POINTS

Two teenage girls turn the tables on high school misogynists in this YA novel.

Sixteen-year-old narrator Bethany Cummings lives in a swanky Chicago suburb where she doesn’t share the in-crowd’s values. Indeed, she has no close friends until her junior year, when she meets new female student Ash Bauer, who, like her, isn’t into coy flirting—although both still worry about how to please guys. After they encounter some jerkish male behavior, though, they realize that it’s time to reverse the dynamic. Bethany discovers a spreadsheet on her brother’s old MacBook evaluating various girls he dated, assigning them points for anything from a hug to a sexual act; when each girl reached 100 points, she got dumped. Bethany is disgusted and furious—but she also sees the perfect way to overturn the system. She and Ash develop a guy-rating spreadsheet that gives them new confidence and a measure of romantic success. But Ash becomes troubled by the new system, which hasn’t resulted in a jerk-free relationship and is, after all, ethically dubious. Bethany, who’s been gaining influence as a feminist activist, defends the new spreadsheet system, but her views are challenged when she meets a kind, respectful guy. Doyle, whose debut novel, Milked (2019), was written for an adult audience, here offers her first YA novel that tackles some mature themes. The spreadsheet proves to be a great hook for a story and a graphic way to capture the colder, more manipulative power dynamics of dating. That said, it’s never really acknowledged that people who are less attractive than Bethany and Ash might have some trouble adopting their tactics. The book’s humor is nicely balanced by moral complexity, and even Bethany’s brother, the inventor of the point system, is revealed to be a more complicated character than he first appears.

A clever and thoughtful investigation of teenage empowerment.