This was a quick read and pretty much exactly as advertise as a feminist reimaging of The Outsiders. Mostly, I enjoyed it. However, I was really hoping for some queer representation. And that ending....ugh.

It's really hard to update a classic work. This gender-swapped Outsiders story keeps the class warfare and tragic romance elements, but doesn't do much to transform the story for a 2021 audience. Alas, it's enjoyable enough, with female friendships at its heart, but I expected more from the author of Moxie, which I loved.

This book is a perfect mashup of Grease, meets the Outsiders, meets mystery for the #metoo era. Jennifer Mathieu hooked me with the powerful feminist themes in MOXIE and BAD GIRLS NEVER SAY DIE does not disappoint. Filled with well-rounded characters, Evie, the youngest of the bad-girl group takes a staring role. She finds her voice and accepts her strengths while dealing with the fallout from an interrupted sexual assault. Her unexpected savior becomes an unlikely friend. While the language and tone felt pitch-perfect, sometimes Diane's heart-woes felt tedious (ala Sandra Dee). Other than that, I loved this book!

I really enjoyed this book! It is like a mix of The Outsiders and Grease, a gender-bent version which just makes it even better!

This story follows Evelyn, or Evie as she likes to be called, who is friends with the “bad girls”. She runs with the “bad girl” crowd that her mom refers to them as, but she does because they accept her. They don’t look down on her, and treat her equally, despite her young age. Amongst the kids, there are the “bad” kids, and the “tea sippers”, basically the poorer kids and the rich kids. One evening, Evie is almost assaulted by one of the upper class boys, but is saved by Diane, a girl who once was a part of the upper class, or a “tea sipper” by desperate measures. After the incident, they each have to keep this secret of what happened to that boy, or be arrested. Which they attempt to keep until someone innocent is accused and they have to decide what to do. Tell the truth, or not.

I love Evie. What she almost went through, and how she copes with it afterward is heartbreaking and yet so admirable how she handles it. Her relationship with her best friends, Connie, Sunny, and Juanita, is just lovely. They’re like a found family, always sticking up for each other and protecting each other no matter what. When Diane is introduced, Evie changes so much as a person. Diane really shows Evie she can be a nice person, and yet still be “tuff”; she can still cry, and yet be a “tuff” person. It’s amazing to see how they all transform as friends, and all become so much closer in order to save each other and protect each other.

This book was an emotional read, especially towards the end. It really focused on friends and family, and those bonds you make with them and what you are willing to do to protect those bonds and those people you love. The book broke my heart, but it also made me feel good and really appreciate the friends and family I have. I highly recommend this book, especially if you love The Outsiders, or Grease, or just a unique retelling or twist on an original story. Thank you to the publisher, the author, and NetGalley for a free digital copy. All thoughts are my own, and I left this review voluntarily.

"Running wild is a way to forget what put our hearts through so much pain in the first place."

The Outsiders meets Grease with a dash of The Goonies. Don’t forget your rocky road ice cream!

The Outsiders is a book that always stuck with me. It was the only mandatory school reading that I was actually excited about and still love to read to this day. So the synopsis for this jumped right out at me. Did you say girl gang? Sign me up!

To take a classic and make it your own without ruining its reputation takes a lot of courage and hard work. So I applaud Jennifer for taking that approach but this wasn't what I was hoping for. I wanted something different and unique. What she does here is mashes two movies and a book that are very popular and changes the gender of the lead characters.

So we get The Outsiders with the street-tough girl gang, we get Grease after a boy from the wrong side of the tracks falls for a girl from the high-class area, and let's not forget about the Goonies with Never Say Die. I thought this was supposed to be original? I felt as if I was reliving what I have already experienced but with no singing and dancing. *Pfft!* Lame!

Now before you send the villagers for my head, hear me out. I love the earlier works by this Author and Moxie is one of my favorites. What her earlier works have are creativity and uniqueness. They made you feel a certain way and got your emotions involved. This wasn't like that at all. It's Groundhog Day without the dancing gopher.

Bad Girls Never Say Die was not the book for me and it wasn't what I hoped it would be. It was too much like a lot of other popular items of pop culture and I just wasn't having it. I wanted to love this one so bad because who doesn't want to read about badass females taking over? I'm very proud of Jennifer for taking that leap with a classic but it was a no for me.

4.5/5 stars

I didn't fully know what to expect from this book, especially as I never read The Outsiders, which it's a bit of a take on. But I was immediately pulled into the story of Evie and the rest of the "bad girls" of Houston in the 1960s. They are painted as "bad" by society but that's just because they're girls trying to live life on their own terms - their own love, their own makeup, their own likes and dislikes.

The girls - Evie, Connie, Sunny, and Juanita - all have a lot of heart and attitude and are so much more than just the way they're depicted and viewed by the world. And Diane was a brilliant character, I absolutely adored her.

This book took several twists and turns, none of which I saw coming. It was a reading experience that left me constantly on tenterhooks tbh. It made me want to keep coming back again and again for more!

Overall, I highly recommend this book. Very good!

Evie and her friends are bad girls. They wear too much makeup, laugh too loudly, skip school, run around with boys, and they protect their own. So when a good girl (a recent transplant from the right side of town) saves Evie from something terrible one night at the drive-in, Evie and her friends have to reevaluate everything they think they know about life, loyalty, and keeping secrets.

Mathieu's female driven re-imagining of the Outsiders gave me Crybaby-meets-Outsiders-meets-Pink Ladies vibes and I was here for it. It took the things that people love about The Outsiders and re-examines those storylines from a female perspective. Mathieu also sheds light on a little disclosed part of American History-the institutionalizing of young, unwed girls who find themselves pregnant and the forced adoption of numerous children.

Evie, Connie, Juanita, Sunny, and Diane are characters worth meeting and this is a book worth reading.

I really liked her previous work and thought this was a good follow up. It kept my attention had interesting characters and was an easy read. I think it would be a good one to take on vacation.

Mathieu clearly has an ear for the teenage vernacular (probably because she's stayed in the classroom). Her voices always sound authentic. She also must listen to her students really well because she understands their fears and insecurities too.

In Bad Girls Never Say Die, she gets to the conflict right away but is able to sustain the emotional turmoil throughout the novel. I was dubious about the sixties as the setting for a YA novel, but the themes are timeless and my students will definitely relate to her characters. I'd love to have students read this alongside The Outsiders and ask them to consider the class and race issues both books raise.

I'm always down for a good gender-swapped version of one of my favorites. At first, I thought this one was written a bit too simplistically, but it moved me to tears just like the original did when I was 12.

What an interesting idea to have a gender flipping retelling of the classic the outsiders. I could clearly see the parallels and highly recommend this book. I received this book as an advanced reader copy from net galley in exchange for an honest review.

Solid feminist take on The Outsiders.
Set in the 1960s in Houston, Evie was a “bad girl” who came across a River Oaks good girl who happened to save her life in a bad girl kind of way. As Evie takes you on the journey with Diane (the good girl), you also meet her crew and how they live their day to day. You are engrossed in the understanding of life on that side of the tracks, but you also learn the dark side to a River Oaks girl - you learn the lengths the rich parents will take to portray the “perfect” life and how quickly they will write off their own.

I can’t wait to recommend as soon as our kids finish The Outsiders during their 7th grade year and those who loved it and are now 8th graders - this will be their next read.

This is a gender-flipped retelling of The Outsiders, a book that is so popular with students still today. Set in the mid-1960's, Evie is a "bad girl" from the wrong side of town. She has a great group of girlfriends that stick together through thick and thin, so when Evie is attacked one evening at the drive-in and Diane, a once popular girl steps in to save her Evie and her group of friends take her in as one of their own. Diane's story may surprise everyone though. Is she really so different than they are? What will the group do to protect Diane? I loved this book by Jennifer Mathieu. Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for a free ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this take on the Outsiders staring young women instead of young men. While many of the situations are similar, the strong female-led take makes the book (even as historical fiction) timely and fresh.

I will be recommending this book to my middle school readers.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of this book.
Evie, the protagonist and bad girl, was an interesting character. I liked that she straddled both sides of the friendships she was in. The classic good girl gone bad, but turned good again really made her a like-able character. I felt myself rooting for her throughout the story. Her innocence and genuine nurturing personality was a nice addition to the text and helped to make her friends (the bad girls) more like-able as well. I found Evie and Diane's friendship very forced & somewhat bland, especially because they were pushed together in a traumatic event. It was hard to believe that they really would be friends, and that Evie's friends would accept Diane in such a natural way.

I wanted to love this book so much, but I was not as excited about it after reading as I had hoped. I was initially drawn to the idea of a female retelling of The Outsiders, but I found it very slow paced and predictable. I wish the characters had more depth to them as well. Based on the description, I had hoped it would be more of a thriller or have some added mystery too it, but I did not find that as a I read.

While I really enjoyed Moxie, Bad Girls Never Say Die was just okay for me. Maybe it had something to do with the gender stereotyping Grease vibe and I could tell where the story was going. While I love Grease the movie, I just didn’t love this story. If you enjoy Grease-esque stories with a murder, you will enjoy this story.
Content warning of sexual assault.

HMMM I like the concept of "gender-swapped Outsiders" and I liked Evie as a narrator a lot but the pacing felt a little off and it felt a bit like...knowing? I guess it's the difference between historical fiction about the 60s and a work of contemporary fiction set in the 60s and written in the 60s, but something about it just didn't quite click with me.

Also similarly to the og Outsiders it kept feeling like one of the big secrets in play should be somebody's repressed queer desire but that never really came up. Still, it was engaging and I think fans of the Outsiders and/or the 60s in general will enjoy it.

A BIG thank you to NetGalley and MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group for sending me an arc of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Wow. W O W. I’ve read a few of Mathieu’s other novels (Moxie and The Liars of Mariposa Island), but this one went above and beyond my expectations. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton is one of my favorite books of all time, so when I saw that Mathieu was writing a gender-bended reimagining of it, I screamed.

Words cannot express how excited I was to see this book pop up on NetGalley. Then, when MacMillan approved my request and SENT ME THE BOOK, I nearly broke an ankle from jumping around in excitement.

Evie, our main character, is a girl from the “wrong side of the tracks”, who, after a wild night where “tea-sipper” Diane saves her from being sexually assaulted, gets wrapped up in a murder that rocks their world to its core. Evie’s best friends, Connie, Juanita, and Sunny, are apprehensive of Diane at first, but realize rather quickly that sticking together is the only thing that will keep them all safe.

Bad Girls Never Say Die is an exquisite story filled to the brim with friendship, heartbreak, love, and loyalty. I laughed, I cried, and I sobbed into my cereal while I was reading this beautiful book. Evie and Diane’s bond, after what is arguably the worst night of both of their lives, absolutely stole my heart.

I particularly liked the feminist-forward attitude that Mathieu expresses throughout the novel. Although there are some male characters sprinkled throughout the story, the overarching theme follows a group of girls as they struggle with where their loyalties should lie and how far they’re willing to go to protect their friends.

To put it plainly, I loved this book. I loved the characters, the setting, the callbacks to the original literature, the writing style, the underlying feminism sprinkled throughout, and literally everything else this book had to offer. It was all just very, very satisfying (and heartbreaking, as many of these kinds of stories are).

I can’t exactly say whether reading The Outsiders before reading Bad Girls Never Say Die is a good idea or not. Most people my age were forced to read it at some point in their middle school days, so it’s likely that the YA readers who read this book have already read the source material. My point is, I can’t exactly say which way is the “better way” of reading, as I read the Outsiders, like many of my peers did, when I was twelve years old. Either way, both stories are enjoyable and can absolutely stand on their own (but I’m recommending that you read both, in whatever order you choose to read them, because they’re both fabulous!).

Mathieu is known for writing coming of age stories, but Bad Girls Never Say Die takes the cake. A solid 5 stars for this expressive novel, which in my (not so) humble opinion, is likely to become a modern-day classic in the Young Adult genre.

I didn’t expect this title to have as large an emotional impact as it did. A story from another time, love across the wrong side of the tracks, a rape attempt, murder, and high schoolers? And yet, there is something so moving about the main character Evie’s journey, her family’s journey back to each other.
I also feel that this is a good title for young women who are struggling to communicate with their parents (as well as for the parents), as Evie did, which is a theme I’m happy to see cropping up more.

Calling this a "gender-flipped reimagining of The Outsiders" is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it's a huge draw, but on the other, it means this has huge shoes to fill in the world of young adult literature. Unfortunately, this comes up short. While The Outsiders is one of my all-time favorite books, the language and style is rather stilted and immature; however, this feels authentic when you remember that S.E. Hinton wrote the novel when she was only 16, growing up in the actual time period she's writing about. Conversely, Mathieu's attempt at capturing the voice of a teen in the 1960s feels put-on and lacks Hinton's nostalgic charm. Still, I think I would have loved this as a follow-up to The Outsiders when I was in middle school, so I will likely include this in my classroom library for my students once it is published.