How to Be Bad (review)

Freaked out by her mother's diagnosis of breast cancer, Jesse decides that the best medicine for herself would be to get out of Niceville, Florida for the weekend. She proposes the trip to Vicks, her best friend and co-worker at the Waffle House, as a road trip to visit Vicks' boyfriend at the University of Miami, and Mel, the quiet rich girl who hostesses at the Waffle House, offers to foot the bill if they let her come too. Each girl tells her own story in a round-robin narration, parsing out nibbles of her truth to the other girls as they learn to trust one another and ultimately share all of their innermost secrets. The narrations, each written by a different author, are varyingly successful. Jesse, for instance, drifts in and out of a redneck persona and voice, and she is caricatured as a committed Christian with all of the guilt about sex and bad language and none of the faith and forgiveness. Mel, on the other hand, has moments of genuine wit, particularly in her banter with a boy they meet on the road, though her regional cred falters occasionally. Despite the promise of the title, the girls don't get up to much badness; Vicks and Mel do get drunk and throw themselves at a boy they've just met, but he's too honorable to take the bait, and he instead becomes the perfect love interest for the normally demure Mel. Everything else is pretty tame, with nothing fresh or compelling here beyond the by-now familiar dynamics of friendship-affirming chick lit. Still, the concept offers a diverting experiment in storytelling with an underlying energy that percolates from the sense that the authors had fun writing it; hence it's an inspiring model for collaborative writing projects.