ARC Review: Trouble Girls by Julia Lynn Rubin

Review by: Paige

Rating: ★ ★

I received an advanced copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. Thank you so much to Wednesday Books for providing this galley!

Publication: June 1, 2021

Genre: Young Adult, Thriller

Synopsis: A queer YA #MeToo reimagining of Thelma & Louise with the aesthetic of Riverdale, for fans of Mindy McGinnis, Courtney Summers, and Rory Power.

When Trixie picks up her best friend Lux for their weekend getaway, she’s looking to escape for a little while, to forget the despair of being trapped in their dead-end Rust Belt town and the daunting responsibility of caring for her ailing mother. The girls are packing light: a supply of Diet Coke for Lux and her ‘89 Canon to help her frame the world in a sunnier light; half a pack of cigarettes for Trixie that she doesn’t really smoke, and a knife—one she’s just hanging on to for a friend—that she’s never used before.

But a single night of violence derails their trip and will forever change the course of the girls’ lives, as they go from ordinary high schoolers to wanted fugitives. Trying to stay ahead of the cops and a hellscape of media attention, the girls grapple with an unforgiving landscape, rapidly diminishing supplies, and disastrous decisions at every turn. As they are transformed by the media into the face of a #MeToo movement they didn’t ask to lead and the road before them begins to run out, Trixie and Lux realize that they can only rely on each other, and that the love they find together is the one thing that truly makes them free.

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Review: A reimagined Thelma & Louise with the aesthetic of Riverdale was truly all I needed to hear—this book hooked me with that and that alone. But I think I may have set my expectations too high as a result, because no one is as shocked as I am that this book didn’t work for me.

I wish I could say that the pacing and actual structure of Trouble Girls didn’t negatively impact my reading experience as much as it did, but the total lack of chapters took a toll. I’ve explained in reviews before how much I hate skimming, but I skimmed so much of this book because it just simply couldn’t hold my attention, but I wanted to reach its ending so badly. After the initial incident that kicks off the story, little to nothing actually happens. Two girls take off on the road, outrunning a violent act against a would-be rapist, and the plot subsequently becomes as aimless as Trixie and Lux’s journey itself. And despite the promise of a cops-hot-on-their-tail, propulsive thriller, it never felt like they were running away from much at all. It was missing true drive, and the prose couldn’t hold the concept’s weight.

And much of that is due in part to the romance between Trixie and Lux, unfortunately. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl problem presented itself quickly, and when it was actively addressed, I was elated and ready for something deeper between the two girls and within the two girls as individuals to establish itself. But the MPDG problem was never actually overcome. Considering that this story is based almost solely around Trixie and Lux’s developing relationship as they try to escape, I was expecting their bond to naturally anchor the text. Instead, it felt decidedly unmoored. I never got a good sense of them as individuals nor as partners in any sense of the word. While I was glad to see an overtly “Sapphic” novel like this, I wish more had been done with Trixie and Lux.

And finally, I had issues with Rubin’s exploration of rape culture. As happy as I was to see it fleshed out on the page and actively explored (major props to the use of raw, realistic, plain and oft-violent language when it came to the online abuse Trixie and Lux received/discovered), it felt somewhat empty and hollow. The prose itself bordered on trite and patronizing, and it wasn’t lost on me that activists of color were placed at the forefront of Rubin’s sociopolitical commentary, became vessels for it, yet never held significant space. It felt—to me—that they were used as props. We need to be having these conversations about rape culture in YA, we need to be having them about weaponized feminism, but for as much as I wanted to cheer on the violent and unforgiving challenge of rape culture, I also wish there had been an ending that drove home the necessity of that. The ending fell awfully flat. There was something very seriously lacking in all this that I’ve been struggling to put my finger on. It felt a lot like Promising Young Woman.

Overall, I’m just not sure what to really say, comprehensively, about this book. I feel a bit speechless. I loved the aesthetic, but it felt more committed to aesthetic at times than it did plot and character. I wanted to cheer on the rape culture commentary, but I struggled with its use. The writing hooked me quickly, but it lost me just as quickly too. I feel strange even rating this book, because I’m so stunned that it didn’t work out. I think Trouble Girls was ultimately just not a book for me the way I was so certain it would be.