Sorry I'm Not Sorry by Nancy Rue, 2015

Click to view
on 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 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.

Princess Academy: The Forgotten Sisters by Shannon Hale, 2015

Click to view
on Goodreads

After a year at the king’s palace, Miri has learned all about being a proper princess. But the tables turn when the student must become the teacher!
Instead of returning to her beloved Mount Eskel, Miri is ordered to journey to a distant swamp and start a princess academy for three sisters, cousins of the royal family. Unfortunately, Astrid, Felissa, and Sus are more interested in hunting and fishing than becoming princesses. As Miri spends more time with the sisters, she realizes the king and queen’s interest in them hides a long-buried secret. She must rely on her own strength and intelligence to unravel the mystery, protect the girls, complete her assignment, and finally make her way home.

(323 pages)

This is the second of the two books I won from Bookshop Talk's giveaway in early March. When I was  picking out my books, I immediately knew I had to get The Forgotten Sisters because my library doesn't have it. I mean, what kind of library doesn't get the third book in an extremely successful/popular trilogy? I swear the people who run my library don't even read.

Anyway, I just finished this third and final entry into the Princess Academy trilogy with a smile on my face! I've been reading these books for a long time (for about as long as I've been able to read, actually), so finishing the trilogy is rather bittersweet for me. On one hand, I'm very relieved that things ended on a high note - both in terms of the story and of the quality of the book itself. I was deathly afraid that it would turn out to be just a cheap knock-off of the first book, but instead I found that it brought the story arc through a beautiful full circle, until everything and everyone was brought back to where they began.

While I can't say that the plotting is air-tight and fast-paced (because it's not), I can say that this isn't really a high stakes thrill read that requires such careful plotting. It's a book that was meant to have a slower pace, so you can enjoy it more thoroughly than if you sped-read through the whole thing on tenderhooks. There is danger aplenty, and worries galore, but it is at its core a book about brains, not brawn. It''s one final adventure with our beloved characters, a last hurrah of sorts that gives us a final chance to admire their bravery and intelligence before seeing them get their happily ever after.

While this may be one reason for the final book, the novel still offers up a compelling story of its own. Miri must learn to survive in the swamp, adapting to a new world all over again as she moves from the capital city Asland to this swamp in Lesser Alva. The threat of war with the kingdom Stora hangs over Miri and later the girls. The king of Stora is a thrice-wed seventy year old. How can one of these spirited young women tie themselves to such a man in a loveless marriage? Yet if they don't, peace will fail and thousands will be slaughtered in the war between the two kingdoms. It's a huge quandary, and I have to say I love the way it was resolved (sorry, no spoilers!).

At the end of the day, this is a good book. If you've read the first and/or second book, then please pick up The Forgotten Sisters and read its engaging tale for its own sake, as well as the closure it brings to the series. If you haven't read Princess Academy, then go read it! Right now! It's an amazing book, even as a stand-alone. Please don't read this book first, though, because it just won't be nearly as interesting without all the backstory you can only get by reading the earlier books. 

The Forgotten Sisters is a great book, and I'm glad to have read it. I'm also extremely glad that I own it, so I can re-read it whenever I want! I know I'll definitely be revisiting this one soon, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Edit 6/1/15: Click to check out my review of the first Princess Academy book.