Furthermore, the supporting characters are sketched too thinly. Riley’s mother is a one-note portrait of addiction, and the male authority figures are uniformly predatory or useless. By the final act, the book’s nihilism feels less like a profound statement and more like a refusal to grow up. The ending, which implies a cycle of recidivism, is brave but hollow.

Where the book excels is its unapologetic voice. Riley is not a secret sweetheart. She is manipulative, angry, and often cruel. She steals from friends who try to help her and mocks the concept of therapy. This refusal to sanitize teenage delinquency is the work’s greatest strength. The prose is jagged and visceral; one passage about shoplifting a pack of cigarettes while dissociating from her own body is as good as anything in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son .

The author clearly understands the psychology of a girl who has weaponized her own vulnerability. The chapters set in juvie, particularly a brutal scene involving a riot over a pair of sneakers, are pulse-poundingly real. You won’t find a “very special episode” moral here.

On the surface, Bad Girl: Confessions of a Teenage Delinquent looks like another entry in the long line of “troubled teen” exploitation fare—think Kids meets Jawbreaker with a dash of Girl, Interrupted . But beneath its spiked necklace and smudged eyeliner, this confessional narrative (whether a memoir or a roman à clef) attempts something more dangerous: empathy for the unrepentant.

But for those willing to sit in the muck of a teenager’s worst impulses, the book offers something rare: a mirror held up to the delinquent not as a caricature, but as a fully realized, broken human being. It is a flawed, messy, and important scream into the void.