Book Review: LOVELY GIRLS

Title: Lovely Girls
Author: Margot Hunt
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Pages: 302
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

 

Kate Turner and her daughter, Alex, have moved to a small town in Florida from New York. Kate hopes the move will help, that she and Alex will make new friends, and put their tragic past behind them.

Alex has a run-in with Daphne, Callie and Shae, three mean girls at her new school, but Kate is befriended by Genevieve, Ingrid and Emma, the mothers of those girls.

 

The book is written in the first person past tense PoV of Kate. This main narrative is interspersed with transcripts of the footage from Alex’ video diary.

I could relate to Kate, to the fact that she was swamped with life and had no real friends. But I couldn’t understand her desire to be friends with Genevieve and her clique, while completely disregarding how fake they were.

The dialogue between Kate and Joe Miller, the handsome single father she befriends, is quite lame.  The writing too was rather prosaic. At one point, Kate tells us that she is ‘incandescent with rage.”

I didn’t like any of the characters. Kate herself appeared rather petty in her attitude towards her neighbour, Lita Green. Granted that Lita gossips a lot, but that didn’t condone Kate’s high-handed attitude towards her.

Also, she complains about Alex having distanced herself but makes rather feeble attempts to get closer to her.

The novel went on for far too long. The middle should have been cut down. It added nothing of value to the narrative. The action picks up towards the end, by which time we are nearly running out of patience.

I wish authors would stop resorting to the Mean Girls trope. It’s been done once too often, and in this novel, there isn’t even a valid reason for why the girls act the way they do.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)