“What have I done wrong?” That's the question Hyo-in An asks herself as she's ignored and bullied by her former friends at school. She used to get along with everyone, until Juhye Kim and the other kids she thought were her friends began excluding her from their group and treating her horribly. But Hyo-in has an ace up her sleeve that could turn this whole situation around. Her uncle, the developer of the messaging app KitTalk, has given her a special phone that lets her access the group chats where her ex-friends badmouth her behind her back. Her initial hopes of being included again turn into desire for revenge, and Hyo-in begins using the phone to her advantage, making morally questionable choices along the way.

A Group Chat Without Me has story by and art by Bongsoo. Localized by WEBTOON. (October 15, 2025). Rated YA.

Content warning: bullying

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Reading a story like this makes me grateful that the worst internet menaces I had to contend with in school were AIM and chat rooms. Bongsoo's A Group Chat Without Me is a story at once familiar and terrible, a reminder that kids aren't always the best arbiters of their own actions – especially online.

The premise is neatly outlined in the title: Hyo-in discovers that she's the only person who's been left out of a group chat on KitTalk, an app like LINE. And lest you think it's an oversight (if you've been in middle or high school, you already know it's not), it turns out to be at the behest of her “friend” Juhye, who is jealous of the fact that her boyfriend Gyujae liked Hyo-in first. (Although he's such a winner that he makes it sound like he turned Hyo-in down.) How does Hyo-in learn this? Not just through the girls' room gossip network: her uncle is one of the programmers of KitTalk, and he, horrified that his niece is being bullied, gets her all of the chatlogs. Illegal? Absolutely, and he says as much. But sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

Hyo-in's reactions to learning what's going on while everyone else assumes her ignorance are very real. At first, she tries to solve the problem by approaching Juhye, like a kicked dog, hoping for a pet despite all evidence that none will be forthcoming. When Juhye just escalates her bullying, Hyo-in starts playing a complicated game of her own, using the information people think she doesn't have against Juhye, and possibly the rest of the class. Her lynchpin is Dajeong, another member of the group she assumed were her friends. Hyo-in correctly identifies Dajeong as the weak link, the girl who's probably just going along with the other two so as not to find herself in Hyo-in's position. She may also actually like Hyo-in. But at this point, Hyo-in seems to see her more as a crack in the class's armor than a potential ally – and I can't blame her.

A Group Chat Without Me can be hard to read, especially if you've been bullied. Hyo-in's uncle could be a divisive figure because of his approach to helping his niece, not going to the school, but instead giving her access to information illegally. Maybe he doesn't trust the adults to do the right thing for Hyo-in. Either way, he's armed his niece, and Hyo-in, in her swings between anger and despair, is ready to fight back. I, for one, am ready to see her burn them all.

Bolts
Rating:

This was a very uncomfortable story to read because the issues that it deals with are very real. Cyberbullying is still a very prominent thing in this day and age. Centering a story around a young girl who feels excluded and silently marked by her peers is a fascinating one. This is the story of a young girl who feels like her access to social media will finally allow her to get closer to her friends, but all it does is highlight how separated she actually was from everybody. I love the way that Hyo-in An is initially portrayed here, with her constant anxiety and wondering what she did wrong so she can fix it.

The overall premise is very contrived, with her getting access to other people's text messages in a way that doesn't feel realistic. It also feels like the story is constantly going out of its way to both highlight and lampshade some of those creative decisions that allow our protagonist to start reading the text messages in the group chat. However, there is a strong emotional investment here in wanting to make sure that people are given the ability to fight back when they feel like they have been wronged.

The problem is that I think the story jumps the gun way too quickly. The escalation with our lead going in a downward spiral doesn't feel as earned as I think the book wants it to be because the inciting incident for why things got this bad feels rather mundane. There are situations where she becomes a target of bullying, but that doesn't happen until later in the book. There's no definitive moment where it's clear that actions as extreme as reading a person's text logs were justified. That's a shame because I liked the slow, realistic burn that the first two chapters took. The expressions here are really strong, despite the overall simple presentation. I'm also a sucker for shows that will display text or images over people's heads to show what they are actually thinking.

However, that brings up another narrative issue, and that's how the text messages themselves are used in the story. It starts believably with Hyo-in An, looking at old texts from her friends and discovering how they actually feel about her. She doesn't start to put things in place as a way to either placate or get back at said people. However, then she gets access to read people's messages in real time, but the way it's presented is very confusing. She's reading messages as if they are from a solitary group chat just to get information that people shouldn't really be texting about at the moment. It comes off more like she's reading everybody's mind in the moment, then seeing what everybody is texting in real time. It feels like this is a book that has an idea of what story it wants to tell, but it doesn't have the sense to tell that story with all of the available pieces. This doesn't even feel like a case of the story wants you to fill in the blanks, but rather it wants you to try to put a square peg into a round hole., I like the premise and the message that this book is playing around with, but I feel like it needs to be put in the hands of a writer who can really bring out the most of it with this setup.