Six Angry Girls

 
 

Six Angry Girls

by Adrienne Kisner

Feiwel & Friends

2020 

 

 

I don't actually know Adrienne Kisner, but her husband is in my regular Friday night gaming group, and we've been playing together for about a decade now. So Adrienne is the friend of a friend, at the very minimum. Six Angry Girls is her most recent YA novel, about a group of scorned high school girls who form a Mock Trial team in the spring of their senior year.

 

We follow the alternating perspectives of Raina and Millie. The heading of each chapter is stylized as a court case, showing one or the other viewpoint character v. someone or something, in the Court of Public Opinion or the like, with a meaningful docket number.

Raina is one of her Pennsylvania high school's two lead actresses. At the start of the spring term in January, she gets dumped by her boyfriend, gets outmanuevered by her theatrical rival Claire, and starts questioning whether she even wants to act, or if she was only doing it because her boyfriend used to encorage her. She quits the Drama Club and starts knitting at the local yarn store, where the regulars are starting yarn-based activism against a misogynistic local judge.

Millie is thethe hardest working member (and the only girl) on the Mock Trial team, but the boys plan a coup via open tryouts, and kick her off entirely. A chance meeting with Raina when they're both crying in the bathroom convinces Millie to start an all-girl rival Mock Trial team. It's interesting to see some of the same characters from a different perspective - Raina's ex-boyfriend is one of the boys who ousts Millie, and Raina's nemesis Claire is Millie's best friend.

With Raina and Millie teaned up, we're off to the races! Sort of. Raina meets new student Grace at the yarn store. She becomes part of the team, and starts dating Millie. Veronica usually rock-climbs but she has a broken foot, so she joins in. Izzy is trans and a nonbinary demigirl; like Grace, she's new, after just transfering over from an all-boy's school. They recruit the school librarian to be their faculty advisor, and Nikita, who is on punishment for overdue library books is their reluctant sixth.

Meanwhile, Raina is getting more and more involved with activism, while trying to figure out who she is without her ex and what she wants to do with her adult life. Millie is also trying to figure out her plans, especially as her dad and his conservative new girlfriend keep trying to derail her from trial, friends, and even college next year, in favor of housekeeping and taking care of the girlfriend's kids from a previous marriage.

But the girls' Mock Trial team is on a winning streak! They advance past the district level to states, where they face off against the boy's team from their own school for a chance at nationals.

The bigger challenge though is the new case everyone is assigned for the tournaments - a free speech case that pits a fictional queer feminist club against their school's fictional religious conservatives. It's a case that hits too close to home, a case where the girls don't feel comfortable arguing the anti-gay side. Millie wants to win, but at what cost? Will the others support her  over their own objections? Does she actually want them to?

I feel like in some other version of this book, Raina would learn that the hated judge is really a very nice person once you get to know him, or Millie would realize that the Mock Trial boys had been doing more than she gave them credit for, or she'd be forced to abandon college to babysit her new step-siblings but later decide it was for the best. 

Kisner isn't writing that kind of book though. She's not ashamed of her characters' feminism; their legitimate grievances are not treated as character flaws to be overcome. The judge, for example, might indeed be a nice man off the bench, but his rulings still disfavor women, and they're still an appropriate target for public protest. Not everyone needs to 'learn a lesson' - the closest anyone comes is Raina re-evaluating Claire once they have a mutual friend and aren't competing for the same roles anymore.

Kisner gives her characters problems at home, at school, and as burgeoning political adults. Raina and Millie are definitely the best developed characers. The others aren't flat, but they're not given as much detail or as much agency. Grace and Claire, who both know both the mains in different ways, emerge as the second tier. Kisner's depiction of feisty craft-store feminists felt authentic to the women like that I've known before. 

The girls are coming of age, but not everything is going their way. Whenever their first choice is blocked, they have to do some soul searching and decide who they want to be instead, and what to do to become that. So it's less about a smooth path, and more about self-knowledge, resilience, getting appropriately angry at the correct parties, and figuring out the best alternative. Oh, and yarn-bombing,  activism, community, and politics. Probably a good book for a real life angry high school girl.