Reviews with content warning for Adult/minor relationship - The Cheerleaders

Reviews tagging 'Adult/minor relationship'

The Cheerleaders by Kara Thomas

82 reviews

kellyreadingbooks's review against another edition

emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No

3.5

There were times where I felt super invested in this YA mystery and other times where I felt a little lukewarm. I think it may have been a smidgen too long. But I still really enjoyed this one like I did with Little Monsters as well. I will continue to pick up this author for sure.

Content Warnings

halebugs's review

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

3mmers's review against another edition

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emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

The Cheerleaders by Kara Thomas ought to thank its lucky stars for its compelling cover design, because without it this would never have ended up on my tbr. Although considering the forthcoming whinge, never reading this might have actually been the better option. This makes it sound worse than it is. As noted, I try to approach all books with an open heart and the only books that make it to the vaunted tbr that I am expecting to hate are so popular they never needed my praise anyway. No, I chose The Cheerleaders because I’ve always wanted to find out what others see in mystery and this seemed as good a place to start as any. That said, I only picked it up because it was the first library audiobook that didn’t have a hold queue and I’d run out of podcasts to listen to while cooking. In this case, I fear that the format was part of the problem. The Cheerleaders has a lot wrong with its narrative elements, but my experience was soured most of all by the narrator. It’s unfair to hold a bad va against the book, but I ended up listening on 1.25x speed just to make the tone of voice more robotic and inhuman. It didn’t help the protagonist’s characterization that she had the voice of the bully from every teen sitcom. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves

Five years ago in the sleepy cliché of Sunnybrook, five cheerleaders died within a month of each other in a tragedy whose effects still reverberate through the town. Two died in a freak car accident. Two were murdered in a shocking incident no one saw coming. And the last committed suicide after the deaths of her best friends. Our protagonist Monica is the younger sister of the last cheerleader to die, and after a summer of failing to find meaning in a self-destructive relationship with an older man, she turns to the unsatisfying resolution of the five deaths. Monica draws further away from her old friends and closer to a childhood teammate of her sister, Ginny, and together they pursue the many loose ends of the case out of the conviction that her sister did not kill herself and all is not as it seems.

I want to talk, in this review, about narrative promises. Narrative promises are what a story implicitly advertises itself as doing. They are the expectations it sets for itself. In romances, the premise that two (or more) people will fall in love is a narrative promise. If they have a whole book’s worth of romantic tension only to part ways at the end because the timing wasn’t right and one of them got a job offer in another city and long distance would just be really tough right now… You’d be justified in feeling a little betrayed. Failing to fulfil them isn’t refreshing; it’s a let down. The many things that are bad about this book largely come down to the fact that its idea of innovation and subversion is not fulfilling its narrative promises. The narrative promise of mysteries is that there is something to discover. All is, in fact, not as it seems. Specifically in this case, The Cheerleaders promises that something is fishing about the five deaths and implies they’re actually all connected. Spoilers:

neither of those things ends up being true. Everything is as it seems. Events are substantially the same as we thought they were. Sometimes a tragic coincidence. Sorry, but if I wanted to read about something that’s just shitty and sad for no reason, I’d read the news.

I’m not interested in being told it’s delusional to expect a mystery from my mystery novel!

This is a mystery novel, so having the protagonist uncover clues and reconstruct events is mandatory. Rather than grapple with how a teenager might discover information that has remained hidden for five years, stuff that is tough to plausibly record like private emotional states or personal secrets, information known only to closed institutions like the police of school administration, The Cheerleaders instead

introduces the disconnected point of view of one of the victims.

This is, frankly, awful. It’s incompetent. This is a mystery novel. The protagonist needs to uncover the information. Having an atemporal point of view switch fill in the details is not tense and it is not satisfying. It’s a massive disappointment. I’m reading this book to watch the character solve the mystery, not to piece it together myself with the knowledge that none of the characters will ever solve it. If I wanted that I’d play Clue, or more likely D&D. It is deeply unsatisfying to end the novel with

the protagonist not ever even starting on a huge part of the mystery.

Sure, it’s subversive, but it doesn’t add anything. It actively takes away from the conventional mystery experience rather than adding to it. Worst of all. The final chapter reveals

yet another point of view character with a flashback to explain all the unresolved plot points.

I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. Alright, I’m a little mad. No one made Kara Thomas do this. When faced with a problem she herself created, she takes the most cowardly and inept route to just narrate everything at the audience like a workplace instructional video. Why couldn’t the murder victims have had diaries? Or social media posts? Or unknown confidants that give us insight into them? There are many solutions here. This is a problem on the macro level (

the overall construction of a mystery plot in which the resolution is that there was nothing mysterious going on at all is not a meaningful reflection on obsession and grief, it’s an underwhelming mystery

), and as we’ll see later, it comes up even in the construction of individual scenes, which continually set up one expectation and then proceed to ignore it.

The most egregious example of this is

Monica’s interview with former cheerleading coach Ally. Monica intends to ask about murdered cheerleader Juliet’s secrets. Did she confide in her coach? It’s not a bad idea and the smartest way to pursue the lead. Instead, Monica switches on a dime to aggressively quizzing Ally about five year old rumours that she has no reason to believe are connected to the murders. It’s nonsensical and it’s frustrating for Monica to turn aside a perfectly good lead in order to act like a tiny psychopath as if she is trying to sabotage her own investigation. The worst thing is that the clue this is supposed to allude to (that Ally was dating the book’s big villain Brandon, who was then, as now, cheating on her with underage girls) could be established without any of this drama. The argument is confusing. Thanks to very weak dialogue and prose — no one here talks like a human being — the scene fails to establish suspicion of a red herring. It feels like contrived drama for drama’s sake, which majorly devalues the rest of the plot. How am I supposed to take the emotional arc of a girl dealing with suppressed grief at the death of her older sister seriously when she goes about it by haranguing some woman about high school ass dating rumours?

I have been a bit cheap with my examples to make a point.

In reality only two of the big mysteries end up being nothingburgers; the car accident was just a car accident and (most gallingly) the suicide — our protagonist’s main motivation all book long — is just a suicide. But the murder was a different murderer than the one we thought. I’m still removing points because they’re both creepazoids of the exact same flavour, but I guess it’s the thought that counts.

The Cheerleaders has the hallmark of bad mysteries which is that you can deduce the killer from the story structure rather than any of the clues. Ask yourself: is there a character who stays close to the spotlight despite having no immediately obvious reason to remain important? Bonus points if they appear once in the beginning and once again at about halfway through as the textbook set-up and reinforcement for the forthcoming pay-off of the reveal.

In this book it’s obviously Brandon, Monica’s adult pseudo-ex, with whom she has a self-destructive summer fling ending with her getting pregnant and having an abortion. Brandon sticks around, spookily appearing at her school. Here’s the thing, he never ends up doing anything other than being vaguely in proximity. Surreally, Monica’s abortion is never referenced directly and only comes up once in the whole book. It was significant enough that I would have bought Brandon sticking around if he knew Monica had been pregnant, but she never tells him and so he’s just sort of there. To nobody’s surprise, a guy who gets ‘seduced’ by a fifteen-year-old actually demonstrates a troubling pattern of behaviour and had been secretly dating one of the murdered cheerleaders, also a minor at the time. He killed her when she threatened to reveal their relationship. It’s the same motivation as the previous suspect, who had also been perving on teenagers.

But wait!

A cheerleader in a secret relationship with an adult man?

Perhaps the climax of a message about how the charmed lives of highschool’s princesses are much more troubled than onlookers might realize? In fairness, the book desperately wants this to be so. It’s named ‘The Cheerleaders’; one edition even has the prominent subtitle ‘five girls lied, five girls died’ (

which isn’t even accurate, only one of the girls was ever duplicitous, and even if we expand that to include all the characters, we only reach a total of four female liars

). It’s weird because The Cheerleaders fumbles this narrative promise so badly by simply… not doing anything.

We learn that the girl with whom Brandon had this illicit relationship had met him after falling in with a bad crowd (individual student) and starting to do drugs). But why did she fall in with this crowd? Did she feel abandoned by her friends? Was she worried about her future? This book isn’t smart enough to ask. We never find out anything about her internal life. The first two deaths are just two strangers who got in an accident. That’s it. No lies, no mystery. Technically Monica never even learns this herself. The final death is a suicide. Narratively it depends on us buying the emotional spiral of a girl who was increasingly alienated from her friends only to tragically outlive them. Compelling stuff, you’d think. But the book doesn’t explain why she is alienated from them. None of them do anything terrible. Their relationship could easily be fixed with a single conversation. Is the tragedy that they never got the chance to have that conversation? Sure wish the book had done a better job of conveying that! They just grow apart. She doesn’t even know one of them is dating an older guy. The issue is that there is no intensity. This is a book; it doesn’t need to be realistic, it needs to be compelling.

I’d like to take a tangent here to talk about a few parts of this plot thread that are emblematic of the failings of the rest of the book. First, The Cheerleaders is really sloppy with its hard numbers.

At the beginning of the book Monica tells us Brandon is eight years older than her, making him ~24, but at the end of the book he tells us that five years ago, at the time of the murder, her was 22. This isn’t the only number that doesn’t scan.

The Cheerleaders’ Goodreads page is full of questions about dates that don’t match up. In mystery novels especially, having hard numbers is important. Establishing a timeline of events is a core part of the mystery novel experience. Lacking clear numbers and dates is not simply a weakness, it is a mistake. I don’t know why this novel cares so little about this part of its premise, but the lack of attention is obvious and damaging. Second, what the novel is interested in is Monica’s deeply weird ambivalence towards her fling. She gets pregnant and the book begins with her in the serious physical pain of an abortion. And then it is only mentioned once in the whole rest of the book. It’s a deeply strange thread to include in an otherwise very pedestrian YA novel.

Monica consistently characterises her relationship with Brandon as her seducing him. She says explicitly that even though he will be charged with statutory rape, she doesn’t see herself as victim, but rather as the active agent in that relationship. It reminds me most of all of My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell, in which an adult Vanessa must confront whether her teenage romance with a man thirty-three years her senior was actually exploitative. To be candid, that story is way too deep for The Cheerleaders. My Dark Vanessa is a whole book only about this one thing because the subject is just too big to be a sub-plot. It is way more important than anything else; it’s certainly more important than the vaguely defined sense of ‘getting the truth’ or ‘vindicating Jen’s legacy’.

I get that The Cheerleaders is going for the idea that Monica is using the mystery as a coping mechanism to avoid dealing with the trauma of her relationship, but it felt more like the book was avoiding its more important subject.

The other thing that undermines the book’s attempt at a nuanced and considerate approach to teenage agency and trauma is that, contrary to its approach to Monica dating an older guy, it is extremely judgemental and cruel towards anyone else. Monica is allowed to have ambiguous feelings about Brandon, but the other teenage characters that cope with their problems by acting out are punished aggressively for it. None of the other characters actually do anything wrong, or at least nothing more wrong than Monica and Ginny, but the book had no sympathy for the idea that acting out might be a symptom of a troubled childhood. There are two characters that this book singles out as doing bad things and therefore finds itself free to treat disproportionately cruelly.

The obvious one is Ethan, a gothy loner who immediately read as just the most tasteless reference to the Columbine school shooters. Ethan is an uncool dork who writes poetry and isn’t on the football team, who gets physically bullied by them as the sympathetic characters stand idly by because obviously the social consequences of being nice to a loser are just so much worse than being an outcast getting coins thrown at you by a crowd of jeering jocks. Ethan writes a list of their names and maybe I’m not American enough to get this but that is not the same as a death threat (by the way, the Columbine allusion is obviously tasteless but also the shooters were not bullying victims, they were white supremacists). Ethan’s list gets him expelled and leads protagonist Monica to act like he is some sort of Disney villain that she needs to put in his place with snarky dialogue. Does the thought that a teen dealing with bullying at school and a dying single parent at home might be acting out due to a tough set of circumstances, who straightens himself out to be living a normal adult life five years later, change anything? No! No sympathy for bad people. The worst example is a surviving cheerleader, Carly, who is nasty and bad because she — shocked gasp — did drugs! Monica can be awful, rude, and deceitful to her because she did drugs and that mean’s she’s a slag and thus undeserving of sympathy and understanding. Is she a troubled kid trying to fit in at a new school who gets physically assaulted by a teacher (that plot point is insane and would never happen)? No! She’s a slag! You can tell that we’re really not supposed to sympathize with either of these characters, and even enjoy participating in their comeuppance at the hands of Monica’s very bad dialogue, because Ginny, the moral compass of the novel, agrees with it. I want to go in really hard on this because the novel is otherwise obsessed with inequality and nuance. Monica often finds it important to include that she understands adults give her a pass because she’s young and white and the step-daughter of a cop. The book has a deeply underwhelming denouement chapter to give Monica time to reflect on her agency and victimhood in her relationship with Brandon. But when characters do things that a middle class white don’t like — drug use, extreme bullying, very bleak mental situation (which I hesitate to include because Ethan never actually considers violence, the book just assumes he would because he’s a goth) — it turns to aggressively punishing them. Quick tip: if you want a book that cares about equality, that needs to extend to the kind of behaviour that white girls find uncomfortable. Also if a cop shoots an innocent man maybe the worst thing about that should not be that the cop might lose his job. The dude may have been a pervert but he still doesn’t deserve to be executed without trial by a guy who thought he looked sus.

As a final thought, a friend of mine has this book shelves as ‘you should have been sapphic’ on Goodreads and she’s 100% right.

With the motif of failed heterosexual relationships appearing so inexorably — Jen doesn’t feel safe dating an outcast like Ethan, Monica uses a dangerous relationship with Brandon to act out — and with the resolution for both Jen and Monica being that their use of a relationship with a man as a coping mechanism for existential ennui fails because it draws them away for the real meaningful relationships in their lives, their female friends (I’m probably doing too much here — never let it be said that I don’t extend books more than enough goodwill). The logical extension of that would be a sapphic relationship between Monica and Ginny where they realize that that mutual understanding is possible for them. This would have been a great place to include the tension between close female friendship and sapphic romance. It’s frankly an indictment of the book’s quality that after banging on about Monica acknowledging her privileges, it wallows in the mediocrity of a conclusion where she settles down with the right kind of guy.

This isn’t enough to make me give up on mysteries, YA or otherwise, but my first outing has been nothing more than disappointing. Pro tip: if you want to avoid or subvert the common tropes of your genre, make sure the alternative is in some way more interesting. Subversion in and of itself is not sufficient.

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laneyts's review against another edition

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2.75

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liez's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

s_lorenz's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

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bookedandbusy's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Loved this book! Such an incredible thriller!

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ruthypoo2's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

This is a really well-crafted YA murder mystery and I thought it was very effective to have narratives set in two different timelines.

In the current timeline, the main character, Monica, is struggling not only with a personal crisis, but the upcoming 5-year anniversary of her sister’s death that was determined to be a suicide. Monica has never been convinced that her popular and happy cheerleader sister, who was planning a bright future, would end her own life. The fact that immediately preceding her sister’s death, four other girls on the same cheerleading squad had died from either a car accident or as a murder victim leads Monica to suspect there are a lot of unanswered questions that the police, including her beloved stepfather, have ignored. Monica accidentally uncovers some items hidden away in her house and this sets her off on a personal quest to find out if there’s any connection between the cheerleaders’ deaths.

As for the secondary timeline, peppered in between Monica’s chapters are flashbacks that reveal what was happening in other characters lives five years earlier, including the cheerleaders and their friends. This insight helps the reader connect to the victims and become more invested in seeing Monica succeed with her amateur sleuthing.

The story moves along at a fast pace, even though there’s minimal action. Most of the book is character development and conversation. There’s definitely satisfaction when Monica gets some insight through snooping and research, which really is as much as can realistically be expected since she’s just a teenager with a bicycle and not Magnum, P.I.!

The author, Kara Thomas, includes difficult and complex issues into the story, such as substance abuse, bullying, body image, abortion, statutory rape, and suicide. I feel these topics are handled well, but get lost in the story as it progresses. For example, one character seems to be headed down a path leading to misuse of prescription pain meds, but gets distracted and never voices another craving or complaint about the pain that was causing them to take up to 4 pills at a time. This is just a side note though because I didn’t get too hung up on this oversight and stayed glued to the progression of story regardless.

Overall, a very good book. I listened to the audio and really like the narrator, Phoebe Strole, who did a great job voicing teen and adult characters, as well as different temperaments and emotions. Her voice was well suited to this book.

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seawitchindisguise's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

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ellesbells1510's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

This book just really irritated me from start to end. There were so many characters mentioned in the first 20 or so pages that I felt overwhelmed and confused. The protagonist was really unloveable and everything only seemed to happen because she said so, nothing was really backed up with facts. There were also at least two contradictions in the novel, they were small but to me noticeable. The blurb says that the cheerleaders died in the summer whereas in the book it is said from the beginning they died in autumn and the description of the protagonist changes over the course of a couple pages, she goes from having blue eyes to brown eyes.
Overall the flimsy plot and paper thin characters did nothing to justify what could have been a very interesting idea.

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