Thank you so much to Toppling Stacks Tours for allowing me to take part in this tour for Freddie and Stella Got Hot. This is a new book, released only a few days ago, and I had been hearing about it for a bit before the tour announcement came out. So when they were looking for hosts to take part, I jumped at the chance. It sounded like fun!
About The Book:
Author:
Maggie Horne
Pub.Date:
January 27, 2026
Find it: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound
Jenny Han meets Mean Girls in Freddie and Stella Got Hot, Maggie Horne’s YA rom-com about getting revenge and falling in love.
By the time the Beaumont-Gardiner Award is announced, everyone’s going to hate Levi Preston. And they’re going to love us.
Freddie and Stella are on a mission: take down their former best friend turned queen bee Levi Preston by depriving her of the one thing she wants more than anything: The Beaumont-Gardiner Award. Only the coolest, smartest, and – let’s face it – hottest girls win . . . so Freddie and Stella are going to have to get a whole lot cooler, smarter, and hotter.
At first, it seems to work – Freddie and Stella slowly manage to worm their way in with the cool girls. With every shopping date, agonizing salon appointment, and hot yoga class, the girls get closer to the in-crowd and Levi fades more and more into the background. The higher they rise, though, the more uneasy Freddie starts to feel. Stella’s gone from her lovable, goofy best friend to someone she barely recognizes, using her newfound power for evil at every opportunity. Soon, Freddie realizes she’s created a monster – and she needs Levi’s help to put a stop to it.
Review:
The plot of this book intrigued me. I recently saw Mean Girls for the first time, so I was very much drawn to the idea of a story that took aspects from that movie and made it sapphic. I'm definitely happy I gave this book a chance, even though my feelings on it are kind of...split.
The characters are one of the strangest part of this book. I liked them, but I also hated them at times. They aren't nice people. They're rich and spoiled and entitled. They're mean. But also, the author does give them some form of humanity. Even when I didn't like them, I was still rooting for them to get their happy ending. I still wanted them to succeed. Not too many books can make me hate and love characters at the same time.
The romance was really cute and not what I was expecting. I can admit that I came in with a preconceived idea of who the romance was going to be between and it wasn't. But that definitely wasn't a bad thing. I quite enjoyed getting to watch the relationship flourish and everything that the two characters had to deal with. It was messy as hell, but genuinely fun to read about.
I found this book to be a pretty easy read. Not in a simple way, but because I didn't want to put it down. I was drawn in by the characters and the romance and the occassional chaos. It was fun and entertaining and I had a great time reading it. I don't know if it's for everyone, but I enjoyed my time with it!
Favorite Quotes:
"You really talk about murder plots a lot for someone who's also convinced her phone is listening to her conversations."
"Oh no, I told her every single detail of what we've been doing. Was I not supposed to do that?"
"We can hate Levi all we want, but I'm not making *** pay." (Name censored to avoid spoilers)
Hot girls through good the best parties.
About Maggie Horne:
Maggie Horne is a writer and editor who grew up near Toronto, Canada and now lives in the UK with her wife and a collection of dogs and children. The author of middle grade novels HAZEL HILL IS GONNA WIN THIS ONE (an Indies Introduce Summer/Fall 2022 Selection and a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection) and NOAH FRYE GETS CRUSHED from Clarion Books, as well as the YA novel DON’T LET IT BREAK YOUR HEART from Feiwel and Friends, Maggie is always trying to write the queer stories she wishes she could have read growing up.
You can find her on Instagram, Twitter, and her website.
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