This one has been on my TBR list since I read Dumplin’ a few years ago, and when I was between audiobooks recently, I realized I could download this one from my library right away, so I did.
It’s every bit as adorable and feel-good as the prequel. Willowdean makes a few appearances, but the sequel focuses on Millie (who won second place in the beauty pageant) and Callie (the popular girl who tried to steal Willowdean’s best friend).
Millie misses Willowdean and the gang who became friends in the first book. Since the pageant ended, they haven’t really had a chance to hang out, so Millie calls an ”emergency meeting” to announce weekly sleepovers so they can stay connected.
She’s also trying to get into a summer camp for journalists, despite the fact that she knows she doesn’t look like the kind of woman they tend to put on TV. She also has to convince her mom she’s not going back to fat camp.
Callie is co-assistant captain of the Shamrocks, the school’s dance team, which is trying to make it to sectionals. When a sponsor of the team drops their sponsorship, the girls are going to have to either pay for the trip themselves or drop out. The girls are pissed and some of them decide to egg the gym that dropped its sponsorship. Callie is not on board, but she thinks she should go as co-assistant captain to prevent things from getting out of hand.
So much for that. Things get out of hand, and rather than just egging the place, they end up breaking in and trashing the gym. Melissa (the other co-assistant captain) runs for it as soon as things get serious. Callie blames Melissa for not sticking with the team, but Callie had previously thrown Melissa under the bus to try to beat her to captain, so she’s hardly in a position to throw stones.
Millie’s uncle owns the gym and he had to pull out of the sponsorship because money has been tight lately and his wife just gave birth to twins, so of course getting vandalized doesn’t help anything. They had to pull back on security, which is how the girls were able to break in without setting off an alarm, but they do still have insurance and security cameras. The girls were all wearing face masks, but Millie (who works part time at the gym) recognizes Callie’s necklace, so the police are able to identify her. They can guess that the rest of the dance team did their part destroying the gym, but Callie is the only one they can identify and she refuses to give them up because she thinks the team is a sisterhood and they’ll support her.
They don’t. Not only do they let her take the fall for what the whole team did, but they stop hanging out with her because they don’t think it’s good for the team to be seen with her.
Of course Callie is kicked off the dance team as punishment for the vandalism. Millie’s uncle decides not to press charges but to have her work at the gym to pay off the insurance deductible, and of course she and Millie become friends while working together.
From there, the book follows the usual formula. Callie has to win over Millie’s friends, and Millie has to convince her friends that Callie isn’t a lost cause. Callie blows up what remains of her relationship with the Shamrocks because she thinks Melissa is the one who ratted her out to the police. Millie feels guilty about not admitting to Callie that she’s the one who identified her, but the closer they get, the harder it is to come clean, making it that much worse when Callie finds out the truth from someone else. But of course they repair their friendship and forgive each other and make a grand gesture of love and support, and it’s all wonderful and adorable.
I always appreciate it when the villain of one book is made into the hero of another. It’s not easy to do in a way that’s believable, and I think Murphy did a good job of explaining Callie’s position without letting her off the hook. That said, Callie still spends a lot of time blaming other people for her situation. Trashing the gym may not have been her idea, but she chose to participate. If she had known it was Millie and not Melissa who identified her to the police, she wouldn’t have blown up that relationship, but she still made a choice to betray the confidence of the team, and that’s on her, not Millie. She crossed a line and she knew it, and while Melissa and the Shamrocks might have turned out to be awful friends, that doesn’t excuse what Callie did and I would have liked some more acknowledgement of that fact.