Jesus take the wheel, where do I even begin with this book?!
Okay, so I’ll say right now there are going to be spoilers because I can’t accurately describe why this book drives me crazy without giving away plot elements. So if you were looking forward to reading this book, which does have lots of Big Reveals, don’t read further. A trigger warning as well for abuse, rape, incest, religious abuse, basically anything bad that can happen.
The basic plot is this: Essie is a member of a Duggar-like reality TV family. Her whole life has been spent on camera, ostensibly because of her evangelical preacher father, but really because her sociopathic mother forces everyone in the family to be stars of their wildly successful show. Essie’s older sister left the family under mysterious circumstances, and Essie is desperate to leave as well. She contrives a plan to do so: she will manipulate events so that a schoolmate of hers (who starts the book hating her and wanting nothing to do with her) agrees to marry her for a huge sum of money (they sign a contract and everything!), and once they marry and get that money, she will escape.
Also, the schoolmate is gay. Also, he was sent to a camp to reform kids, which for some reason housed kids who have committed horrible sex crimes along with kids they were trying to force to stop being gay. Also, Essie was repeatedly raped by her sadistic brother and is pregnant by him. Also, that brother was at the same camp as her schoolmate. Also, the woman who interviews Essie regularly is a survivor of a separatist cult whose leader killed her sister. Yeah, there’s reveal upon reveal upon reveal in this book. Books that function that way have a way of making me keep reading them even though I’m hating it because I know it’s bad but I still want to know what happens next.
All these subjects are treated pretty blithely by the author. It’s weird because she makes tons of nods towards appreciating the seriousness of the subjects and the trauma her characters experienced, but because the characters have no depth, you don’t feel like the respect is actually there. The book is told from three perspectives, but the voice is exactly the same in each chapter. You get the sense that each trauma is just A Trauma To Be Written About, not a trauma that happened to THAT character.
Speaking of the lack of character depth, no one in this book acts like a human being. I don’t mean they’re all sociopaths, though plenty of them are and are just one-dimensionally evil. I mean they don’t make decisions like human beings do. Essie’s schoolmate, Rourke, goes from hating her to agreeing to marry her in the course of a chapter. Essie goes from wanting to expose her brother and horrible family throughout the book to deciding that’s an immoral choice back to deciding to expose them, again all in the course of a chapter or two. It’s like everyone is very set in their choices and beliefs until someone shows up to say “but what if you didn’t think that anymore?” and then they immediately change their mind. Everything is done just to further the plot, whether the decision makes any sense or not.
It’s so frustrating, because a really interesting book about fame, authenticity, religious extremism, and trauma COULD be told with this general plot. But this book does not do it, at all.