*2.5

content warnings: gore, body horror, violence, death, murder, necromancy, mentions of suicide, fatphobia, racism, sexism
representation: fat mexican-american wiccan main character, fat black side character, mexican-american side characters, wiccan side characters, implied side f/f relationship


“Spells are just prayers with more steps and a name that scares people.”


I'm having a really bad run of reading super underwhelming books that I was excited for this year. This book isn't bad by any means, but it doesn't live up to the expectations of the synopsis.

Undead Girl Gang is about teenage witch Mila Flores whose best friend died supposedly by suicide two days after the schools mean girls hung themselves. Mila, however, believes that Riley was murdered and decides to resurrect her so they can find her killer, accidentally resurrecting the mean girls as well. The mystery of who killed the girls unfolds from there because none of them can remember the night they died.

The mystery was okay. Admittedly, I didn't guess who the murderer was, but the reveal was super underwhelming because I didn't care about the character or their relationship to the other characters enough for it to effect me the way it was intended. Their motive was fine, but was extremely predictable once you figure out that they're the culprit.

Characterisation is where this book completely fell flat for me. The author seems confused as to what personality traits every character has and can't figure out if we're meant to like the characters or not. Mila is mean and judgmental, something I love in my female characters, but as a character she just didn't connect with me so I just found her off-putting. I genuinely have no idea if we're meant to like Riley, but if so the author completely failed in writing her. The entire time she annoyed me, and she came off as so self-centered and naive that I grew to hate her very quickly. June and Dayton were okay and I like the deconstruction of the mean girl trope, but they just felt very bland to me.

Spoiler

Honestly, my favourite character ended up being Aniyah and she gets barely any page-time.

Due to my lack of caring about the characters, I also didn't care about any of the relationships, romantic or platonic. Riley and Mila's friendship in particular is the entire basis for this book and it got to a point where I was bored every time they interacted.

Also, are we really still doing absent parents?? Come on people, it's 2018, let's stop having Mila's parents disappear for 100 pages and not care that she's sneaking out constantly even though they're supposed to be fairly strict.

I think this book missed a really good opportunity to explore grief, made even more annoying by the fact that the first couple chapters seemed to be going in that direction. But the second Riley, June and Dayton are back it's dropped entirely until the very end. It tries to halfheartedly keep it going with Mila and Xander connecting, but it didn't work for me because of my complete lack of interest in their relationship and the fact that all of their interactions boiled down to the fact that Mila had a crush on him.

On a positive note, this book had really good fat representation. Mila being fat didn't by any means make up the entirety of her character, but it was still mentioned several times as part of who she is. I also liked reading about other peoples' reactions to her weight, such as Riley being only able to call her "curvy" even though Mila insists that it's fine to call her fat because that's what she is.

One positive aside, I know I'm really ragging on this book. I can definitely see the appeal of this book, but it's clearly not for me considering the fact that I skimmed nearly the entire last half. Ultimately, I ended up finding it fairly boring with characters who I didn't hate enough to want dead but didn't like enough to root for.