From the cover:
"Beatrice Maria Estrella Giovannini has life all figured out. She's starting senior year at the top of her class, she's a shoo-in for a scholarship to MIT, and she's got a new boyfriend she's crazy about. The only problem: All through high school Bea and her best friends, Spencer and Gabe, have been the targets of horrific bullying.
So Bea uses her math skills to come up with the Formula, a 100% mathematically guaranteed path to social happiness in high school. Now Gabe is on his way to becoming student body president, and Spencer is finally getting his art noticed. But when her boyfriend dumps her for Toile, the quirky new girl at school, Bea realizes it's time to use the Formula for herself. She'll be reinvented as eccentric and lovable Trixie - a quintessential manic pixie dream girl - in order to win her boyfriend back and beat Toile at her own game.
Unfortunately, being a manic pixie dream girl isn't all it's cracked up to be, and "Trixie" is causing unexpected consequences for her friends. As the Formula begins to break down, can Bea find a way to reclaim her true identity and fix everything she's messed up? Or will the casualties of her manic pixie experiment go far deeper than she could possibly imagine?"
I had mixed feelings while reading this book and couldn't decide how I felt about it, but after spending some time post-read pondering, I've come to the conclusion that Bea's friends were the only redeeming part of this story. Bea herself was unlikable to a shocking degree - she was judgmental, selfish, and a genuinely horrible friend. What's more, while the whole premise of this book is built upon the "horrific bullying" she and her friends experience, the only character who is actually the recipient of horrific bullying is Gabe. I'm sorry, but from one nerd to another, being called "Math Girl" is neither horrific nor bullying, particularly when a. literally the only thing she cares about is math and b. she openly admits partway through the book that she decided upon starting high school that everyone there was mean and horrible and decided not to talk to any of them. Making the choice to assume the worst of everyone and isolate yourself without any attempt to make friends isn't bullying.
Then there's the whole manic pixie dream girl thing, the whole concept of which irritates the shit out of me. Because women aren't analyzed under a microscope and torn apart for everything they do already, let's definitely let a man coin a term to describe a certain type of woman and use it to tear each other down further. And while we're at it, how many times did Bea need to shit talk Dakota and Noel and their vocal fry or insinuate that Cassilyn is stupid or a bitch? I frequently choose books based on title or cover without reading the description, and in this case it really bit me in the ass because what I expected to be a story shining light on the "manic pixie dream girl" trope as something that applies not to women but to men and their expectations actually ended up being almost 350 pages of Bea tearing down other young women and treating her friends like shit, only to learn basically nothing but still manage to get the guy in the end. Hard pass.
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