A gritty read for a woke generation.
A close look at sexual coercion, cyberbullying, and other perils of surviving high school jock culture.
The story hinges around the close-knit trio of Nikki, Ani, and Lydia, who welcome the attractive, worldly new girl Suze into their fold. DeShawn and Marcus, two best friends and outsiders, catch wind of a rumor when a photo circulates revealing Suze, looking drugged, being carried from a party by her friends. DeShawn, empath and gifted tech whiz, intuits that something is wrong while snarky, budding journalist Marcus senses a story. Tarkin, king of the Jonesville jocks, has nude pictures of Suze, and he blackmails her into dumping her friends and becoming his girlfriend. Suze sets out to settle the score, enlisting DeShawn for backup. Things go from bad to worse when DeShawn becomes a suspect in a serious crime. The quick assumption of DeShawn’s guilt exposes the injustices and life-threatening realities he faces as an African American young man while indifferent administrators do little to protect students from harm (Ani is Indian American while Nikki, Lydia, and other major characters are white). Readers glimpse the inner workings of racism in criminal justice procedures, gender-based double standards, sexual coercion, diminishing privacy, and cyberbullying. In exploring and exposing interlocked oppressions, readers will grapple with intriguing twists on a rape revenge story, although the relationship between homophobia and sexism is not meaningfully explored.
A gritty read for a woke generation. (Fiction. 15-19)Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948-34026-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Dottir Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Repellent.
After his burnout mom fails in her suicide attempt, 14-year-old drug addict Jaime is sent to live with his estranged father, a superrich hotshot art dealer.
The book is filled to the brim with angst, profanity and drug use in what feels more like a celebration of bourgeois ennui than a proper examination. An Internet phenom who’s released an album online and posts videos of himself reading his poetry and short stories, Jaime is impossibly talented, attractive, intelligent and sexually charged. Every woman Jaime finds himself attracted to (including adults) offers herself to Jaime in increasingly gratuitous ways. It is hard to see Jaime as anything but a monstrous, spoiled brat, unable to see past his own pain and libido and incapable of complex thought or, apparently, character growth. At over 500 pages, the novel is an exhausting read. There are long passages in which nothing of consequence to character or plot takes place, just lots of navel-gazing. The characters discuss music with no sharp insight, making the endeavor feel like a laundry list of bands that the author really wants readers to know about (he goes so far as to include a playlist at the end of the book). The characters are flat, the romance undercooked, and the only individual of true interest is an author who awkwardly defends criticisms of his books—ones that mirror those made against Myers’ own previous works.
Repellent. (Fiction. 16 & up)Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4424-8722-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
It’ll take a sturdy reader not to keep flinching—or put this exercise in sensation down altogether.
Mean Girls with an occult twist.
Military kid Sofia Flores is used to moving around and always being on the outside, so she’s happy to be embraced by the queen bees in her new high school in tiny Friend, Mississippi. She is a little sorry that Riley and her posse seem to have it in for friendly Brooklyn, but she goes along with them. Though she’s been raised an unbeliever, her beloved grandmother, who lives with Sofia and her mom, is a devout Catholic; something in her responds when Riley decides to “save” her, baptizing her in the girls’ room. What she sees at a party sets off a horrific series of events that ends with maimed and dead teenagers. The bulk of the book takes place in a secret hideout in an abandoned development, and it is there that the girls viciously, bloodily confront Brooklyn, the proceedings causing Sofia to question all her moral certainties (and her immediate survival). The book comes with a “for mature audiences only” label, and refreshingly, this is not a warning about sex but about protracted, unrelenting and graphically described violence. Vega works in the occult element coyly, giving readers and Sofia only glimpses of what may or may not be supernatural evil—but there’s plenty of lovingly described, human-inflicted evil to keep strong-stomached readers occupied.
It’ll take a sturdy reader not to keep flinching—or put this exercise in sensation down altogether. (Horror. 16-18)Pub Date: June 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59514-7226
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Razorbill/Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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