This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.
Verdict: A sharp, genuinely funny sapphic Mean Girls with a narrator worth the price of admission, undercut by an ending that forgives everything too fast for a large share of its readers.
Best for: Readers who want messy, scheming, morally compromised teen girls and a voice-driven YA rom-com, and who can accept a tidy reconciliation after three hundred pages of escalating cruelty.
Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 — closed-door YA; romance.io lists it but has no steam rating)
Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.8/5 — a 3.93 Goodreads average and a starred Publishers Weekly review, against an ending nearly half the reviewers I read could not buy)
Tropes: Revenge plot, friends-to-enemies-to-lovers, second chance, popularity contest, glow-up, toxic best friend, all-girls private school, morally grey heroines, single POV, epilogue HEA.
Freddie and Stella Got Hot by Maggie Horne is a standalone young adult sapphic rom-com from Feiwel & Friends, set at an elite all-girls private school where two former nobodies reinvent themselves to take down the ex-best friend who dropped them — and where the plan starts to crack the moment Freddie remembers exactly how she used to feel about Levi Preston, the girl she is supposed to be destroying. It sits squarely in contemporary lesbian romance, just aimed at readers who are fourteen and up.
It has a 3.93 average across 240 Goodreads ratings, a 4.07 on StoryGraph, and the kind of trade coverage most YA sapphic books never get: a starred Publishers Weekly review plus Booklist, Kirkus, BCCB and Shelf Awareness. The readers mostly agree with the critics about the voice. Where they part company is the ending. Both halves of that are worth understanding before you start.
What Is Freddie and Stella Got Hot About?
Freddie and Stella Got Hot is a high-school revenge comedy first and a romance second, and it knows exactly which films it is riffing on. The publisher pitches it as Jenny Han meets Mean Girls; readers keep adding Heathers, Do Revenge, Booksmart and Bottoms. Rich-kid private school means money everywhere and parents almost nowhere, and the social economy runs on a single coveted prize, the Beaumont-Gardiner Award.
Freddie is the sidekick by habit — the quieter half of a two-person friendship with Stella, who does the planning, the talking and the deciding. What Freddie lacks is a spine, and the book is about her growing one. Levi Preston is the queen bee who ditched them both when high school started, and who is widely assumed to have the award sewn up. The whole thing runs in Freddie’s first-person voice, which buys the book its comedy and costs it something too: we see Stella and Levi only through Freddie’s resentment, and some readers wanted more of both.
What Makes This Sapphic YA Rom-Com Work
- Freddie’s voice: The single most-praised element, by readers and trade reviewers alike. Publishers Weekly singles out her “fantastically facetious” narration, and readers repeatedly say they laughed out loud at her inner monologue.
- Girls behaving badly: Readers love that nobody here is a clean victim or a clean villain. 92% of StoryGraph reviewers say character flaws are a main focus, and they mean it as praise.
- Queerness without the pain: Most of the cast is openly queer, with lesbian and bisexual labels on the page and no coming-out plot.
- The romance underneath the scheme: Freddie and Levi’s history turns the revenge plot into a friends-to-enemies-to-lovers story with a second-chance edge, and Kirkus calls it a swoonworthy slow burn.
- Speed: Short chapters, titled sections and a 336-page length. “One sitting” is the recurring phrase, and StoryGraph readers split almost evenly between fast and medium pace.
Book Synopsis
Freddie and Stella used to be a trio. Then high school started, Levi Preston found better friends, and the two girls she left behind spent the next two years watching her become the most admired student at their school. Now Levi is the obvious favourite for the Beaumont-Gardiner Award, the prize every girl in the building quietly wants and only the right kind of girl ever wins.
Stella has a plan. If the award goes to the coolest, smartest and — nobody says it out loud — hottest girls, then she and Freddie will simply become those girls. That means new clothes, painful salon visits, hot yoga and, more importantly, a slow infiltration of Levi’s inner circle. Pick off the friends one at a time, move up the ladder, and leave Levi standing alone when the nominations come in.
It works better than either of them expected. The higher they climb, though, the less Freddie recognises her best friend, whose appetite for damage keeps growing and whose targets are no longer only the people who deserve it. And the closer Freddie gets to Levi, the harder it becomes to remember why she hated her in the first place — or to ignore the feeling she had for her long before any of this started. Somewhere between the glow-up and the award ceremony, Freddie has to decide whose side she is actually on.
My Review
The voice is the reason to read this, and I want to lead with it because it is genuinely good. Freddie narrates like a clever, anxious teenager who has spent years being funny in her own head instead of out loud, and Horne gets real comic mileage out of the gap between what Freddie thinks and what she says. The trade reviews reach for the same words — snarky, punchy, banter-filled — and readers agree: the dialogue is what carries people through in one sitting.
The second strength is how willing it is to make its heroines unpleasant. Stella in particular goes from goofy best friend to something much colder, and one reader notes that the book quietly flips the Mean Girls archetypes — the outsiders are rich, blonde and already privileged, while the queen bee is the less wealthy, openly gay girl the school genuinely likes. That inversion is smart, and it gives the romance a moral charge: falling for Levi means admitting she was never the villain.
Where it struggles is the ending, and this is not a personal quibble. It is the single most repeated criticism in the reviews. Of the roughly thirty substantive Goodreads reviews I read, about thirteen say some version of the same thing: after everything Stella does, the reconciliation comes too fast and too completely to believe. Several reviewers name it as the one thing that cost the book a star, and even five-star readers add that they would never have been so forgiving. Kirkus, unusually, reaches the same verdict. Around that sit the smaller structural notes: adults and parents who barely exist, a romance that some readers felt was told through backstory more than shown, and an opening that drops you into the scheme before you understand why Levi deserves it. StoryGraph’s 5% did-not-finish rate is modest, though at least one reader says she had lost interest by the middle.
One expectation to reset: the title suggests heat, and there is none. “Got hot” means a makeover. This is a closed-door YA romance for readers fourteen and up, and the romance is a strand inside a friendship story rather than the whole engine. If you came for a sapphic love story first, calibrate; if you came for Mean Girls with queer girls in it, you are in exactly the right place.
My honest note: A four-star voice in service of a revenge plot that pulls its punch at the end. If a too-neat reconciliation will sour everything that came before it, it will. If you read for the ride rather than the landing, the ride is sharp, funny and worth it.
| Element | In Freddie and Stella Got Hot |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Freddie & Levi Preston — former best friends turned rivals, friends-to-enemies-to-lovers |
| Core tropes | Revenge plot, second chance, popularity contest, glow-up, toxic best friend, slow burn |
| Setting | An elite all-girls private school competing for the Beaumont-Gardiner Award |
| Heat level | 1/5 — closed-door young adult |
| Series | Standalone — HEA with an epilogue |
| Content notes | Bullying, cursing, friendship abandonment, alcohol and some drug use, classism, emotional manipulation, body shaming, infidelity (minor) |
How Spicy Is Freddie and Stella Got Hot?
A 1/5, and deliberately so. romance.io has the book in its database, tagged f/f, young adult and enemies-to-lovers, but has no steam rating for it — which is the norm for YA, since that site is built to catalogue adult heat. The publisher lists it for ages fourteen to eighteen, and the reader reports match: “cute,” “cheesy” and “fluff” are the words readers use for the romance, and nobody I read mentions anything on the page beyond that.
The one thing worth flagging is that the title is doing marketing work. “Hot” here means the makeover, not the heat, and a reader expecting a spicy romance will be surprised. For other sapphic YA at the same level, You Should See Me in a Crown and She Drives Me Crazy both sit at 1/5 on this site.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you grew up on Mean Girls and Heathers, you enjoy heroines who make genuinely bad decisions, you read for a funny narrator above everything, and you want queer teens whose sexuality is simply not the problem.
You may want to skip it if: you need consequences to stick and an unrealistic reconciliation ruins a book for you, you cannot spend three hundred pages with a best friend you actively dislike, you want the romance to be the main event, or you are expecting any heat at all.
In short: a very funny, very messy sapphic revenge comedy whose ending is kinder than its plot.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)
This is a traditionally published book with strong critical support and a modest reader footprint. The trade coverage is real — Publishers Weekly starred it, and Booklist, Kirkus, BCCB and Shelf Awareness all reviewed it positively. The reader base is smaller: 240 Goodreads ratings eight months after release, 16 on Amazon, and a large share of the written reviews come from NetGalley advance copies and a blog tour rather than from readers who found it on their own. I could not find an audiobook — Amazon lists only hardcover and Kindle, and Libro.fm carries Horne’s earlier books but not this one. TikTok search results for the title sit behind a login wall and Reddit could not be checked from here, so I cannot tell you whether there is an organic BookTok or Reddit conversation. What I can say is that one enthusiastic reviewer writes that she needs the book to go viral, which is usually a sign it has not.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): Freddie’s voice, first and by a distance — reviewers quote her jokes back, and “laughing out loud” recurs. Then the messiness: “messy” is the recurring word, used almost always as a compliment, alongside “unhinged” and “diabolical.” Readers treat the film comparisons as accurate rather than as marketing. The queer representation gets consistent credit, with several readers specifically praising a school where being gay is not the conflict. The epilogue has its own fans. StoryGraph’s moods back all of this: 73% funny, 58% emotional, and 77% of readers say the character development is strong.
What readers argue about and complain about: The ending, above everything. Roughly thirteen of the thirty or so reviews I read object to how easily Stella is forgiven and how neatly the fallout resolves, and one three-star reader says outright that Stella did not deserve a redemption arc. Kirkus reaches the same conclusion — that the ending feels rushed and the conflicts resolve unrealistically — and that agreement between critic and readers is a stronger signal than either on its own. The other trade pull-quotes do not mention the ending at all. Second: Stella herself. A smaller group finds her so unredeemable from the first page that they cannot understand the friendship, which makes the redemption harder still. Third: the adults, who readers describe as absent or cartoonish — rich parents who exist mainly to be complained about. Beyond that, scattered single-reader notes: a romance told through backstory rather than shown, a slow middle, heavy italics, and prose one two-star reader found overwrought. Opinions divide on the forgiveness itself — a few readers argue that teenagers really would reconcile this way, and that the ending suits a YA audience better than an adult one.
The standalone question worth asking first: none — it is a complete story with an HEA and an epilogue, and nothing follows it. The better question is where to go next in Horne’s catalogue. Her previous YA novel, Don’t Let It Break Your Heart, sits at almost exactly the same Goodreads average (3.94 across about 940 ratings), so it is a like-for-like next step. Her middle-grade books rate higher — Hazel Hill Is Gonna Win This One holds a 4.44 — but they are aimed at younger readers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Freddie and Stella Got Hot a standalone?
Yes. It is a complete standalone YA novel with a happy ending and an epilogue. There is no sequel and no cliffhanger.
How spicy is Freddie and Stella Got Hot?
Not at all — 1/5. It is a closed-door young adult romance for ages fourteen and up, and “hot” in the title refers to the makeover, not the heat. romance.io lists the book but gives it no steam rating.
Is Freddie and Stella Got Hot a lesbian romance?
Yes. The central romance is between two girls, Freddie and Levi, and most of the cast is openly queer, with lesbian and bisexual identities named on the page. There is no coming-out storyline and very little homophobia.
Is it really like Mean Girls?
Very much, and readers say the comparison is accurate. It borrows the infiltrate-the-popular-girls plot and the rich private-school setting, then adds a revenge scheme closer to Heathers or Do Revenge.
Is there an audiobook of Freddie and Stella Got Hot?
Not that I could find. As of September 2026 Amazon lists only hardcover and Kindle editions, and Libro.fm stocks Maggie Horne’s earlier books but not this one.
If You Loved Freddie and Stella Got Hot, Read These Next
If the popularity contest was the draw, You Should See Me in a Crown runs a prom-queen campaign through the same high-school status machinery. For a scheme that turns into a romance, She Gets the Girl is the book one early reviewer paired this with, and it shares the plotting-leads-to-feelings engine. And for a sapphic YA rivalry that turns romantic, She Drives Me Crazy offers another YA rom-com where the friction between two girls turns into something else.
For more in this register, browse our complete enemies-to-lovers reading list or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
Freddie and Stella Got Hot wants to be the sapphic Mean Girls, and for most of its length it earns the comparison. The narrator is genuinely funny, the scheming is gleefully nasty, and the queer cast gets to be messy without being punished for being queer. It also resolves its cruelty too easily, keeps its adults off the page, and leaves the romance underfed next to the friendship plot. Whether that trade is worth it depends on how much you need the ending to match the damage — but readers who come for the voice and the chaos get a fast, sharp, very funny book. Check Freddie and Stella Got Hot on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, Freddie and Stella Got Hot ranks as a voice-first sapphic YA revenge comedy — funny and gleefully messy, held back by an ending that forgives too fast, and best approached for Freddie’s narration and the scheme rather than the romance.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 3.8/5
- ✓ 3.93 average across 240 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ Starred Publishers Weekly review
- ✓ 4.07 on StoryGraph, 5% did-not-finish
- ✓ Ending is the dominant complaint
Romance ★★★★☆ 3.7/5
- ✓ Kirkus calls it a swoonworthy slow burn
- ✓ Friends-to-enemies-to-lovers with real history
- ✓ Falling for Levi carries moral weight
- ✓ Some readers found it told, not shown
Characters ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ 77% of StoryGraph readers rate development strong
- ✓ Freddie grows a spine convincingly
- ✓ Clever inversion of the Mean Girls archetypes
- ✓ Stella divisive, adults barely exist
Writing ★★★★☆ 4.1/5
- ✓ Voice and dialogue praised across trade outlets
- ✓ Laugh-out-loud inner monologue
- ✓ Short chapters keep it moving
- ✓ Heavy italics and overwrought moments noted
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.8/5
- ✓ Friendship breakup lands hard
- ✓ 58% of StoryGraph readers tag it emotional
- ✓ Stella’s escalation genuinely unsettles
- ✓ Easy forgiveness blunts the consequences
Heat Level ★☆☆☆☆ 1/5
- ✓ Closed-door YA for ages 14–18
- ✓ Readers call the romance cute and fluffy
- ✓ No steam rating on romance.io
- ✓ Title implies heat the book lacks
Ending ★★★☆☆ 3.2/5
- ✓ Complete standalone with an HEA
- ✓ Epilogue singled out for praise
- ✓ Freddie’s arc closes cleanly
- ✓ Around 13 reviewers found it unbelievable
Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ One-sitting length invites a second pass
- ✓ At least one reader plans a reread
- ✓ 73% of StoryGraph readers call it funny
- ✓ No audiobook, and the ending lingers
Affiliate disclosure: Lesbian Romance Reads is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. If you buy through the link below we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you.
1 thought on “Freddie and Stella Got Hot Review — Is It Worth Reading?”