beautifully.

Violet was an incredible main character simply because she is so normal. There is nothing spectacular about Violet. She is your normal run of the mill teenager, just trying to make it through high school. She is both witty and adorable and a good friend to Katie, even when Katie wasn’t being such a good friend. Her intense loyalty to her friendship was admirable.

While the first half of the book moved at a slower pace, providing a lot of back story about Violet and Katie, the second half takes off with lots and lots of conflict. I actually enjoyed the first half of the book- while it moved slowly, I didn’t ever feel bored. Instead, I wanted to know more and more about Violet’s world. I wanted to be her friend too. I loved immersing myself in her head and learning more about her.

A great story about the up and downs and the many intricacies of the relationship between best friends.

5/5