Rebel Belle

Kindle

How anyone before a certain age can read this book without thinking of Billy Idol first is probably a disparity to my supposed age. As we might have noticed, lately my taste in books is more about feminine and bad-ass ladies, and while I'll start off by saying this book doesn't touch anything I've been reading by Gail Carriger, I did really have fun with it. And at first I was disappointed with it, but it grew on me like a fungus.

Rebel Belle is about Harper Price, a pretty, popular, and loaded Southern Belle. She's a perfectionist, she's on literally every student committee in her private school, she has the perfect boyfriend, now she's the home-coming queen, yadda-yadda, you know the type. The kind of character, I'm kind of guilty to admit, is usually villainized and "mean girl'd." Actually, I expected to hate her. Until I realized she was a lot like Cordelia from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but if Cordelia was the slayer instead. Then she kind of grew on me.
So, anyway, back to where I was. Harper is an dauntingly perfect Southern Belle, and on the night she's crowned as the school's Home-Coming Queen, she's also gifted with mysterious and unlikely powers - essentially super strength. She's now a paladin and must protect a hipster boy named David Stark. She & David have been rivals since childhood and absolutely hate each other. And now that she has to spend more time with him, those feelings are getting more complicated.

Okay, so this book is silly and more appropriate for teenagers, but I had so much fun with it. I really appreciated the honesty and authenticity of all the characterization. Even the minor characters seemed like someone I might have met. Best of, I love that a lot of the gendered cliches were shot down really elegantly - actually, a lot of the cliches were handled very nicely. I may have been a little too old for this book, but I want my teenaged cousins to get their hands on this book!