Darkly Funny, but Sort of Sweet: A Review of Mariah MacCarthy's Squad

I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't what I got.

Mariah MacCarthy's Squad  is one of those rare books that has grown on me as time has passed and I've reflected on it.

It's an odd book because there's no way to really prepare for what it's about. Basically Jenna, a teenage cheerleader, begins to go through a friend breakup from her oldest friend and reacts poorly. When it begins, you think it's going to be a coming of age story about the way we change as we get older. then, for awhile, things get really . . . dark. Jenna decides to cope with the loss of her friendship by lashing out and plotting "revenge" on a girl that she has been close to since fourth grade. When the story shifts, your expectations shift, perhaps unfairly. At that point, you think the book is going to be dark throughout, when really it is just a coming of age story.

When I was first reading this and began to realize that this was really just a regular YA fiction novel, that it wasn't morphing into mystery or some other sub genre, I felt uncomfortable with my inability to categorize what was happening. It felt like such a subversion of genre conventions: surely this obviously troubled young girl should, if nothing else, be shown getting help for her break? After all, I thought to myself, she was overreacting so greatly to losing a friendship. I mean, it's life after all. People grow apart.

Then I remembered.

I remembered being young and how intense female friendship is in your youth. I remembered that feeling of being "best friends" and how, in many ways, that relationship is even more intimate than a romantic one because of the ability to be affectionate with no expectation of sex, because of the way you share every moment and detail of your lives, the note passing, the sleepovers, the feeling that you totally can't get enough of someone. . . . and I remembered friend breakups. Man, I swear they were worse than break up break ups. They were a person who you'd totally trusted just rejecting you. the self doubt, the sadness, the feeling that you couldn't even vent about it because no one else took friendship breakups nearly as seriously (even though they'd all probably been through the same thing).

this book is so important because it's about something that hasn't already been written about a million times. It's fresh and yeah, really dark in a way that feels over the top sometimes, but still honest. for me, this book took me back and made me remember my own youth and that, for me, is always the hallmark of really nice YA.

4.5/5: Definitely recommend.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this awesome novel.