Read This Book: Six Angry Girls by Adrienne Kisner

In this YA novel, Raina is happy with her senior year goals and plans until her boyfriend dumps her out of the blue. Millie has a plan to finally shine in mock trial…until Raina’s ex and his male teammates use her knowledge and research to push her off the team. In a moment of heartbreak and anger, Raina and Millie connect and decide to form an all-girls mock trial team to take on the boys, much to the alarm of some in their school administration. But never ones to shy from a challenge, Millie and Raina work their contacts to assemble a crack team of girls who take the mock trial scene by storm, because hell hath no fury like six angry teenage girls. But they’ll face more than a little stiff competition on their journey all the way to the National Championships.

I feel like I should warn you all and say that if you don’t like to be righteously angry, then maybe this isn’t the book for you because there were so many times while reading that I gasped, “Oh no he DIDN’T!” This is a very savvy and timely political comedy about six girls deciding that they’re fed up with casual sexism and racism, and they’re not going to let anyone tell them what they can and can’t do, or even how they define what it means to be a girl. It’s a dual narrative novel that jumps from Raina to Millie and takes readers through the final semester of senior year as the girls tackle injustice at school, and slowly grow more aware of the sexism in their personal lives and in their communities. As they find success in their mock trial courts, they also gain the confidence to speak up at home. The sense of camaraderie is something I truly enjoyed in this book, both in the team that is assembled, but also in the allies they discover in their wider community: a legal mentor, the school librarian, and the women of a very opinionated and politically active knitting group. This is a novel that shows that fighting for equality is not something that can be done alone, and that while teens are more than capable of changing the world, they can also learn a lot from community mentors and the women who came before them.

The ending isn’t neat or pretty, but it’s realistic. I won’t say too much about it, other than I was happy to see where Kisner left things for these characters–triumphant, but not perfect. It’s a good reminder that although you’re very likely to lose some battles, progress can be gained gradually, and that seeing small changes in your personal lives can amount to big change later down the road.