Friends, Enemies and Other Tiny Problems

This novel recounts with toe-curling accuracy the bitchiness of teenage girls and how they care desperately to be friends only with those who make them feel good about themselves. Tory is in Year Nine and is part of a close group of four or occasionally six girls who do everything together at school and home. They live on the same street and have been friends from when they were all new in Year Seven. With Ella as their leader, they decide who can become part of their group and are cold towards anyone who isn’t one of their ‘sort’. That is until Hannah joins the school and Tory’s mother orders her daughter to be friends with her, just because she was friends with her mother at school years ago. To any teenage reader’s delight, the mothers are portrayed in a quite bad light – partly wanting their daughters to be friends for their own ends and sometimes being downright rude to the girls themselves.

Tory recounts the events of the end of the summer term when her gang and her world began to fall apart, all because of the apparent lies of Hannah. All girls will know a Hannah, the one who manages to twist what others say and never says the same thing twice. Rosie Rushton writes with no qualms about how mean and two-faced girls can be. She conveys in detail how frustrating it is to be 14 and not be able to break free from what your mother does, what your friends say and how much you care about it all. Hannah is made human when we learn her father is in prison for fraud and she’s trying to make a fresh start, but the ending of the story is a little abrupt with Hannah self-harming. In the Epilogue we are told Hannah is seeing ‘this great woman who is making her see that you don’t have to force people to like you by manipulating them…’ but Rushton would have written a greater book if she’d been more explicit about Hannah’s problems earlier on. In her world, the mean girls are simply that way because of problems at home, but she’s underestimated her characters and her readers by not really exploring why teenage girls self-harm.