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"Mean, the word itself, means run-down, stunted. Mean means mean. Huts and shacks. Brain stem responses. But it does not come down to raw stupidity. I didn't think of it in so many words, but I know I felt meanness connected to that place. The school, the town, the rumors of the city, the whole notion of the whole state seemed to conjure meanness. Right about that time, someone in Chicago was putting cyanide in Tylenol, so someone in Miami started putting antifreeze in mouthwash. But it's not a particularly bad place, where I lived. Mostly, it's just more obviously bad than other places. It's the kind of place where people take flying lessons before they hijack a plane. Mostly, we didn't have much money, and it's not that money keeps people from doing mean things to each other, but if you have money it's a lot easier to shut yourself off ina castle, and it's a lot easier to feel safe from other people's pain, which is the great majority of it anyway, other people's pain, no matter who or where you were."

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Read all my reviews on http://urlphantomhive.booklikes.com

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review, thank you!

I was immediately intrigued by the title (and especially this A history for girls part). I really liked it and wanted to know what kind of story this would bring. The problem is however that even some days after finishing the book, I still don't know what I read...

Sure, there are psychokillers, all throughout the book. There are short stories around them, but I kind of lost what their connection to the bigger story was. I mean, it's not a collection of short stories, it's a novel after all. But the narrator's story didn't seem that important or at least I couldn't connect to it. I didn't know where that story was going or why. I don't even know how to describe it in a comprehensive way...

It won't come as a surprise when I say the main character felt a bit flat, I would have loved to get to know her a bit better. Because of course, there is a lot of violence in her neighborhood, but there just has to be more to her than that...

The writing was sometimes very beautiful, but at other moments a bit too poetic for my liking. I think there will definitely be people who really like this book, but it wasn't for me... ( )

Lucy Corin’s Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls: A Novel, originally published in 2004,is only similar to the first two books in that it is also concerned with existential angst. Set in a small Florida town, the protagonist is a 13-year-old girl—we never get her name—who has an active, wandering mind. Like McElroy’s Cy, she has an active, restless mind; she returns again and again to the same subjects, each time giving us a slightly different perspective.

What makes this work, as with McElroy and Coover, is the powerful use of language to show us that this is not just circular thinking, but rather more of a spiral staircase. The girl’s obsessions are tools for taking us inside her mind, and as she obsesses about serial killers, we begin to wonder if she will become a victim or a predator.

What all these novels have in common—aside from the skillful, literary writing—is an inquiry into the nature of obsession and compulsion as manifestations of the human condition.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com ( )

Society's obsession is murder and serial killers becomes clear in this work. One passage titled “To be innocent is to be doomed” struck me in an unexplainable way, as if learning about serial killers can help save the main character, or girls in general. Interesting and extremely disturbing at the same time. ( )