This one just across the board felt unsatisfying and falls sharply in the category of “why did I read that”. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right place to read a depressing story about a teenage girl. As I make my own Arya Stark-like list of “Alabama, Missouri, Georgia, Ohio” I just didn’t want to spend a few hours witnessing yet another abuse of a young girl without the tools to defend herself. I dunno.
This is a story about a young woman named Jo. She’s 15, has two best friends, and it’s the mid-1980s. Surely nothing can go wrong, right? Until like two pages in (and this isn’t spoilers, it’s right there in the summary) she’s driving a golf cart and accidentally kills one of said best friends. While this gets a fair amount of real estate in the book, it always felt like a superficial impact on her. And maybe what the reader is supposed to take away is her shock and her inability to cope with what had happened. That she was shunned so utterly by her community that she left for a boarding school almost immediately. That this was a genuinely freak accident (and the type of thing that is going to skyrocket to the top of my fear list) she had to shoulder like it was a murder. At times, it felt like a plot device to get her to that boarding school. I didn’t like that.
And then at the boarding school she’s preyed upon and abused by one of the teachers, because men like that pick their targets very deliberately. She’s bright, she’s alone, she’s incredibly vulnerable – and really, who is going to believe her. The abuse isn’t terribly explicit or exploitative (thank you, female author) but ugh is it creepy af. I also didn’t like that this is where the book gets its title, to me it helped with the near-dismissal of the death of her best friend. But that’s me.
Anyway. It peeled me away from my Game of Thrones re-read and maybe that’s also why I didn’t like it. Nothing gets between me and my GoT.