This is a quick YA read about what makes girls “bad” by society’s standards in 1964; our girls are motivated by friendship, rebellion, and the sense of found family that makes a friend group feel like home. There are obvious elements of The Outsiders & The Goonies in the novel that make it feel familiar! I would recommend this for upper middle grade students and early high schoolers as far as the prose/tone/content goes. My personal rating of this novel was a 3 Star— it was a decent read, but as an older reader, I found myself bored and struggling to connect with the novel as it was more juvenile than I like to read, but I’m also aware I’m not the intended audience. Give it a go if you want a genderbent Outsiders.

It’s the 60's……..you’re either a twin set girl or a kohl eyes girl…….boys wear khakis and loafers or jeans and hair gel. From the outside you have reflexive opinion of who has a better life and who you’d want to be like but this book tells an entirely different story. I kept thinking of it as a cross between Romeo and Juliet and West Side story……..it’s all about “them” and “us”.
   An unexpected and harrowing incident brings the two sides together and a friendship develops that would never have happened if the moon and stars hadn’t aligned at that one moment.
   It offers a look into the minds of teenagers: who they trust…..their commitment to loyalty…..parental  expectations…..how they see themselves……how they perceive the world they come from…..and their future.
   This book lets you look at life through their eyes and reminds the reader how hard it was (is) to be a teenager.

I am disappointed with this book. I was expecting one thing and received another. It had potential but it was not well written.

Comparing a book to a classic is tough. On one hand, it makes readers (like me) interested in how the author can twist the original to create something new, exciting, and relevant. On the other hand, it makes readers inevitably (even subconsciously) measure it against that comparison. This may have been why this one fell a little short for me.

I enjoyed this gender twist on Hinton's “The Outsiders.” As one reviewer mentioned, I think I would have appreciated it more without the association to the YA classic. In fact, when I market it to my library kiddos I don’t know if I’ll make that connection for them or let the get there themselves. I found myself trying to find too many similarities to the original so my reading felt more like a forced English class assignment than a pleasurable experience.

Thank you for granting my arc request. I hope to one day come back and pick this up but I will be unable to finish my review of this at this time.

Excellent adaption of The Outsiders! My students read The Outsiders in 7th grade so this would be a really fun recommendation for 8th graders.

I read this book because I loved Moxie by the same author, but this is a different vibe. It still has the strong female characters I like, but this is more Riverdale thriller-y and harder to relate to because of the historical time period. The ironic ending reminded me of Shakespeare. This is a great book, but not my taste.

First, thank you to Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, Roaring Brook Press, and NetGalley for allowing me access to this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This review is a bit delayed, but...life happened.

Evie Barnes and her friends are from the wrong side of town in 1960s Houston. They drink, smoke, cut school, and run with the bad boys. When Evie is saved from a sexual assault at a drive-in by a "tea sipper" good girl from the "rich" side of town, it throws her world upside down and reveals the dark underbelly of even the most put together members of the community.

Going into this, I had obviously seen that this book was being billed as a gender-flipped version of The Outsiders, so I was intrigued. The Outsiders was one of the few mandatory reads from school that I actually enjoyed, so I was curious to see what exactly a gender-flipped version would entail. Knowing that what I was reading was a novel didn't change the fact that the whole story felt - for lack of a better word - fake. Contrived, even. Everything was so incredibly rushed (acknowledged by the characters in the book itself that it takes place over the span of roughly 10 days) and it just felt like the pieces fell into place too easily. The relationship between two characters smacked of Sandy and Danny from Grease, complete with a female foursome with qualities reminiscent of the Pink Ladies themselves. The plot moved incredibly slowly, due largely in part to repetitive conversations and actions from several characters. It felt like the same conversation was had four or fives times, leaving me bogged down and begging for something exciting to happen. Most of what played out consisted of fairly routine plot lines of the time period - troubled girls being sent away, preps vs. "greasers", sweater sets and leather jackets - which made the whole story fairly predicable on top of it already being roughly the story of The Outsiders.

Overall it was a fast read, but I never felt any true connection to any of the characters which hindered my enjoyment of the novel.

Such a wonderful story! I read some reviews prior and others weren’t a fan but this book blew me away! I’m so lucky to have been given the chance to read it. Through the main characters and the plot, I felt like I was developing too. It shows friendship, family, love, death, grief. It shows so many human complexities that I just didn’t want to end the experience!

I feel pretty indifferent towards this book really. It wasn't particularly bad but I was also never invested in the story. I think the concept was super interesting and I loved reading a book with the same vibes as The Outsiders. I will definitely recommend this to anyone looking for a book with similar vibes to Grease and The Outsiders, but I don't think it will stick with me personally for that long.

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A girl from the right side of town falls out of favor and is sent to the wrong side of town. There she meets true friends and teaches a tragic lesson about choices.

Parts of this one felt very predictable and others were just so good I couldn't put it down. I loved the gender flipped Outsiders and I think that this works well for the story. Overall, I was never completely invested in the story but think it would be interesting to read this with The Outsiders maybe for a school thesis where you could compare and contrast them.

Wasting no time, Bad Girls Never Say Die delves right in. A splash of Romeo & Juliet pairs with this gender-flipped take on The Outsiders (well, maybe a bit more than a splash...). Though I don't have enough fingers to count the number of years since I last read The Outsiders in eighth grade, Jennifer Mathieu's take certainly pays homage to the YA classic.

Evie Barnes is a bad girl. She cuts class. She runs with the wrong crowd. She smokes and drinks and lies to her mother. Then comes one fateful night at the drive-in. She finds herself literally running with someone completely unexpected. Building from the need to keep secrets, what transpires is an intense friendship between the unlikely pair. But what will Evie's fellow bad girls think of her new friend? The group, not to mention Evie's role in it, will be tested like never before. But if there's one thing Evie and her friends know, it's bad girls never say die.

Set in Houston in 1964, Mathieu provides a tremendous sense of this particular time and place, especially for a YA novel. Bad Girls Never Say Die is another page-turner from the author of Moxie.

Disclaimer: I've never read The Outsiders! I plan to take it off my shelf soon, because I *loved* this book.

I haven't cried so openly and so much while reading a book since A Monster Calls , and that is saying something. I had to take a day off from this book before I finished it. The characters were so real to me, and I was invested in their story.

The female relationships in this book are all about friendships - the friend you can't believe considers you a close friend, the friend you can lean on, and the friend you never expected.

I won't say more about this book, but it was one of my favorites of this year, and I wish I could reach in and pull out the characters and cradle them cause holy crow did they get to me.

I liked that this was a feminist take on the Outsiders, but it felt a bit predictable and slow for my tastes. I agree with other reviewers that, although marketed as a YA novel, this would be appropriate for middle schoolers.

Definitely planing to use this book in my young-adult lit class, paired with The Outsiders. I think this will generate some interesting discussion about the alpha and the (current) omega of YA Lit. How far have we come since S. E. Hinton's genre-creating novel?

It’s an intriguing idea to remix S. E. Hinton’s iconic The Outsiders with young women instead of young men. But for me, this didn’t quite hit the spot as I found it overly stylized and a bit of a trudge.

Evie, Connie, Juanita, and Sunny are “tough girls”, which, in 1964 Houston, means that they wear heavy eye makeup, smoke, and skip school. They have contempt for the “tea-sippers” from the other side of the tracks.

15 year-old Evie is the youngest of the group and the most innocent. She is almost raped by one of uppercrust boys, but is rescued by Diane who stabs him and accidentally kills him. Though Diane presents as a tea-sipper, she is living with her aunt in a small dingy house on the wrong side of town and goes to the same school as Evie. United by their shared trauma, Evie and Diane become friends, though the shadow of what happened looms over them both.

I read The Outsiders a long time ago and had very little recollection of it (probably not helped by getting it confused with Francis Ford Coppola’s film version), so I did a quick read of the Wikipedia page to see how the two books compare. While the set up for both books is similar, Bad Girls diverges on a major plot point, introducing a star-crossed Romeo and Juliet relationship.

The author intelligently highlights issues that were relevant to girls at the time (and still resonate today). The novel is very strong in its advocacy for the power of female friendship in an era when girls and women were more defined in relation to the men in their lives. Evie’s mother’s ambition for her daughters is for them to be married and settled with nice, steady men. But Evie doesn’t want this and it takes much of the book for her to be able to articulate the desire she has to just be able to choose for herself and make her own decisions.

I found much of the novel to be rather slow-paced and somewhat repetitive. Though written in a style that feels somewhat appropriate to the 1960’s and to pulp novels, the novel also has a modern sensibility that doesn't always sit comfortably. I thought the feminist ideas were a little shoehorned in (Evie’s sister is reading Betty Friedan) and Evie’s ideas about desegregation and civil rights, while admirable, felt rather too contemporary and adult, and seemed out of character (though I suspect this would be unnoticed by today’s teens). Conversely, thoughts about sex and sexuality are noticeably absent.

So, overall this was an okay read for me, but I have already purchased it for my library as I know many of my students really loved Ponyboy, Johnny, and the other greasers, and will be excited to read this new iteration.

Thanks to Roaring Brook and Netgalley for the digital review copy.

It happened again. I saw a cover; I saw an author; and I got a book without reading the summary. I'd say, "Someday I'll learn," but at this point it seems highly unlikely! However, things turned out well in this instance. It wasn't until after I started reading, and I added this book to my Goodreads list, that I discovered it's a modern, feminist retelling of "The Outsiders" (a favorite of mine)! It was a lot of fun to think about the parallels as I read, but I also truly appreciate all the ways that Mathieu made the story her own.

Most notably, I appreciated how layered and nuanced the girls in the story were - even the "tea sippers" (Socs). All of the girls, including the minor ones (like Betty, Sunny, and Cheryl), are multi-dimensional. They make good choices and bad choices. They are loyal to their friends, and they do hurtful things. They are part of a fierce friend group, but they also have their own lives and their own things going on. And they grow, learn, and change as the story progresses - all of them! They are realistic, believable characters - more so than the Greasers in "The Outsiders." And I love it!

It would be so much fun to pair this book with "The Outsiders" for a book club. Another idea would be to have two groups - one reads "The Outsiders" and one reads "Bad Girls Never Say Die" - and put them together to see where *that* discussion leads!

“Bad girls never give in. And bad girls never say die.”
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It’s 1964 in Houston, TX and Evie Barnes and her gang of girlfriends are what this side of town would refer to as “bad girls”. They smoke, wear a ton of eye makeup, drink and cut class regularly. But when Evie is saved by Diane, a good girl from the right side of the tracks, after almost being sexually assaulted, she wonders if her hard and fast rules about life are what’s right. As the two grow closer secrets are revealed and lives are changed forever.
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This feminist take on S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders hit just right for me. I’m a huge fan of Matthieu. Moxie will always hold a special place in my heart and I believe this book is just as impactful. It shows how difficult things were (and still are) for women growing up, coming into their own, society’s expectations of them and how hard it can be to stand up for what’s right, for themselves and others. I love this new twist on a classic and feel like Matthieu was the best person for job. This YA book releases October 19.

CW: attempted sexual assault, death, violence, adoption


4.5 ⭐️ as I was a bit bored in the beginning but it nailed the ending.