The Bitch Posse is a self-named group of three teenage friends who desperately need each other, despite the belief of parents and teachers that each of the gang is the worst possible influence on the others. The group is an unlikely match: Rennie, the one with the good grades who has an affair with one of her teachers, Cherry, the tough as nails chick with the cocaine addicted mother and Amy, who has given up her place as popular cheerleader to be with the only girls in her school who understand her. Together, with their genuine frustration and anger, not to mention their questionable rituals meant to even further cement their already airtight bonds, the reader might wonder if the authority figures are right.

In true teenage suffering, the Bitch Posse always hangs at the height of drama, where the girls only can trust each other and every moment they live may as well be their last. At one point in the novel, the girls are called into the principal's office for a meeting, where the parents express their concern about rumors they've heard, that the gang is really a cult, "flirting with lesbianism and witchcraft, that almost certainly involves drugs." The girls argue back, that although they dress differently and listen to different music, that doesn't mean they are bad or evil, "just that we don't play the game." Rennie plaintively states, We're just friends. Best friends. I haven't had friends like these in my life.

And while the reader knows this is true, the parents are unconvinced and claim that the group has a suicide pact, which is enough reason to keep them apart. In true Bitch Posse fashion, where they are the only three who matter, the girls only pretend not to see each other and in fact, are drawn closer by their secret meetings.

However, the stories of the teenage girls are intertwined with the lives of the same women twenty years later, where it seems the group has successfully been driven apart. Now, Rennie, a one-time novelist, is years later very certain that she will never be able to match her single success. Amy, in an effort to erase her unhappy childhood, is married and focused on the singular goal of creating a life perfectly ordered out of a catalogue. Cherry, once the strongest, most driven member of the group, is now in a mental institution, and spends her days finding new friends to "rescue."

The novel leads towards a mystery event which happened to the girls at the end of high school and is what drove them apart. While it risks seeming gimmicky to hang three stories on the events of one night, O'Connor delivers, giving and holding back just the right information to keep the reader turning pages until the very end. Martha O'Connor deftly laces not three, but six narratives of the different stages of these women's lives as she leads us towards the reason the group fell apart. In clean bursts of narrative flash, O'Connor jumps back and forth in the characters' timelines, letting the painful angst of the women's experiences guide the reader from one event to the next.

The Bitch Posse has been called "anti-chicklit" by other reviewers and the lack of shopping or "looking for Mr. Right" aspirations are the most obvious example. More so, its philosophy that things don't always work out, and women can't always bounce back definitely excludes it from that genre. While not light-hearted, this novel, with its pared-back, raw characters is an engrossing read.