Mockingbird

After reading [b:Blackbirds 12944651 Blackbirds (Miriam Black, #1) Chuck Wendig http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1334862930s/12944651.jpg 18101226], it was hard to think there could be anything scarier than the wholly unhinged Miriam Black. Turns out, Miriam with a sense of conviction, righteousness even, is far more vicious and frightening.If Blackbirds was a tumbling fall down a rocky mountain, than Mockingbird was a steep zipline. It was cleaner, tighter and wrapped up in a sense of purpose. Miriam is not only discovering who she is now, but her place in the world and what she's meant for. She may not like it exactly, but she is what she is, as is said over and over. It begins when Miriam is introduced to a whole school full of little versions of herself. Bad girls. Drug users, violent offenders, sugar and spice and everything gone wrong, and then she finds out that several of them are marked for death by a serial killer in a plague doctor's garb. She's forced in her quest to save them partially by the specter she comes to call the Trespasser, the thing that comes in nightmares and now in hallucinations so vivid she occasionally ends up scarred. But a large part of her desperately wants to save the girls. Because its the right thing to do? Because she identifies with them? It's never really answered, and that's what makes things so fun.The whole thing got me thinking about bad girls, and what it really means to be one. There's that flicker of what I loved about [b:The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo 2429135 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium, #1) Stieg Larsson http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327868566s/2429135.jpg 1708725], that dismissal of all those pseudo-intellectual serial killers who think they are doing something extraordinary but really are just reinforcing something ancient. The hatred of women. Think of bad girl as opposed to bad boy. Bad boy is a trope. It's a fantasy. The dangerous boy with the heart of gold, or the slick trickster who steals your heart. Either way, he is well regarded and practically worshiped by teenage girls. But a bad girl? A bad girl is an affliction, something that needs to be stamped out. We put them on reality TV shows and laugh at them. We design heroic Nice Guys to save them. They aren't romance, they're pornography. And Miriam points it out perfectly.“Why is it you hate girls?” Miriam asks. “You don't look for trouble in boys. You don't kill anybody with a dick. Just young girls. Bad girls.”“Because girls are poison. Whores if you let them be.”So much for glorious purpose.The last section in particular was intoxicating. Not only does the plot get wilder and stakes higher, but Miriam and the Trespasser just take things to whole other level. Oddly enough, I don't think this was as nasty as Blackbirds, but that might've been because we're already dealing with girls getting their heads chopped off. You don't want to over do it. Or Miriam was actually trying to watch her mouth. As if.ARC provided by NetGalley.com

Hot effing awesome.

I couldn't really get into the first book in this series. I could look at it objectively and say, “That's a well written book,” but it just didn't do it for me. This one? Holy crap, what a difference. I was engaged in this story from the start. Highly recommend.