What is “mean girl culture”? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself recently … as well as whether or not the term is considered sexist, as boys are more than likely to be just as mean as girls, if not meaner.
If you had the distill the term down, however, I think you’d end up with one word: bullying.
Not many novels—at least contemporary suspense novels—focus on mean girl culture. Maybe because mean girl culture is assumed to be more a focus of YA novels. Or maybe simply because mean girl culture isn’t relevant to many thrillers. Then again, I could be completely off-base and it occurs more often than I realize.
I certainly didn’t set out to write a novel about mean girl culture, but that’s what ended up happening with Girl Gone Mad. A look at not just a group of means girls when they’re young, but how their meanness affected them for the rest of their lives.
Below are five novels that, while they may not mainly focus on mean girl culture, certainly contain aspects that are important to the plot; in some of the books, bullying is what sets the story in motion.
Carrie by Stephen King
How can you have a list about mean girl culture and not include King’s first novel? The scene near the beginning where the girls in the locker room shout “PER-iod!” at Carrie has become iconic. Especially when those mean girls start throwing tampons at her. King makes Carrie’s peers so awful that the reader starts to sympathize with her, so when she finally snaps toward the end, it’s almost understandable.
Dare Me by Megan Abbott
Gillian Flynn has described Abbott’s novel as “Lord of the Flies set in a high-school cheerleading squad,” and there’s really no better way to describe it. This is the quintessential “mean girl” novel. There’s Abby, the narrator, and her best friend, Beth, who’s captain of the pep squad. When a new coach enters the scene and Beth sees her as a threat, all hell breaks loose. As the coach remarks early on in the book: “There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”
Sisters by Daisy Johnson
This is a very short book—barely 45,000 words long—but it holds quite a punch and is beautifully written. The sisters in question are July and September; July is the narrator and the timid one, while September has a nasty streak running through her. The book opens with the sisters and their mother going to stay at a beach house due to an incident at school which isn’t described to the reader until much later in the book. Other than it includes a set of mean girls at the school who were bullying July.
Good Girls Lie by J.T. Ellison
Ellison’s novel takes place at an exclusive girls’ boarding school, which is pretty much the perfect setting for mean girl culture. Ash, the protagonist, comes to the school from the United Kingdom after the death of her parents, and right off the bat—like within minutes of her arriving on campus—some of the girls start messing with her. As you can imagine, things spiral out of control from there.
Bunny by Mona Awad
Unlike the other books on this list, Bunny takes place in college and focuses on an MFA program. There are a group of girls who refer to each other as “Bunny” and Samantha, the narrator, who at first despises them until she’s invited into their group. From there, things get really twisted.
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