So I’ve done this before, but last time we weren’t so chapter book focused. It seems almost every chapter book features a mean girl eventually. If you read that past article, you’ll know we’re here to classify mean girls by commonly seen character traits: Mean, popular, perfect, preppy, rich, snooty, and conceited. Occasionally bonus traits, or the lack of a trait are important to note too. Ultimately, we’ll see if these mean girls really fit the archetype or if there’s more to these girls than mean.

Let’s get started.

Sue Clawson (Owl Diaries)
A textbook mean girl, and in an early chapter book even!
Mean: Constantly chimes in at school to put down Eva. It even says “mean” in the picture above.
Popular: Her classmate Hailey confirms this in book 19, but even before that, she has a general air of popular. Everyone seems to like her, despite her constantly being a jerk.
Perfect: We see this in a lot of her class projects.
Preppy: She’s the daughter of a dressmaker, so this comes naturally. A lot of her projects are about clothes. Even her eye patterns are the most detailed of any of her classmates (they look like flowers).
Rich: She’s the daughter of a successful dressmaker, who is always busy. It’s implied her dad is also successful.
Snooty: She doesn’t just berate Eva, she always talks about how what she’s doing is going to be better.
Conceited: This might be her most prominent trait, and probably the reason all her other traits exist. She is really proud of everything she does, seemingly trying to live up to her parents.
Sue might display every mean girl trait, but she’s more than that. We see her apologize a lot. She admits she doesn’t have a best friend. Eva even comments on how Sue becomes less mean in later books. She’s trying.

May Murkee (Junie B Jones)
Some people might consider Junie herself a mean girl, but May fits the bill much better in my opinion. Anyone that thinks Lucille is a mean girl can fight me over it. Being disgustingly rich doesn’t make you a mean girl.
Mean: Is “tattletale” a type of mean? Because this is May’s M.O.
(Not) Popular: She admits to Junie in one book that she has no friends. That’s not surprising considering her other traits, but I feel like she probably doesn’t try to make friends either. It’s interesting how for mean girls, they’re either extremely popular or have no friends. There’s never an in-between.
Snooty: The tattletaling usually comes from a general disapproval of everything Junie does.
Like Sue, May also seems to have more depth than she lets on. She has no friends, as mentioned (and doesn’t make any like Sue does). Christmas is her favorite holiday, and one of the only times we see her genuinely happy.

Rori Smith (Dragon Masters)
The Dragon Master of the fire dragon Vulcan. Rori always speaks her mind and doesn’t settle for what others say.
Mean: In the “aggressive” and “battle” senses, for once. Her first thought is usually to attack the bad guy, which she almost always acts on immediately.
(Not) Perfect: She tries, and doesn’t always succeed. When you train a particularly aggressive and volatile dragon, you kind of have to try and be perfect. Also when your belief leads you in to self-exile.
(Kind of) Snooty: She thinks her ideas are right a lot, and acts on them without approval a lot. She doesn’t like inaction or planning. She’s kind of like Annie from Magic Tree House in that sense, which is weird to think about.
(Bonus) Cocky: This might be the trait that causes her aggressiveness. She thinks pretty highly of herself, despite the constant failings.
There’s not too much more to say about Rori. Take the above or leave it. In a story with as many characters as Dragon Masters, characters don’t get too much depth.

Riley Rottenberger (Stink)
Stink’s classmate and all around mean girl. Or is she? Don’t let the above picture fool you, it’s just all I could find.
Mean: Her last name is Rottenberger. Come on now. Need more proof? She creates a “Pluto is Dead” shirt overnight just to make her astrological point to Stink. She creates two more outfits over the week to keep it up. The last outfit has her and her argument team dress in trash bags to hold a “funeral” for Pluto. That’s some commitment to being mean.
Conceited: Know-it-alls usually are. “Don’t ask her questions,” Stink warned, “or she’ll never, ever stop.”
Even when she’s being nice, she’s conceited. In book 10, she feeds Stink slime mold facts to stand up for his slime mold. She still proceeds to say her slime mold is bigger later.
You could argue the “mean” points earlier are also actually conceitedness, since Riley is doing all this Pluto bashing to prove her point, not just to be mean. In that case, she’s the only mean girl I’ve seen so far purely fueled by one trait.

Dutchess Wigtower (The Princess in Black)
Can adults be mean girls in chapter books? I think so. This one should be pretty quick, since she’s only in two books so far.
Mean: She tries to leave a mean cat with Princess Magnolia purely to see it cause problems for her.
Rich: She’s a Dutchess and has her own castle.
(Bonus) Nosy: She admits she likes snooping around other people’s places to find secrets and skeletons in their closets.

Naming in Chapter Books

This is probably going to be my next article, because it’s kind of a big deal. Mean girls are just the tip of the iceberg.
Sue Clawson, Riley Rottenberger, May Murkee…see where this is going yet?

Names are one of the first handshakes you have as an author. Besides art (and chapter titles), names can be the fastest way to get a character across. Who cares about realism when you can literally call your secondary character “mean” in their name? Just call your bad guy Thorn or Sir Surly. Sometimes this comes across more subtly. Sometimes mean girls have really long, pretentious sounding names like Melanie Maplethorpe or Meredith Mooney. A lot of “M” names, I guess. Mean starts with M and all.

Conclusion

Like last mean girls article, I’ll leave it up to you, the reader, as to what constitutes a mean girl. Personally, I do think all of the girls mentioned above were intended to be in this archetype, but maybe some more than others.

Also like last time, there’s still a lot of mean girls I haven’t covered. Maybe I’ll make this a regular article. We’ll see.