The book is what it is—a dystopian near-future boarding school for stepford girls—and the story is fine. But it is filled to the brim with discussion topics to have with teens:
- how to listen to instincts about feeling in danger, and how culture teaches women to suppress those instincts
- diet culture
- why are women’s magazines so often about pleasing men?
- pleasant mutual touch vs situations where only one person is receiving pleasure
- the male gaze and objectification
- girls working cooperatively instead of being pitted against each other (really stood out bc it is so rare to see this in media for teens!!)
- future planning as a woman (career options)
- why some women are complicit with their abusers
- being kind/helpful in one situation does not negate a history of abuse
- abusers in general: how you feel around an abuser, the kinds of things they say to emotionally manipulate you, how your relationship is based on rewards/punishment and not on mutuality, etc
- common ideas we see embodied all the time, but made explicit, e.g., boys can’t control themselves around beautiful women, so it’s up to the woman to protect her purity.

It is not preachy, and it has a lot of sentences that are easy to latch onto and bring out of the book into your life. This is key to help people to start analyzing and questioning the media and attitudes around us. For example, the girls get ahold of a Cosmo-type magazine and start reading the tips on how to give better blowjobs to men (these are not described in the book btw). After flipping through the magazine some more, one of the girls wonders aloud, “If this is a women’s magazine, why is so much of it about men?” No one has a good answer. But questions like that don’t need to be answered. They just need to be asked. And this book is so so so good at that. That’s why I gave it 5 stars.