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liralen 's review for:

On Thin Ice by P.J. Sharon, Addy Overbeeke
3.0

There is so much in this book:
Spoileran eating disorder, cancer, death of a parent, competitive sports, a long-lost father, alcoholism, a coming-out story, abortion, rape,* religion, teenage pregnancy...
It's a lot. It's a lot of a lot.

But then there's this, in the author's note at the end: ON THIN ICE is the book of my heart. Of course, they all are in one way or another, but Penny's story is most like my own. She and I share many life experiences, including dipping our toes in the competitive figure skating pond, suffering an eating disorder, losing our mothers to cancer when we were sixteen, and surviving a dysfunctional family and a teen pregnancy.

Some readers may feel that too many serious life issues were addressed within this story, but the fact is, many teens have to deal with whatever life throws at them. Sometimes that means multiple dramas at once. That was certainly the case for me.
(229)

She's right, of course. Life doesn't usually come with one or two carefully chosen dramas—sometimes they overlap, and sometimes that overlap is messy or poorly timed or both. It's still, I think, too much for the book (because in real life, even when traumas are colliding, there's usually more time for the little things, the banal, et cetera; even when a lot is going on it doesn't usually feel like we're leaping breathless from one crisis to the next—although, to be fair, I'm writing this in 2020, and I'm not sure if this year is proving or disproving my point). What to do with that?

*
SpoilerBut also. With the rape—the guy pleads guilty, and because he has no prior offenses the judge is 'lenient', giving him five to seven years in prison. And, what? That's an amazing result for a rape case. Most cases don't go to trial, but not because of a guilty plea; they don't go to trial because the prosecutor doesn't think it's a strong enough case, because society blames victims, etc. And in this case, the prosecutor even points out how much (unfair) ammunition the defense lawyers would have in a trial, so I don't understand why the defense wouldn't push back more in this case. I'd love to see more rapists thrown in jail for years, but this is not a society in which 5–7 years is considered lenient; it's a society in which any jail term at all for rapists is considered either too harsh or a minor miracle.