More than a half century since the publication of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, the young adult novel's message about the perniciousness of classism still needs broadcasting. With Bad Girls Never Say Die, Jennifer Mathieu has rather ingeniously taken the social dynamics of The Outsiders and refocused them on a pack of teenage girls whose low status in 1964 Houston is both a mark against their future prospects and a unifying force.
Fifteen-year-old Evie Barnes considers her four-girl posse at Eastside High her true family: "In my mind we're four corners of a tiny square, drawn close to protect ourselves from the rest of the world." But Evie's friends aren't there to protect her the night Preston Fowler, a rich boy, tries to rape her. Her unlikely rescuer is Diane Farris, who Evie comes to think of as "this strange girl from the right side of the tracks who had the guts to save my life." Diane's only recourse against Preston was a switchblade, and using it proved fatal. After the girls flee the murder scene, they lie low and bond over their predicament. A few days after the murder, the cops pick up an Eastside boy as a suspect; as Evie puts it, "Who was going to believe a bunch of kids from the wrong side of the tracks over tea sippers with daddies in important places?"
Bad Girls Never Say Die offers a guided tour through outdated thinking about gender, especially the idea that it's the girl's fault when she's pursued by an aggressively libidinous male. The book has some stock characters, but Mathieu (Moxie) is supremely good at getting at the intuitive feminism of the disadvantaged teenage girls anchoring her story. Bad Girls Never Say Die isn't a corrective to Hinton's timeless work; it's a worthy expansion. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author