REVIEW: THE HATE U GIVE by Angie Thomas

THE HATE U GIVE by Angie Thomas

RATING: ★★★★★

GENRE: Young adult, bordering on new adult.

THEMES: The Black Lives Matter movement, race, identity, coming of age, activism, poverty, and police brutality.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Police brutality, gun violence, gang violence, mentions of domestic violence, mentions of drug use.

Once upon a time there was a hazel-eyed boy with dimples. I called him Khalil. The world called him a thug.

THE HATE U GIVE, or, as it’s affectionately abbreviated by fans, THUG, centers around Starr Carter, a sixteen year old black girl living in Garden Heights, an impoverished, mostly-black neighborhood, but who attends the nearly all-white high school, Williamson Prep. Identity and perception rule Starr’s world, and while most teens can relate to this, as a teen of color, Starr is living in two worlds, constantly trying to manage how to balance between “Garden Heights Starr” and “Williamson Starr”: Garden Heights Starr can speak the way she wants to without feeling like she’ll be seen as improper or “ghetto”, while Williamson Starr has to hold her tongue; Garden Heights Starr can be angry and emotional and complicated, while Williamson Starr can’t be without being perceived as “the angry black girl”; Garden Heights Starr is only known as Big Mao’s daughter who works at the store, while Williamson Starr is a basketball star, a good dancer, a cool girl–but also as one of the only black girls in school.

Williamson Starr doesn’t use slang – if a rapper would say it, she doesn’t say it, even if her white friends do. Slang makes them cool. Slang makes her “hood”. Williamson Starr holds her tongue when people piss her off so nobody will think she’s the “angry black girl”. Williamson Starr is approachable. No stank-eyes, none of that. Williamson Starr is no confrontational. Basically, Williamson Starr doesn’t give anyone a reason to call her ghetto.

While juggling these two identities and trying to navigate some normal teenage dilemmas–friendships that wane, romantic relationships that are starting to get physical–Starr hides a deeply-buried trauma that she is reminded of every day: the death of one of her best friends, Natasha, at the hands of a drive-by, assumedly gang related shooting.

One night, Starr is invited to a party in Garden Heights, where she and another of her best friends, Khalil, catch up. In another room, gunshots fire off, and the party ends abruptly, teens running out of the house. Khalil and Starr, running out together, decide to carpool home.

Then Khalil is pulled over by the police.

Then Khalil, like so many black boys in the USA, is assumed to be a threat.

Then Khalil is shot and killed in the middle of the street.

Days later, the process begins for a trial against the officer. And Starr has a choice: to speak out against the injustice or to stay silent.

I’ve seen it over and over again; a black person gets killed just for being black, and all hell breaks loose. I’ve tweeted RIP hashtags, reblogged pictures on Tumblr, and signed very petition out there. I always said that if I saw it happen to somebody. I would have the loudest voice, making sure the world knew what went down. Now I am that person, and I’m too afraid to speak.

It has been a while since I last read a YA novel. Come to think of it, I don’t know if I can actually recall the last YA novel I read.

I have nothing against YA or new adult in the slightest–I just often find myself wanting to read more adult themes and characters. But one night, on a spontaneous date-night trip to the closest Barnes and Noble (my boyfriend lovingly enables supports my bookworminess), the beautiful, shining, gilded-covered collectors’ edition version of THE HATE U GIVE, a novel that has been sitting on my TBR since its release in 2017, I had to get it and start reading it.

At first, THUG looks like a behemoth of a book. At just under 450 pages, I think this is one of the longer YA books I’ve come across, and I was wondering–not really nervous, though–how Angie Thomas would be able to keep the story engaging for such a large span of text.

This was one of the quicker books I’ve read, and I attribute that to both Angie Thomas’ style of writing, which has a really distinct voice and so easily speaks the way teenagers do, and the gripping story. There wasn’t a single point in THUG where I felt that there was a lull or a slow period, and it kept me engaged and hungry for more.

I have horrible, horrible motion sickness, and I read this book for 4 hours on a round trip bus ride. That should speak for itself.

Thomas weaves together the incredibly dark, heavy traumas that shape Starr’s life and her family’s–their struggles in Garden Heights as people who want to help change their neighbors and influence them to better themselves, the danger they face in a neighborhood rife with gang violence and a tight police grip, and Starr’s witnessing of two of her best friends being brutally shot in front of her before she graduates high school–and some pretty average, everyday struggles and triumphs of coming of age. There is a beautiful balance of bright humor and supporting friendships, budding activism and bravery, pain and its catharsis.

THUG is the kind of book that I think every single white person should read. Will it make everyone comfortable? No. Will it shed light on Black Lives Matter, whiteness, and police brutality? Absolutely.

Sometimes we need to read something that will make us uncomfortable. Sometimes we need a reminder that this world is not perfect for all of its people. All of its children.

THUG is that necessary reminder, that brave little voice, that rallying cry that now, more than ever, we need to support people of color and assert their validity, their right to this earth, the importance of their lives.

Damned If I Will: OUTLANDER’s Problem with Sex and “Salvation”

Let’s get this out of the way: I majorly fell off of the blogging train. I got busy with work and personal projects and trying to meet my 2018 reading goal of 50 books (which I did! Yay!) that I…just…forgot to sit down and review the things I read for the last few months.

But I’m back, with some thoughts I have on Diana Gabaldon’s OUTLANDER, a novel-turned-Starz-series that is half steamy romance, half historical fiction.

Before I dive in to my thoughts on the cult classic, I would like to give some major warnings: first, and most importantly, there will be a lot of detail about sexual assault and talk about PTSD in this review, so if you are triggered by this, please take care. Second, general spoilers ahead. I’ll be glossing over the entirety of the plot and focusing more on a scene very close to the end of the novel. Third, there are some general NSFW/sex scenes I want to discuss.

I was very, very excited to start reading (well, more specifically listening to the audiobook, but hush) OUTLANDER. It had been energetically recommended to me by co-workers who read the entire series and are now watching the show. As far as genres go, it was a perfect recipe for me: I have been looking for a romantic story set in this time period and I have a major soft spot for Scotland.

And for the first 20 chapters or so of this hulking, 41-chapter behemoth, I really did like it. The slow build in tension between Claire, a nurse who is swept out of her 1945 honeymoon into the 18th century, and Jamie, the Scottish Highlander with a complicated past, was palpable enough that I often found myself yelling at my car radio on my way to and from work, because damnit, just KISS already, you fools.

But then, things started slowly chipping my swooning state away. There are controversial scenes galore, such as Jamie beating Claire as punishment for disobeying his orders, and some…questionable choices of scenery for Jamie and Claire’s rendezvous (in front of a sleeping child? Maybe not the best idea, guys), but my major problem with OUTLANDER is how consenting sexual encounters are handled versus non-consenting, manipulative ones.

I don’t think I’m over-exaggerating by saying that 90% of the consenting, steamy sex scenes between Jamie and Claire are written with the slimmest amount of detail to get the point across. Diana Gabaldon has a tendency to begin her sex scenes with some glorious tension, but eventually dissolve into the one phrase that became my absolute ire throughout my 50-hour listening: “Sometime later…” ends sex scenes almost every. Single. Time.

For a novel featuring a 23 year-old man who is quite sex-crazed after losing his virginity, there is a lot of sex, but only a few principle scenes that deluge more than:

1. Jamie or Claire initiates foreplay.
2. Jamie penetrates Claire, which (as is the case in a lot of depictions of heterosexual, “P-in-V” sex in media) gives her far more pleasure than it should.
3. Diana Gabaldon promptly fans herself and promptly fast-forwards to the post-sex pillow talk that occurs–unsexy groan–“sometime later.”

mfw diana gabaldon writes “sometime later” for the 80th time in a row

In the many sex scenes scattered throughout the latter half of the novel, there also isn’t a lot of prioritizing–or even considering–Claire’s sexual pleasure. There is one scene that fully prioritizes Claire’s pleasure: shortly after their marriage, Jamie wants to give Claire oral sex, and (sigh, like most depictions of this in media) Claire is hesitant because she’s never done it before and she’s afraid of repulsing her husband who clearly just wants to do this for her, but eventually, she consents. In a scene that, for all intents and purposes, should be given credence as a defining moment in Claire’s sexual life, her experience is framed as some kind of mystical, ungrounded experience, as if she’s wading through the cosmos instead of actually feeling anything:

Consciousness fragmented into a number of small separate sensations: the roughness of the linen pillow, nubbled with embroidered flowers; the oily reek of the lamp, mingled with the fainter scent of roast beef and ale and the still fainter wisps of freshness from the wilting flowers in the glass; the cool timber of the wall against my left foot, the firm hands on my hips. The sensations swirled and coalesced behind my closed eyelids into a glowing sun that swelled and shrank and finally exploded with a soundless pop that left me in a warm and pulsing darkness.

–Chapter 17, “We Meet A Beggar.”

(Seriously, Diana? Roast beef and ale is the detail you’re giving me here? ROAST BEEF AND ALE?!)

In clear contrast, Gabaldon dedicates nearly an entire chapter (Chapter 39, if you want to skip it) to discuss, in full, horrifying detail, Jamie’s sexual assault and torture at the hands of series villain Captain Jack Randall.

I just want to express, for a moment, that while sexual assault is often a gratuitous, unnecessary device used to force a character’s growth when other options are readily available, I don’t think that means that it shouldn’t be something that happens in fiction. It is real, it happens to many, many people, and when discussed properly, it can shed light on a subject that is so little talked about. I think the subject of men being victims of sexual assault is talked about even less, and for that, I commend the series for shedding light on this topic and for portraying Jamie’s victimhood so very accurately in this chapter. But that is about all of the credit I give, because the way Gabaldon handles it after Jamie’s disclosure (at least in the first book of the series) is a bit despicable.

After being beaten and assaulted to his near death, the stress consuming him, Jamie is irritable, easily startled, anxious, withdrawn, and wildly swinging between rage and tears, a textbook illustration of post-traumatic stress disorder. Being around Claire, someone he once found incredibly easy to be physically intimate with, is clearly a triggering experience:

He started violently when I touched him. His eyes, still glazed with sleep, were sunk deep and his face was haunted by dreams. I took his hand between both of mine, but he wrenched it away. With a look of near-despair, he shut his eyes and buried his face in the pillow.

Claire is angered by Jamie’s emotional and physical distance from her, and I didn’t fault her for this at first. Not everyone understands the mental severity of being sexually assaulted when it hasn’t happened to them, and Claire feels wounded by her husband being afraid of her when she hasn’t done anything wrong. She wants to heal Jamie, very, very badly, and she asks him to speak to her.

In a moment of complete vulnerability, fear, and helplessness, Jamie bravely decides to share every scathing detail of his assault with Claire, who can barely stand the recounting herself. He is baffled, like so many victims are, that not only did his rapist hurt him and use him, but that the experience brought him pleasure, something he had only ever experienced with his wife. It breaks him.

I truly began to dislike and borderline hate Claire for how she decides to move forward with this information. Because it’s the 18th century and healing environments are not sterile, Jamie’s wounds become severely infected, and the monks of the abbey where Jamie and Claire have taken refuge have decided to give him the Anointing of the Sick, often given to people who are near death.

Claire is unable to accept that Jamie is dying and decides that she can’t wait through the night to see if he survives: she must force Jamie to fight for his life.

She does so by reenacting nearly every single detail of Jamie’s assault, down to the scent of lavender in the room–something that she knows was particularly stressful for Jamie:

I unlaced the front of my robe and rubbed my body quickly with handfuls of the lavender and valerian. It was a pleasant, spicy smell, distinctive and richly evocative . . . A smell that, to Jamie, must recall the hours of pain and rage spent wrapped in its waves. I rubbed the last of it vigorously between my palms and dropped the fragrant shreds on the floor.

She grabs Jamie roughly, and, in the voice of his rapist, tells him that “he’s not done yet”; all while Jamie, half-conscious, weakly tries to crawl away while pleading with Claire/Randall. Reminder: Jamie is on his deathbed, presumably, and Claire is making him relive the most horrifying moment of his life. She gropes him and he screams in terror.

Then, she reenacts a specific moment of his assault, when Jack Randall cut into Jamie’s chest, tastes his blood, and forces Jamie to do the same:

I took the knife from the table and drew it firmly across his chest, along the path of the freshly healed scar. He gasped with the shock of it, and arched his back. Seizing a towel, I scrubbed it briskly over the wound. Before I could falter, I forced myself to run my fingers over his chest, scooping up a gout of blood which I rubbed savagely over his lips. There was one phrase that I didn’t have to invent, having heard it myself. Bending low over him, I whispered, “Now kiss me.”

This snaps Jamie into fighting back: he throws Claire off of him with a surprising amount of strength for a man on the brink of death, chases her around the room, pins her to the ground, then, realizing that she is a woman by seeing her breasts, mistakes her for his mother and reverts to a childlike state before passing out.

I hated every moment of this scene, and especially the fact that Claire takes the moment of trust that Jamie shared with her and irresponsibly, despicably, impatiently uses it to scare him back to life–and it works. Claire is rewarded for doing something that could have just as easily killed Jamie with the added stress, and Gabaldon paints this scene as something necessary and equally-painful for Claire as it is for Jamie when it is not, will not ever be, could not ever be.

I had plans to finish the series and move forward to the show, and because of this chapter, I’m not sure if I still do. The fact that it’s easier for Gabaldon to describe not one, but two non-consensual sexual acts in full detail than to describe sex between two willing participants is hard to overlook, and the fact that Claire’s manipulation of Jamie is seen as an act of love and a means of salvation is harder still.

I refuse to believe that love is this selfish, that hurting someone so deeply can be healing, and that a relationship like Claire’s and Jamie’s, given its tendencies to believe that loving, hurting, and healing are so intimately interwined, is healthy.

 

 

REVIEW: THE FEVER by Megan Abbott

THE FEVER by Megan Abbott

RATING: ★★★★☆

SIMILAR READS: Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman.

GENRE: New adult horror/thriller.

I have had an interest in witches for a very long time–specifically, with the Salem witch trials. In fifth grade, my class held a history fair where we could pick any historical topic we wanted, research it, and make a huge, three-part poster about it. I picked the Salem witch trials and made an aptly creepy poster: painted black, with red paper and printouts of 17th-century illustrations of the hysteric courthouse and its flailing girls, pointing their fingers at their next accused witch.

In college, to my excitement, we studied Salem as a phenomenon, looking into the various theories that have been made about why these girls, in this specific environment, acted the way they did. Was it a mass-spread anxiety borne by a community that faced massive amounts of death each winter due to the harsh conditions? Or a demand for a marginalized group in society–young girls, who virtually had no autonomy–to claim a sort of power? Or a game gone too far?

There have been multiple similar incidences since Salem of communities suddenly falling into an unexplained, shared hysteria, one, in 2012, affecting 18 teenaged girls in a Le Roy, New York high school, who all simultaneously fell ill with unexplained seizures.  Parents clamored for answers: what was the school hiding? What was making their daughters sick? Was it hazardous waste?

I’m not sure if Megan Abbott has revealed if this incident in Le Roy served as inspiration for THE FEVER, but it certainly feels like it was. And, unsurprisingly, I absolutely loved it.

Deenie, Lise, and Gabby are best friends attending Dryden high school and experiencing the awkwardness of the coming-of-age years: beginning to experiment with sex, or at least entertaining the idea of doing so; navigating the sometimes brutal social climate of high school friendships; and struggling with the concept that they are slowly being seen more as “young women” and less as children.

On a seemingly normal morning, Deenie and Lise are sitting in class when, suddenly, Lise collapses to the floor, seizing in the middle of class.

Lise is taken to the hospital, and the rumor mill begins: she’s pregnant, she’s on drugs…

Did she go to the lake? One student posits.

The Dryden lake is a green, thick mass of algae and god-knows-what-else. Local legend has it that a boy died in the lake and anyone who comes in contact with it gets sick. Deenie, Lise, Gabby, and other girls at the high school have been to the lake–recently. But Deenie brushes aside any of the rumored causes: if it was caused by the lake, wouldn’t the other girls be getting sick, too?

And that’s when it begins: Gabby faints during a band concert. A slew of high school girls are suddenly dropping like flies in the middle of class, seizing, vomiting, twitching, experiencing hallucinations. Deenie is one of the few girls not affected.

Parents in Dryden are rushing to conclusions. In an anti-vax uprising, some blame the recent outcropping of HPV vaccines. Some blame the school for somehow not complying with hygiene and other contamination standards. As the town begins to fold in on itself, Deenie, her father, Tom, and her brother, Eli try to find out the true cause while trying to assemble some sense of normalcy, but soon, the hysteria becomes too much to handle.

I can safely say that I’m a Megan Abbott fan now. I really enjoyed the narrative being split between Deenie, Eli, and Tom–each character has their own struggles with their own darkness, their own coming-of-age-related anxieties, and their own ideas about what’s happening in Dryden. Abbott does an incredible job of slowly building a very scary narrative that only truly begins to unravel in the last few chapters, and I can safely say that I actually did not expect the actual cause of the sickness.

THE FEVER is a pretty perfect October read if you are looking for a Salem-esque feeling. An essence of hysteria is deep in the bones of this book, making it an incredibly thrilling read.

REVIEW: VOX by Christina Dalcher

VOX by Christina Dalcher

RATING: ★★★★★

SIMILAR READS: THE HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood.

GENRE: Dystopian fiction.

“Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. That’s what they say, right?”

I have given few books this year a full five-star rating. VOX is, unquestionably, deserving of it. When the Trump era began, I read HANDMAID’S TALE, thinking that it would be all too real, too scary, to get through with the realities of this administration on the horizon. I think that’s what makes a good dystopian novel: the ability for the horrors of the new society to seem achievable. Maybe not perfectly realistic at the moment, but looming in the future, dark, waiting.

I’m going to be honest, while HANDMAID’S was certainly a chilling dystopia with a lot of cultural connections and fears realized within its narrative, I didn’t think it was as realistic (or, I guess, “achievable”) as a lot of readers made it out to be. VOX, while not entirely, seamlessly plausible, certainly lays out a possible, future America in which women’s voices are silenced. Quick warning here for HANDMAID’S spoilers!

After taking a lot of time to mull over the differences and figure out what it really was about this book that struck me more than Atwood’s seminal, misogynistic, dystopian novel, I figured a few things out.

First, where HANDMAID’S TALE’s fundamentalist Christian dictatorship is thrust upon the government by a terrorist attack, VOX’s is the result of the same process and ideologies responsible for the Trump administration–racist, sexist, conservative, white America felt empowered by a candidate who embodied their ideals. At the same time, voter turnout among the people who could help change the tide–white, liberal women and men–was minimal. Protagonist Jeanie isn’t very concerned at the onslaught of the Pure administration, and her college roommate, Jackie, a gay woman and basically the picture of today’s pussyhat-wearing, Women’s March-ing feminist, tries, to no avail, to convince her to march, protest, and vote. One cyclical message throughout the text is multiple interpretations of an Edmund Burke quote: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Jeanie says it, Jackie says it, and Jeanie’s children say it, and it serves as a reminder of the fact that ignorance, privilege, and the ideas that influence so many people today–that their votes won’t matter anyway, that whatever changes could happen won’t be “that bad,” that they can skate by without consequence–can have incredible consequences for everyone.

Where HANDMAID’S touches upon issues that undoubtedly plagued the 80s, like women’s reproductive rights, VOX chillingly touches upon issues that plague women and LGBTQIA+ people today. In a world where Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony is seen as a lie, where women and LGBTQIA+ people’s stories aren’t being listened to, VOX rings incredibly true. I actually found a lot of solace in this book; I was able to identify with Jeanie’s palpable rage at the world because in this administration, I feel that, too.

And maybe this means that now is the perfect time for people to pick up this book–when they’re feeling their angriest, when the elections are only so far away, when they need that extra motivation to resist.

I certainly think so.

REVIEW: Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott

Hello, everyone!

Before I start my review, I just wanted to make a quick little introduction, since this is my first post! My name is Kristen. I’m a 23-year-old from New England with a degree in English, and I have had a love for books, reading, and writing since I can remember. This blog is intended to be a more in-depth version of my bookstagram, @bookishkristen, plus some little extra lifestyle blogging as I see fit! I’m pretty much a jack of all trades when it comes to my reading interests, but recently I’ve been gravitating toward women-centric reads and short story collections. Since Halloween is right around the corner, I’ve been looking into some spookier versions of these genres, and GIVE ME YOUR HAND is certainly a bit of a creepy, psychological thriller that will get you in the mood for fall.

A friend of mine recommended that I start reading Megan Abbott, so one day as I was browsing the “new fiction” shelves at the front of my town library, GIVE ME YOUR HAND immediately caught my eye.

GIVE ME YOUR HAND by Megan Abbott

RATING: ★★★★☆

SIMILAR READS: THE GIRLS by Emma Cline, GIRLS ON FIRE by Robin Wasserman, TIPS FOR LIVING by Reneé Shafransky.

She had done this thing to me, burdened me with this vile, howling thing. And now it shuddered in me always and I’d felt I might have to live with it forever. I was right.

Kit Owens is a scientist at the famed Dr. Severin’s lab, vying for a position on her team to investigate the mysterious disease that haunts (cis) women: PMDD, or premenstrual dysmorphic disorder, a severe form of premenstrual syndrome that forces women to be irritable, depressed, and pained. In extreme cases, PMDD has caused women to hallucinate and even forced them to be violent. Kit prides herself in being the one other woman in the lab, and devotes her life to her work, spending most of her day doing research; the first one to get to the lab in the morning and the last to leave at night.

But Kit is harboring a dark secret about her former best friend, Diane Fleming. In high school, the pair were inseparable: both had ambitions of becoming scientists and one day working with Dr. Severin, pushing each other to succeed so that one day, their ambitions would come true. But Diane’s secret shattered their relationship forever.

As the day of the team selection approaches, Dr. Severin announces a newcomer to the lab: Diane. And with her return into Kit’s life, she begins worrying for her own safety, not only in a physical sense, but in a professional sense: Diane was always one step ahead of Kit, just a tiny bit smarter, a tiny bit faster…and if Diane’s secret doesn’t take her down, Diane will herself.

I have read few women-centric books where the protagonist is a woman in science (I didn’t include this in the similar reads section because this isn’t a thriller, but if you are looking for more “women in STEM” reads, DAPHNE by Will Boast is excellent), and this adds such an extra element to this story. Kit experiences a lot of sexism in the office, which is not too surprising, even when the lab deals with a (cis) woman-centric topic such as PMDD. Dr. Severin, Kit, and Diane are all similarly ruthless in their claiming of the male-dominated space, and we see how that’s perceived as ruthless, cold, and unfeminine throughout the novel, but it isn’t meant to be a marker of how evil or bad any of the characters are: it’s merely an added dimension to the already complex and thrilling narrative that is unfolding with Kit and Diane’s secret colliding in a literal and physical way.

Highly recommend GIVE ME YOUR HAND, and I think I may be on a bit of a Megan Abbott kick now, at least during the spookier months…;)

Thanks for reading, and until next time, fellow bookies!