Perfect Ten

Can you believe this is the TENTH installment of Colleen Mondor’s What a Girl Wants?  Stop by Colleen’s blog, Chasing Ray, to add your opinion to ours: are “mean girls” really such a menace, or do they just sell more books?  Neesha Meminger has now joined our panel (hurray!); here’s some of what she had to say on this topic:

I don’t mind reading books about mean girls, as long as they are placed within the context of the larger world and the power dynamics and complexities of that larger world. Otherwise, these stories come off as flat and cliched. They become re-creations of the old “victim meets bully, victim suffers, victim learns to fight back” story–which can be a wonderful, timeless, empowering story to be sure; not implying otherwise. But when the bullies/”mean girls” are young women and the victims are young women, there needs to be a deeper exploration of hidden power dynamics at play in addition to the complex psychological layers of the characters.