"The Bitch Posse is compulsively readable because things just keep getting worse for these girls... O'Connor scatters delicious and slightly macabre details of the mid-1980's alterna-teen culture throughout... It's easy to see Posse as the descendant of [Julian F. Thompson's The Grounding of Group 6] and other thrillingly gloomy YA classics such as John Neufeld's Lisa, Bright and Dark, Joanne Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden or Paul Zindel's oeuvre....It comes hard on the heels of Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, another story about high school (also narrated by an outsider). The Bitch Posse may change the writing rules for these books a bit. To what, remains to be seen."

-The Washington Post Book World

"This taut, psychological thriller is the tale of three women haunted and scarred by a violence shared in their mutual past. A finely crafted page-turner, this is a great read for fans of Donna Tartt or Joyce Carol Oates."

-Bonnie Raught,
Chester County Bookstore,
West Chester, PA
(Staff Pick)

"An angsty, serious novel of lost dreams and sexual damage"

-MARIE CLAIRE (UK),
June

"Highly recommended. This is compelling, unflinchingly honest storytelling about what it means to live haunted by memories you can't stomach but can't quite repress. It's about the darkness within all of us, which so often seeps out through senseless, self-destructive acts. It's a haunting novel, perfect for readers who appreciate Joyce Carol Oates....Another good thing: the blurbs are actually accurate!"

-Margaret Able,
Bookish Marginalia

"'You have now entered a Chick-Lit-Free Zone,' warns this debut novel on Page 1. And it's true: There's nothing pink and frilly about this tale of three high-school girls, bonded by miserable home lives and then sworn to secrecy by a horrible event that ruins their lives. It's scathing, dark and impossible to put down."

-The Newark Star-Ledger

"A sizzling page-turner."

-Cosmopolitan

"Don't disbelieve the hype. [The Bitch Posse] is good a debut as it's cracked up to be... It's edgy, smart and sexy, like its heroines... What could have been just another coming-of-age story is redeemed by strong narrative voices, pungent writing and a splendid Grand Guignol finale."

-Tatler (UK)

"There's a buzz about this book that tells us it's going to be huge this summer... it's more bitch lit than chick lit. Reminiscent of cult movie 'Heathers', it revels in the seedy underbelly of American life, and features the kind of female angst Alice 'Lovely Bones' Sebold would be proud of... The novel flits back and forth from school days to adulthood, where none of the girls remains in contact but all share a dark secret. Believe us when we say you won't be able to rest until you find out what it is."

-Glamour (UK)

"O'Connor nails the intense, us-against-the-world, overcooked emotion that defines the friendship of teen girls and the druggy delirium of first, sexual love. She also has a sharp eye for the posturing of the young and unloved, perfectly describing the pretense of toughness that belies a raw, gelatinous core."

-The Cleveland Plain-Dealer

'And now for something completely different…If you're tired of fluffy chick lit and fancy a trip to the dark side, the debut novel from poet Martha O'Connor is a bloody (very bloody, in fact) good place to start. It's 1988 and the Bitch Goddesses are three schoolgirls united in their passion for sex, drugs, alcohol, self-harm and general destruction…We discover things deteriorated one terrifying night years ago when a revenge plan went wrong, resulting in one of them being confined to a psychiatric hospital. If you loved Heathers and The Craft, this is for you – it's dark, compelling and not for the faint-hearted. Five stars.'

-Heat (UK)

"Quite unabashedly satisfying...prompting even this most jaded reviewer to stay up until the wee hours of the night just to find out what happened next...a thrilling ride."

-Bookreporter

"The story fascinates even as it repels."

-Publishers Weekly

"A crackling story"

-Red (UK)

"One of the most eye-opening, gut-wrenching first efforts I've come across in quite some time. It's the kind of book that makes me want to shove it in people's faces and say 'you must read this.... From the first, rage-filled page, the intertwining stories of Rennie, Cherry and Amy as intelligent teens ever aware of their sexual power and as thirtysomethings grappling with the tragic demise of their seemingly unbreakable friendship is unflinching, uncomfortable, and powerfully rendered. No question, it's one of the best first novels I've read this year, one that I'd literally love to put in every discerning reader's hands."

-Sarah Weinman,
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind
~Pick of the Week

"A little substance never hurt anyone, and The Bitch Posse offers plenty."

-Winnipeg Free Press

"The Bitch Posse is a riveting and emotionally charged read. No fluff here."

-Chicago Tribune

"Not for the faint of heart, this debut novel will keep readers glued to the very last page."

-Library Journal

"Astonishing and truly remarkable ... tough, subtle, tense, authentic and very beautiful. If this isn't really Alice Sebold, Donna Tartt or Barbara Vine writing under a pseudonym, then Martha O'Connor is a huge new talent who is already about as good as it gets."

-Lee Child,
international bestselling author of The Enemy

"The Bitch Posse is dark, poignant, and only too believable. Rennie, Cherry, and Amy are strivers at school by day and connivers by night. Self-styled rebels without a clue, they are bound together in friendship. Little do they realize that there will come a day when their naïve passions will lead them to a vicious mishap, blood that will stay on their hands for the rest of their lives. This is a book that will walk alongside you, and haunt your dreams, long after you turn the last page."

-Jacquelyn Mitchard,
New York Times bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean
and A Theory of Relativity

"The fierce young heroines of Martha O'Connor's uncompromising novel team up in high school and head out into the night to raise hell--not knowing, of course, the infernal depths to which their anger and pain can take them. From the first the story of Rennie, Cherry and Amy is eye-popping: a profane and unabashed account of a girls' pact to get out of the Midwest and get even with the small-town toss of the dice that's doomed them. Told in dramatic flash-like chapters, skimming back and forth through time, and allowing raw emotion to be its nerve-addled guide, The Bitch Posse is a debut worthy of Joyce Carol Oates. That is, O'Connor steals into Oates's bleak, erotically desolate territory by night to explore the pathology of adolescent loneliness and longing, along the way making full-fledged women of this compellingly capricious sister act. And in the end, it's lit--just so--by the glow of the dying fires of youth, and bitter with the taste of the aftermath ashes of a hard-won yet oddly hopeful wisdom."

-Edmund White,
winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award
and international bestselling author of
Fanny: A Fiction and A Boy's Own Story

"This is a novel that gets under the skin, a novel that cuts deep. Martha O'Connor has crafted a trio of unforgettable characters, young women so heart-wrenchingly alive, they burst from the page. The Bitch Posse has all the makings of a modern-day classic; it left me shaken, moved, and deeply grateful for the journey."

-Gayle Brandeis,
author of The Book of Dead Birds
and winner of The Bellwether Prize for Fiction

"A nuanced and often disturbing consideration of the assets and liabilities of friendship and loyalty. Very brave mother-daughter book groups will do well to choose this novel!"

-Katharine Weber,
bestselling author of
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear,
The Music Lesson, and The Little Women

"Every once in a while a book comes along that speaks the truth so intensely that it's a bit like ambulance chasing: you want to look away, but simply can't. In this era of Prada-obsessed chick-lit heroines and Machiavellian Mean Girls, the young women in The Bitch Posse are complex Every Girls-precocious but confused, wry but sad, rebellious but stability-seeking, insecure yet powerful. An exquisitely observant portrait of three very different best friends whose lives change forever on a fateful night in high school, The Bitch Posse is one of the saddest, funniest, and most original stories about deep emotional connections and the forces that threaten to unravel them."

-Lori Gottlieb,
national bestselling author of
Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self