The Payback Girls

February 1, 2025
After their cheating boyfriend ends up in a coma, three girls team up to avoid an attempted murder rap. Scholarship student Meghan Landry hoped senior year at a new school would be different, but even as star basketball player Nate Walker's girlfriend, she's friendless and a target of racist attacks. Meghan is happy with Nate, however, until a pep rally brawl reveals that he's three-timing her with his supposed exes, the only other Black girls in their class, Robin Ellison and Bria Kelly (Nate is "half-Black" and identifies as biracial). After an attack leaves Nate in a coma, the three girls, initially wary of each other, must work together when they become the investigation's prime suspects. But the appearance of a newGossip Girl-esque Instagram account leaves all three doubtful whom they can trust. Travis prioritizes drama to the detriment of plot, characterization, logic, and the exploration of the heavy and important topics the story introduces. Meghan and Robin explore a potential relationship with one another while Meghan weighs staying with Nate, but both these threads are underdeveloped. Themes of PTSD, intimate partner violence, gender, and race are also underexplored in this unevenly paced work that crosses several genres. The author attempts to shine a critical light on the racism Black women experience, but she does so with a heavy hand, flattening Black and white characters alike into stereotypes and missing nuances within the spectrum of Blackness. Well-intentioned but undermined by a lack of depth and focus.(Thriller. 14-18)

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2025
Grades 9-12 Meghan, a scholarship student at Burke High School and one of a handful of Black students, is constantly bullied and harassed by her boyfriend Nate's friends. Nate is the star of the basketball team, and his friends think that Meghan is "the wrong Black girl" for Nate. They also weaponize secrets from her past to bully her. Things turn tenuous when Meghan finds out that Nate never actually broke up with his two ex-girlfriends, Robin and Bria. The three girls couldn't be more different. Robin is a star athlete--the cocaptain of the field hockey team. Bria is the polished, outspoken, and focused school council president (not to mention openly hostile toward Meghan). Still, they form a tentative alliance to get revenge on Nate. But then Nate is assaulted and in a coma, with three potential weapons nearby, each pointing to one of the girls. They shift their alliance to finding out who hurt Nate. Meghan, the first-person narrator, is engaging and bright, and the plot is tightly written. Avid mystery and thriller readers will gobble this one up.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.