Sorry I'm Not Sorry by Nancy Rue, 2015

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According to the Ambassadors 4 Kids Club, one out of every four students is bullied--and 85% of these situations never receive intervention. Parents, students, and teachers have amped up solving the bullying problem for a networked generation of kids.
Written by bestselling author Nancy Rue, each book in the Mean Girl Makeover trilogy focuses on a different character's point of view: the bully, the victim, and the bystander. The books show solid biblical solutions to the bullying problem set in a story for tween girls.
"Sorry I'm Not Sorry" tells the story of Kylie Steppe, former queen bee of Gold Country Middle School. After bullying a fellow GCMS student, Kylie has been expelled--"and "she" "has to attend mandatory counseling. Without her posse to aid her and other peers to torment, Kylie focuses on the person who stole her GVMS popularity crown: Tori Taylor. As Kylie plots revenge on Tori, she attends therapy sessions, where she reveals a few details that might explain why she finds power in preying on her middle school peers. After a rough year with bullying backfire, will Kylie decide to become more empathetic with her peers?
It's hard for tweens to imagine why a bully acts the way she does. "Sorry I'm Not Sorry" shows girls that they hold the power to stop bullying through mutual understanding and acts of love.
(288 pages)

This is the third book in the "Mean Girl Makeover" series. I've never read the first one, but I got a copy of the second book (You Can't Sit With Us - click to check out my review) in January. I didn't particularly love You Can't Sit With Us for its plot or characters, but it still held a special place in my heart because it was the first book I ever got for free as a read-to-review. That's why I still chose to review Sorry I'm Not Sorry, when I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I'm actually glad that I did, because it's much better than its prequel.

It's still got some issues, I'm not going to sugarcoat that. Kylie has such a complete turn-around that it's just a little too good to be true. The anti-bullying Code the "nice" kids go by still is kind of over-the-top touchy-feely. Lydia, the bullying counselor, is a little too perfect. Everyone thinks it's perfectly normal for a public school counselor to talk about faith and the Bible when she's working with students. Kylie's ex-friends go way overboard when they turn on her and give her a chance to understand what it's like to be the one who's bullied.

But somehow all of these things, which bugged me like crazy in YCSWU, aren't nearly as glaring in this book. I think a large part of this is that I actually liked Kylie a lot better than Ginger. Ginger was like this quivering, emotional mess who thought that if her father heard the mean rumors about her mother he would have such a mental collapse she would be taken out of his custody. This when her mother had been dead for several years, and the authorities had never even hinted that her father was a negligent parent. And she was supposed to be smart! Kylie, on the other hand, was much more believable - and, frankly, likeable. Her reasoning for keeping the bullying a secret was "I don't want to deal with this. I'm grounded off of going online anyway, so I'll just not think about it." You can almost understand how Kylie, a kind-hearted girl deep down, could do such horrible things to her classmates: it's obvious that she's emotionally stunted, and that her parents don't know squat about raising children. They always come to her defense, are constantly on her side . . . and consider their duties fulfilled if they give her a credit card and send her off to the mall.

I can almost buy that Kylie was a genuinely nice person who did some terrible things without thinking through the consequences. But, as much as I found myself loving her as a character, how can I accept that she never second-guessed what she'd been doing? How can I believe that she was so steeped in the bullying game, and yet can do a complete one-eighty over the course of a few months? Shouldn't she have had a stronger conscience during her time as a bully? Shouldn't she have had a few relapses into bullying people? Why does she go from being completely horrible, to being so nice? I can understand that being taken away from the social pressures of middle school would play a role in that, and certainly getting a taste of her own medicine in the form of her ex-friends' treatment helps Kylie understand her own shortcomings. But at the same time, it's just a little too rose-tinted to survive any careful scrutiny.

But maybe that's why I enjoyed it.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book through the BookLook Bloggers program in exchange for an honest review.

You Can't Sit With Us by Nancy Rue, 2014

Synopsis (from Goodreads):
According to the Ambassadors 4 Kids Club, one out of every four students is bullied-and 85% of these situations never receive intervention. Parents, students, and teachers alike have amped up discussions on how to solve the bullying problem for a networked generation of kids.
Written by bestselling author, Nancy Rue, each book in the Mean Girl Makeover trilogy focuses on a different character's point of view: the bully, the victim, and the bystander. The books, based on Scripture, show solid biblical solutions to the bullying problem set in a story for tween girls.
You Can't Sit With Us tells the story of Ginger Hollingberry, a new sixth grader at Gold Country Middle School. Ginger has been the brunt of teasing and taunting from the queen bee of GCMS. Kylie Steppe, and her so-called Wolf Pack. Kylie and the Pack favor a new and especially hurtful medium of taunting: social networking. What follows is a candid look into the growing world of cruel cyberbullying, showing kids that bullying doesn't always end at school-it can now follow you even into your home and torture 24 hours a day.
(224 pages)

I'm still buzzing from this. I joined the BookLook Bloggers program over the winter holiday, and requested this from the available titles. They sent it in the mail and it came the other day. I can't describe the feelings rushing through my mind as I pulled my new book out of its box. I got a real, actual book (for free!) in real life, just because of my blog. It was like a reward for all the work I've put into this blog, and that was amazing.

Okay, now for the book itself. Apart from being a symbol of my moving up in the blogging world, what did I think of You Can't Sit Here? Well, it was okay. The options were kind of mediocre when I picked it, so I just went with this one on the basis of its pretty cover (blue is my favorite color!) and its message about bullying. I figured that even if it was really bad, at least it was aiming to be good! 

The thing about this book is that it is, above all else, an anti-bullying book. The plot, the characters, the dialogue - everything revolves around bullying. Learning to cope when you're being bullied, self-esteem exercises to do when the bully puts you down, ways to discourage the bully from focusing on you. If I were being bullied at school, I would love this book with all its messages about self-worth and practical tips for coping and turning to adult help. As it is, I'm the biggest bully on the playground - otherwise known as the oldest kid in a homeschool family.

Apart from its important message, the book is pretty mediocre. The characters are practically caricatures (the shy, insecure girl being bullied by the pure evil bully and her personality-less wannabes, the clueless parent, the empathetic anti-bullying counselor, etc.), and the basic plot concepts pretty unrealistic. Ginger is terrified that the rumors about her mother's fatal car accident will reach home, where her father will then curl into a miserable ball at the thought of her mother's death and forget to take care of her, and her grandmother will take custody of Ginger and her brother. There is also a school Code that was established in the first book of the series (It's called So Not Okay, and I haven't read it). The teachers are so incredibly sensitive to bullying that if someone even snaps at a classmate, they have to go to anti-bullying counseling during lunch. I get the idea of this, and it's really nice to see teachers so worried about stopping bullying. But seriously? There's such a thing as too sensitive!

Ginger alternates between being "smarter than people think" and make really stupid assumptions, like her belief that her grandmother will take custody away from her father if he so much as hears the nasty rumors going around about her mother's death. I alternately loved her (especially when she was working on her Lord of the Rings project with her new friend Colin), and hated her (mainly when she was acting so idiotically). She's an okay character for this sort of message-driven book, but if she were in a character-driven novel I'd be pretty unimpressed.

I don't think I'd ever have picked this up unless it was in the BookLook program. I enjoyed reading it, and I definitely enjoyed receiving it, but I don't think it's anything special. If you're hunting for a good, biblically-based book about dealing with bullies, then this should be right up your alley. Otherwise, you're probably fine skipping this one.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.