Get Even by Gretchen McNeil (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Get Even by Gretchen McNeil Karen Coats McNeil, Gretchen Get Even. Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, 2014 389p Paper ed. ISBN 978-0-06-226085-7 $9.99 R Gr. 7–10 An unlikely assemblage of girls discovers they are all sick and tired of the bullies in their private Catholic school humiliating their vulnerable classmates. They form a secret society they call DGM, short for “don’t get mad—get even,” which targets and embarrasses the bullies. When one of DGM’s targets turns up dead, however, the girls start to panic; they don’t really know one another that well, after all, so could one of them be the killer? As their solidarity and trust are strained, their individual histories surface, revealing their own implication in past bullying. This relational web allows the deepening of each girl, exploring her emotional growth and development of empathy while maintaining a firm distinction between immature characters who make mistakes and truly bad actors. Forgiveness and self-sacrifice also become key parts of their character arcs, enabling them to come together and earn the reader’s empathy as well. As is typical of ensemble casts, each girl has a particular, exaggerated skill set, a difficult home life, and a romance in some stage of development; McNeil manages the texture of character development skillfully enough so that the tensions between the girls are logically credible even if some of the other elements are far-fetched in the way of the whodunit-at-school genre. Unfortunately, their prime suspect ends up dead and the murderer remains at large, turning this page-turning mystery into a victim of the publishing rage for sequels; the ending isn’t breathless, but it’s engaging enough for readers to want to know the outcome. [End Page 269] Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois