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A review by almondcookies
The Places I've Cried in Public by Holly Bourne
5.0
Why are we still reading Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing in school when this book exists? Do you know what a healthy relationship looks like? Read this, you might be surprised.
This is by no means an easy book to get through, but it is very relevant and extremely important. If you have any sort of relationship to another human being (which means everyone in the world), I highly recommend you read this. Abusive relationships are not just confined to romantic ones, they exist between parents and children, siblings, friends of 3 months or friends of 30 years, heck, even yourself and your milkman!!
Please, if you're a teen, a young woman, a grown lady, or even a man grown, please, please, read this.
The biggest piece of constructive criticism I have is that I wish Bourne had addressed that the MC was not just raped that one pivotal time, but multiple times.
The incidents where they had sex beforehand and the MC didn't want to do it is already sexual coercion and can be classified as rape. However, owning that word is incredibly difficult, and many will compare their experience to clear cut examples such as Anti Rape Adverts (most of which feature one off violent incidents), and will question 'if it wasn't painful was it still rape?' Yes. Yes it is.
In Places I've Cried, when MC herself thinks of what happened to her, she thinks of that one painful incident and doesn't think about all the other times that weren't violent. Unfortunately that perpetuates the idea that rape must be painful. This is not true. The definition of rape has nothing to do with frequency, pain, etc. It is dependant on if someone was forced, pressured, coerced etc into doing something they don't want to.
This is by no means an easy book to get through, but it is very relevant and extremely important. If you have any sort of relationship to another human being (which means everyone in the world), I highly recommend you read this. Abusive relationships are not just confined to romantic ones, they exist between parents and children, siblings, friends of 3 months or friends of 30 years, heck, even yourself and your milkman!!
Please, if you're a teen, a young woman, a grown lady, or even a man grown, please, please, read this.
Spoiler
The biggest piece of constructive criticism I have is that I wish Bourne had addressed that the MC was not just raped that one pivotal time, but multiple times.
The incidents where they had sex beforehand and the MC didn't want to do it is already sexual coercion and can be classified as rape. However, owning that word is incredibly difficult, and many will compare their experience to clear cut examples such as Anti Rape Adverts (most of which feature one off violent incidents), and will question 'if it wasn't painful was it still rape?' Yes. Yes it is.
In Places I've Cried, when MC herself thinks of what happened to her, she thinks of that one painful incident and doesn't think about all the other times that weren't violent. Unfortunately that perpetuates the idea that rape must be painful. This is not true. The definition of rape has nothing to do with frequency, pain, etc. It is dependant on if someone was forced, pressured, coerced etc into doing something they don't want to.