Powerful, essential reading for all high school and college students, parents, and educators.
As a 15-year-old, Prout was sexually assaulted at an elite New England boarding school, a crime that would make the national news before she made the decision to go public with her identity and reclaim her story.
Prout takes readers behind the headlines in this candid and inspiring memoir of her assault and subsequent journey to justice and healing. After a childhood in Tokyo with her biracial (Japanese and white) father, white mother, and two sisters, Prout joined her older sister at St. Paul’s, where a social system based on privilege and status allowed misogyny to flourish unchecked. As a freshman, Prout was raped by a popular senior boy who took her on a “Senior Salute,” a ritualized school tradition wherein seniors tried to “score” younger students before graduation. Prout recounts her traumatic experience and its prolonged aftermath—the bullying and ostracization she endured upon her return to St. Paul’s and the well-publicized trial—in honest and gut-wrenching detail. Prout acknowledges her privilege as a “white, straight, blond-haired girl from an upper-class family” that supported her unconditionally and explains that she wants to use her voice to help create a culture in which all survivors of sexual assault can feel empowered to speak out.
Powerful, essential reading for all high school and college students, parents, and educators. (author’s note, resources, letter from the Prouts, note from co-writer, acknowledgements) (Memoir. 14-adult)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5344-1443-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
A startling series of testimonies about urban violence from New York City teens. These first-person essays on sociological issues first appeared in New Youth Connection, a newspaper for and by students of New York City high schools. By choosing the best essays on the theme of violence, the editors have compiled a book more eloquent than a thousand police reports. For the writers live in housing projects; they know violence all too well. So why do kids kill each other? In their own words, “Kids nowadays are ready to kill . . . over the dumbest things.” You’ll hear talk of trafficking in gold chains—one young man is stabbed for a good fake. Yet the cause of violence is rarely just material. Instead, it erupts when one gets —dissed— (disrespected) too often in a life where to hold onto a shred of dignity is rare. To their credit, two of the teenage boys here write about why they will not pack a pistol: because they’ve seen innocent loved ones get killed, and because it gives the owner a dangerously distorted sense of power. While all the killing seems to involve young men who treat life “like a reset button in a video game,” some of the most abused victims are the young women in their lives—or, in one case, a homosexual young man who cannot take part in their bad-mustached, bad-mouthed behavior. Among the women, one Chinese girl, not dressed provocatively enough to earn the usual stream of catcalls from the corner full of unemployed truants, is angry enough to say, after a bottle is thrown at her, that it’s as though a female in the city “has a bullseye on her body.” Unheard voices crying for a hearing.
Pub Date: Aug. 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83754-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
Bosworth—late of Laguna Beach and The Hills, two MTV series that showcased the lives and loves of Southern California’s young and glamorous—is building a brand for herself: the sensible-yet-sexy older cousin. This book, which shares a title with her recently launched lifestyle website, expands on the romance-advice section of her site and ably offers an appealing mix of generic and specific relationship advice in a breezy, knowing tone. Using a mix of anecdotes from her own life and those of her friends, quizzes, recipes and straight-ahead advice in a post-feminist–meets-retro mashup that may make older readers occasionally gnash their teeth, the author counsels girls never to forget their intrinsic excellence and not to settle for bad relationships. Readers might expect a funny and wise young advisor to address sex more directly than she does here, but this is clearly a title intended to capitalize on a specific moment in its author’s life. Bosworth is focused on broad appeal, not breaking new ground. Overall, the positive aspects of her message outweigh the sigh-worthy bits. (Relationship advice. YA)
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4424-1200-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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