Reddit reviews The Girl of Fire and Thorns

In that case, my recommendations are going to be:

• Feed, for a lot of growing up in a dystopian environment
  
• The Girl of Fire and Thorns, as both a stylistic choice (first person present tense) and an awkward teen girl taking on the world (and ruling it). It's first in a trilogy.

I should probably clarify that I mean main characters. You don't see Harry or Elisa making many decisions based around screwing people over: it's always couched in terms of saving their group or maybe one-upping bullies, even if the same outcome with different reasoning could be the Wrong Thing.

I'm very glad that there's some push towards making more nuanced Big Bad characters, but I usually see very one-dimensional institutions or characters to fight against. The Girl of Fire and Thorns was a huge relief in that respect: all of the antagonists had their reasons and could easily be spun as protagonists from a different POV without employing any mental gymnastics.

Actually, maybe The Girl of Fire and Thorns is another book of questionable labels. It does have that nuance, and Elisa always seemed much older than her given age... I think I've pondered before about whether she was deliberately aged down because the narrative style (first person, present) was better suited for a YA than adult audience.