"Get Even" Book Review

Title: Get Even

Author: Gretchen McNeil

Genre: Mystery, Contemporary

Rating: 4/10

What It's About: Four girls (they're names don't matter, they're pretty interchangeable), formed a revenge group called "Don't Get Mad" (they actually thought that was a good name... wow) and they pull some pranks on these assholes at their school but then this student gets murdered (um, rude) and DGM is framed for it. Now the girls have to find out who really killed this kid before someone else tells everyone that the girls are in DGM and they go to prison.

Recommended For: Fans of Pretty Little Liars




Review: *spoilers ahead*

Get Even isn't a bad book, but it has quite a few flaws. The characters are flat and one dimensional and it is hard to remember who a chapter is about. The characters start to run together, there are characters that are over the top evil and might as well be working at Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc.

Some things make no sense about this story. How was it that the coach is able to publicly threaten multiple students, during the investigation of another student's murder, and no one does anything about it? Why does it take 100 pages to get to the actual plot of the book? Why isn't Bree's DNA all over Ronnie's (I think that was his name) room, if that was the crime scene? Why doesn't the computer geek (is it Margot or is Kitty? I don't even think the book knows which one is which) just get into the school's security cameras and see who has been taking pages from the yearbook? She's literally supposed to have top-notch technology and she can't access a school camera? Why are these characters given ridiculous names? Peanut? Kitty? Rex? You're naming human characters, not their pets!



The dialogue is laughable. I can't count how many times I literally cringed while reading this book. The only thing that saved this book from a one star rating was the mystery. While a lot of it is predictable, and it does come off as very "Pretty Little Liars-ish", it's more like the first four books of the PLL series AKA when that series was still good. There's the "A" figure, the creepy notes from "A", the dead classmate, the cute boys/potential serial killers, four annoyingly bratty girls who have to band together through all of this. But Get Even lacks the charm that the PLL series had. The Liars were all interesting characters but the girls in Get Even are bland and boring. I wish that Get Even had dialed WAY BACK in the cattiness and replaced it with actual character development beyond "the suicidal one, the tough one, the popular one, and the Asian kid." This series has a lot of potential. It just needs to get a clear idea of what it wants to be: a thriller/mystery, or the red-headed stepchild of Pretty Little Liars.

Links:

Goodreads

Book Depository