“The girl with the dirty blonde hair ran down the hillside and began to pick her way rapidly through the trees.” That is the first line of Bad Girls by Alex McAulay. The beginning of the book brings the action in right away and nothing is really explained but everyone is still on the edge of their seat. In the story everyone will learn more about Anna, the main character, and will grow to love her and the love the adventure that comes with it. For the most part, Bad Girls was a good read, but one thing really stood out to me that I disliked.

There is a camp on Andros called Camp Archstone that is for troubled teenage girls like Anna, the main character. A cold-hearted woman named Miss Richards runs it and right when she was introduced to the story, I hated her. She created this terrible place because her daughter was troubled, and she didn’t want to be known as a mother that had a troubled child, which I thought was ridiculous. Miss Richards was cynical and domineering and it seemed like she didn’t care about what happened to the girls while they were staying at Archstone. The whole way that Miss Richards set up the Camp made it seem like it was a military camp and not a reform school.
The one thing that I disliked was that none of the characters never have any character development. The first time everyone meets them, the descriptions of them are awfully in depth but no one ever gets to learn more about their personalities because when things start to kick into gear, all of them are forgotten. New characters that I had never learned about kept popping up and I had no clue who they were and then they died. Don’t be fooled by the synopsis either. There was never a man in the book.Though there is one guy mentioned as Anna’s boyfriend before she gets shipped off to Camp Archstone, but he is soon forgotten. Another man shows up but he is forgotten too, which made me angry because there was supposed to be a man but there never was. Bad Girls is an action book and not a romance one, so I wouldn’t recommend this book to those who like the sentimental things.
All of the girls go through many trials and most of them don’t make it. They can never agree on anything and it always ends up getting someone killed or left behind. There are so many plot twists that I didn’t see coming. Throughout the whole book I would forecast what would possibly happen but then mark that down as silly then it would actually happen. Alex McAulay definitely has no problem with killing characters off; although, I think it’s easier when everyone knows nothing about them.
Other than no character development, this book was fantastic. I felt like this book was a test on Anna’s life and she handled it perfectly. After all that she had gone through in the beginning of her story, ending up pregnant, getting busted for drugs and having uncaring parents, she really showed that all of that mattered but it wasn’t as important as what she was facing at the time. She only broke one time, but then she got back up and started again, never giving up, which is a good lesson for people these days. I would absolutely put Bad Girls on everyone's “to read” list.