The Lowdown

Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood is a young adult novel which centres around the theme of revenge and set in a high school. Essentially like The Count of Monte Cristo meets Mean Girls.

Some Observations

• The premise of the book is as follows: Helen Worthington has a best friend called Lauren Wood who is better looking than her; they spend a lot of time together as children but then one day Lauren dramatically betrays Helen and gets her in trouble in order to increase her own popularity. Helen is humiliated and haunted by this, so much so that her family moves away. Years later when the girls are of high school age she returns to the school. She's lost weight now and has a different hairstyle, and she assumes a new identity (Claire Dantes) with one goal in mind: to ruin Lauren Wood's reputation and happiness.
• At the start of the book Claire sets out that her plan to destroy Lauren Wood has four elements: 1) to ruin her popularity 2) to split her up from her boyfriend 3) to make sure she doesn't get the lead in the school play and 4) to get her kicked off the cheerleading squad. The story then generally proceeds along these lines with Claire variously sneaking into locker rooms and putting itching powder into people's underwear etc.
• Needless to say, Claire encounters some roadblocks along the way in the form of a dorky best friend and a cute boy, and eventually learns that in the end friendship and contentment are more important than revenge.

The Verdict

What a brilliant and exciting idea this was - another example of how endlessly reinterpretable this story is. However, it fails to pay off. Maybe it sets expectations too high, but I was hoping for more integration with the original story and read across for the characters. The plot ticks along well enough, but as a young adult novel the writing is necessarily reasonably simplistic and straightforward. A lot of telling rather than showing.

Characters and Plot Elements