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Book Review of How to Be Bad

How to Be Bad
reviewed on
Helpful Score: 2


I read this mostly because E. Lockhart was one of the authors and I've enjoyed everything I read by her. This was, just ok. The book is a story revolving around 3 very different girls and there friendship and how it evolves on a mini roadtrip. It's written by 3 different authors and It's told in first person, however each chapter is the viewpoint of one of the three main characters. this was a smart way to handle the obvious change in writing style. Each writer took the lead with one character. The issue I had was I didn't love the writing style of one of the writers and she was the voice every 3 chapters. I also felt an imbalance when one writer would try to write within her chapter, speech for another character.
The story too was cliche'd and shallow, reminiscent at times of Brtiney Spears' CROSSROADS movie (yikes). Still I finished it relatively quickly and it was entertaining enough to make me want to see it through to the end. There is one character who plays "the christian" and while I feel the author did a decent job of not making her a complete joke for her beliefs, I felt at the end the character completely abandons what she knew to be true to replace it with what she wanted to be true. I guess that's a fair representation of what many people do with faith (cut and paste, remove parts and borrow until it looks like what one wants it to be), but I wish the character had had more conviction to hold to what she knew to be true. SHe was also written as the more naive of the 3 and the least educated which, as a christian, i found offensive. But with the title being "How to be Bad" i guess the warning was right there on the cover, huh?