Scandal, justice, romance, sex positivity, subversive anti-sexism—just try to put it down.
Enraged by unpunished sexual assaults and the unchallenged rape culture at their high school, three new friends resolve to take action.
White high schooler Grace Salter has just moved to Prescott, Oregon, and finds messages of pain and anguish scratched into the walls of her new room. Overtaken by curiosity, she does the unthinkable for a new girl at school and talks to two girls during lunch: Rosina Suarez, a Mexican-American queer punk rocker, and Erin DeLillo, a white girl with Asperger’s who admires the android Data from Star Trek. They both explain that the former occupant of Grace’s room was effectively run out of town after accusing three popular jocks, two of them current students, of gang-raping her at a party. Grace is incensed and, together with Rosina and Erin under the collective pseudonym the Nowhere Girls, rallies other girls in the school to rise up against misogyny, rapists, and the power structures that protect both. Reed’s refusal to shy away from the entrenched realities of sexism as well as the oft-overlooked erasure of intersectionality within feminism yields a highly nuanced and self-reflective narrative that captures rape culture’s ubiquitous harm without swerving into didactic, one-size-fits-all solutions or relying on false notions of homogenous young womanhood.
Scandal, justice, romance, sex positivity, subversive anti-sexism—just try to put it down. (Fiction. 13-17)Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-8173-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
In the end, it’s more liberating than oppressive, with bits of humor and a jubilant pageant takeover by beauty rebels to...
In a small Texas town, a confident fat girl confronts new challenges to her self-esteem.
At age 16, Willowdean—her mother calls her Dumplin’—has a good sense of herself. She’s uninterested in Mom’s raison d’être, the Clover City Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant, which annually takes over the town and Will’s own house. Mom won once and now runs the pageant, dieting to fit her old dress and pressuring Will to diet too. Will doesn’t. She mourns her beloved aunt Lucy, a second parent to her who died six months ago, and simmers with pleasure over a new, hot, sort-of-boyfriend. However, his touch makes Will panic with newfound insecurity. She loses him, loses her old best friend, gains new social-outsider buddies (a familiar trope)—and finds triumph somewhere amid Dolly Parton, drag queens, breaking pageant rules, and repairing relationships. The text refreshingly asserts that thinness is no requirement for doing and deserving good things, that weight loss isn’t a cure-all, and that dieting doesn’t work anyway. The plot arc, amazingly, avoids the all-too-common pitfall of having its fat protagonist lose weight. Unfortunately, Murphy loses her step and undermines her main point in the mournful, cringeworthy details of Lucy’s death and life, which are blamed on extreme fatness rather than unfairness.
In the end, it’s more liberating than oppressive, with bits of humor and a jubilant pageant takeover by beauty rebels to crown this unusual book about a fat character. (Fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-232718-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Earnest and heartfelt.
Two teenagers make a suicide pact in this poignant, first-person debut.
Sixteen-year-old Aysel’s life “can be neatly divided into two sections: before my father made the nightly news and after.” Since her mentally ill father murdered a local boy with Olympic hopes, Aysel feels as though her only escape from the public shame is suicide. She also worries that her father’s madness is genetic and exists inside her as well. Through a website that matches suicide partners, Aysel meets Roman, a kind, attractive, athletic boy who feels responsible for the drowning death of his little sister. Even though Aysel harbors a passion for science and Roman a love of basketball, they are determined not to let each other “flake out.” Together they begin enacting a fake relationship designed to lull Roman’s overprotective mother into allowing Roman more freedom so they can carry out their fatal plan. But when Aysel begins falling in love with Roman for real, she knows she can no longer follow through on their pact. Can she convince Roman that his life is worth living before it’s too late? Any teen who’s ever felt like an outsider will be able to relate to Aysel’s and Roman’s fully realized characters. The countdown at the beginning of each chapter to the couple’s death date (the same day Roman’s sister died) will help propel readers forward to a hopeful if not entirely unexpected ending.
Earnest and heartfelt. (author’s note, resources) (Fiction. 13-17)Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-232467-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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