Saturday, April 2, 2016

Five fun and fearless femmes fatales from fiction

The editors at B & N Reads tagged five of their favorite fun, fearless femmes fatales in fiction, including:
Luckiest Girl Alive, by Jessica Knoll

The “mean girl” trope has been a staple for a long time, even after it was punctured in the titular Lindsay Lohan film. It’s become a bit of lazy shorthand: rich, plastic pretty girls are horrible and cruel. Few books explore what makes Mean Girls so mean in the first place, and even fewer bother to wonder what happens to Mean Girls after high school. Luckiest Girl Alive does both, and performs a remarkable trick by presenting a protagonist who is mean and difficult to like at first, then slowly humanizing her as her twisty and surprising story (trust us, you will think you’ve hit the twist—and then there is another twist) unfolds.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see: John Mullan's ten best femmes fatales in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue