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A review by goosemixtapes
Take Her Down by Lauren Emily Whalen
2.0
jesus christ.
okay.
i don’t know if it’s morally upstanding to dunk on this book. it is small potatoes—it’s from a very small indie publishing house—and it’s genuinely diverse, not just in terms of the cast’s sexualities but also their races and mental health experiences. there are good intentions here. there are good ideas here, too! i mean, come on, it’s sapphic julius caesar and there’s tarot! and i feel a bit nasty picking apart a small book with good intentions and not, like, stephen king.
but i don’t read or care about stephen king so i don’t have anything to say. and this book took me on a journey that i would like you, dear reader, to retrace with me. hold my hand. and behold a list of things that happen:
>bronwyn (brutus) and jude (caesar) are friends. they’re lesbians who run their high school’s group of “power queers” (this phrase kept getting used like i should recognize what it meant. from my understanding, it refers to the gay people version of model UN kids)
>until bronwyn realizes she’s bi and starts dating a guy (porter, the portia character)
>jude hates bi people soooooo fucking much. she is so upset by this concept that she gets people to ostracize bronwyn from the social group and make her life HELL for it. like, tripping her in the halls
> bronwyn: it isn’t like i cheated / jude: not on antonia [bronwyn’s previous girlfriend]. just on your IDENTITY
>who talks like this
>literally every teenager in this book talks like they’re in a weird twitter echo chamber. also like they’re in therapy perfectly describing their own emotions. like
>jude: we didn’t do stonewall so you could go to prom with a STRAIGHT BOY
>“gee,” thinketh i, a humble lesbian, “lesbians definitely can be biphobic, but doesn’t this feel almost cartoonish? also, i am a little uncomfortable with having the only lesbian character in this book so far be a Big Mean Bully Lesbian. that said, i know bi women get a LOT of biphobia and misogyny combined for dating men, and as a lesbian, i can't personally speak to those experiences, so let me read on!”
>it is revealed that jude hates bi people because she’s repressing her own bisexuality because, and this is true, her mother left her father to go join a bisexual polyamorous throuple
>ok
>"my mother couldn't pick a side... or a PERSON"
>bronwyn, her cousin cass (cassius), and porter decide to prove that jude is a hypocrite because she’s actually bi. they catfish her to try to get incriminating screenshots. they feel no remorse about this
>at a party they find her having sex with a guy (sex they think is consensual) and cass video records it
>they email the video to the entire school
>don’t worry, the fact that this is a felony will never come up again!
>(suicide tw) and her parents take her out of school and put her in their vacation house with no therapy or supervision
>(rape tw)
>(incest tw)
>WITH WHOM SHE WAS FLIRTING ON PURPOSE. NOT THAT THAT MAKES IT OKAY OBVIOUSLY, BUT IT’S FUCKING WEIRD
>this has no relevance except to traumatize jude more
>porter stops his bipolar meds so he can fuck nasty. i mean there are other reasons but it seems like the prime one is that he wants to fuck nasty and it was giving him erectile dysfunction before. which i know does happen i’m just stuck on him going off his meds so he can fuck and his GIRLFRIEND going “okay!! i did always want to do P in V secretly”
>antonia (jude’s ex-girlfriend and best friend who’s still in love with her) makes her friends romans countrymen speech which actually doesn’t really have plot relevance now that i think about it. but antonia is a cool she/they so whatever
>bronwyn, cass, and porter start falling apart which culminates in individual breakdowns for all of them. they face no consequence for this
>bronwyn confesses to sending the video out to the principal. once again: felony. she faces no consequences for this except getting expelled from school and going to do senior year at a different school
>bronwyn and jude meet up and talk everything out. and then everything is fine. bronwyn wanted jude to literally die before. she sent out a video of jude to the entire student body. one conversation and they’re okay (no longer friends, but not enemies, either). at this point i have given up on anything but finishing this book before my melatonin kicks in so i don’t even blink
>calpurnia (a very minor side character) turns the story of all of this in for her final english project and gets an A. the last chapter is her teacher saying it was very well-written
>i crawl into bed and go the fuck to sleep.
so.
some thoughts:
i genuinely do like the concept a lot (calpurnia is doing a school project; this is her final assignment; she gives all the characters pseudonyms based off of julius caesar; it’s purposefully meta and that’s sexy) and i love funky formatting (some chapters are testimonies from the characters, but we also get monologues given at the time, diary excerpts, campaign speeches for the school election, etc). the soothsayer plot in julius caesar is transplanted to the cassius character doing a tarot card reading, and that fucking SLAPS. it’s also set up in five acts, like the original julius caesar! hell yeah!
except the pacing of this book is so fucking weird. the first act is half of the book. it’s so long. if this book removed all the extraneous exposition, it would be two-thirds the length. if this book ALSO removed all the repeat information that WE ALREADY KNOW because WE WERE TOLD, it would be half the length. there are at least four entirely irrelevant side characters. by the time i got to the midpoint, i was exasperated by the amount of buildup and the number of times we got “jude is a gross biphobe and bronwyn literally wants her dead but this is hard for her because they used to be friends; also bronwyn and porter are having tons of sex.” my midread notes read “94 pages into this book. no metaphorical stabbing. tick tick cass and bronwyn i’m only awake until midnight”
all this exposition and buildup would be easier to deal with if these characters were interesting, but they’re very one-note, and they only get worse. jude is the most interesting character despite the gross biphobia, because she has a personality that goes beyond “rich girl” or "innocent but secretly a killer." antonia is also fucking awesome. she is everything. she/they trans lesbian with ocd mwah mwah mwah.
but bronwyn, cass, and porter all fell through for me, which is heart-wrenching, because i fucking love brutus and cassius. i am insane about brutus and cassius. but bronwyn is deeply fucking annoying. she acknowledges that she’s rich and spoiled, but never stops being rich and spoiled; her aunt has taken her in for convoluted reasons (her dad did embezzlement and went to jail and her other dad went to hike the appalachian trail to cope. yeah. this book is fucking insane), and she keeps bitching about how she lives in a garage now, even though 1. it is not a straight-up garage; it's a room that used to be a garage and has been converted to a bedroom and 2. HER AUNT TOOK HER IN OUT OF THE GOODNESS OF HER HEART. she also lets her boyfriend go off his meds cold turkey because... she likes to fuck with his dick which doesn’t work on his meds. and she refers to him as a “beta male.” okay. that is NOT my brutus that is NOT my best friend. cass has potential, but her chapters were very repetitive: wanting to impress bronwyn, cheerleading metaphor, conflicting feelings about porter, asexuality crisis, wanting to impress bronwyn. porter was the best-written of the three; his relationship with his bipolar was genuinely interesting; but i have little to say about him because there is just so much going on in this book that no character ever gets full focus and most of their traits are told to us instead of shown.
speaking of stuff told to us repeatedly: let’s talk about jude’s biphobia, huh? because it makes no fucking sense. she’s totally fine with trans and nonbinary people; she only hates bi people. which doesn’t work logically, but whatever, sometimes prejudice isn’t logical. (sidebar: this book is kind of weird about trans people. not innately weird, but there are a few times when someone is like “how dare you date a CIS man” and uhhhh… okay. if trans people want to avoid cis people, sure, but when cis women are like “yeah, i would date a trans man, but not a cis man” …girl. you may just be transphobic. plus this book keeps saying gender =/= genitals, but then also saying things like “i knew the text was from a cishet man because he said u instead of you” and “i could tell he was a guy because of his voice” and like. ?????)
jude is constantly talking about needing to “bring back the lesbian label,” and later on another character mentions that kids these days think the lesbian label is outdated, which just… isn’t true? who is saying that? go on tumblr and throw a rock and you’ll hit twenty teenage lesbians. jude is also seen as the de facto leader of this school, with enough social power to completely isolate bronwyn. i’m not denying that bi people face disgusting prejudice; what i don’t believe is how the fuck this school works. the narration beats into your head that this is a SMALL, PRIVATE, LIBERAL, MOSTLY FEMALE school—but it’s clearly not solely gay people or solely leftists, because bronwyn talks about being afraid of getting groped by cishet men post-trump election. so why does this read like that youtube video about living in a world where being GAY is the norm and being STRAIGHT is a crime? (bi people are not straight; bi relationships are inherently queer; but the way the characters in this book shit on straight men factors into the way they treat bronwyn’s relationship with a straight man.) are you telling me one lesbian has enough social power to make her biphobia the entire school’s problem? are you telling me this school is so far left that “the cishet boys were downright deferential” as if in apology after trump’s election? the cishet boys at my middle school followed me down a hall to yell TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP the day after the election. cishet boys don’t know what deference means. what kind of fucking world do you people live in? is it paramount heathers? do y’all live in the paramount heathers tv show where the fat gay trans jewish kids are the bullies and the poor wittle cishets are the oppressed group? “at augustus high, no one cares if you’re queer. in fact, they expect it.” IN WHAT FUCKING WORLD?
on the trump note—this book is set in 2017. the characters are constantly referencing the aftermath of the 2016 election. i am of two minds about this, because on the one hand, i really do enjoy the sense that they’re all newly awakened to the fact that adults can’t protect them. the election went the way it went, and the kids had no power over that, so of course they want to reclaim any sort of political power they can, because all of our main characters are marginalized in some way (almost all of them are LGBT women and two of them are people of color). the other day my dad commented that my generation seems deeply pessimistic, and, like, yeah, man, have you seen the fucking news? the sense of being let down by the bleakness of the current world climate hits deeply home! “we trusted the adults in our lives,” bronwyn says, “and they fucked us.”
however. why does every character in this book stan hillary clinton. why does hating trump and being afraid of his power mean you have to lick clinton boot. everyone is like oooh hillary clinton was a powerful woman and we looked up to her and she wore PANTSUITS ooooooh. it’s very #girlboss #progressive #womeninthetwopartysystem. this entire book is very that. it wants to make points about feminism, but that falls through when you remember that the big midpoint scene is... leaking a girl's sex tape. which turns out to be
still, my primary frustration with this book isn't about the politics, believe it or not. it's that i came for a sapphic julius caesar, and this isn't julius caesar. sure, there’s a character named jude who gets deposed from her tyrant status, but the book is not interested in the plot of julius caesar. this book is concerned with 1. delving deep into the weirdest biphobic echo chamber you’ve ever seen, at length, as if this constitutes plot instead of a sign that every character needs to fucking go outside and 2. sex crimes. (which NO one faces real consequences for, except jude, who presumably is just traumatized for the rest of her fucking life. girl, bronwyn should be in JAIL, not finishing the school year at this school before her expulsion takes place.) i know moving a shakespeare play to high school means that THINGS CHANGE, but it felt like the focus was never on the plot so much as it was on, just, the weirdest and most uncomfortable shit you’ve ever heard of.
that said, it also focuses at least a little on product placement for the card game exploding kittens, and i can get behind that because i really like that game.
hold my hand again as i share my favorite lines from this book:
- “Her mouth turned down perpetually like a sad clown’s.”
- “Do you remember that girlboss thing?”
- “He was grunting like a frat boy hopped up on miller lite and toxic masculinity.”
- “If kneecaps were capable of orgasms, mine would have been coming multiple times.”
one star for the genuine effort made (because i do believe there was genuine effort made); one for antonia and jude and their dynamic. i am so fucking baffled by this book god bless
okay.
i don’t know if it’s morally upstanding to dunk on this book. it is small potatoes—it’s from a very small indie publishing house—and it’s genuinely diverse, not just in terms of the cast’s sexualities but also their races and mental health experiences. there are good intentions here. there are good ideas here, too! i mean, come on, it’s sapphic julius caesar and there’s tarot! and i feel a bit nasty picking apart a small book with good intentions and not, like, stephen king.
but i don’t read or care about stephen king so i don’t have anything to say. and this book took me on a journey that i would like you, dear reader, to retrace with me. hold my hand. and behold a list of things that happen:
Spoiler
>bronwyn (brutus) and jude (caesar) are friends. they’re lesbians who run their high school’s group of “power queers” (this phrase kept getting used like i should recognize what it meant. from my understanding, it refers to the gay people version of model UN kids)
>until bronwyn realizes she’s bi and starts dating a guy (porter, the portia character)
>jude hates bi people soooooo fucking much. she is so upset by this concept that she gets people to ostracize bronwyn from the social group and make her life HELL for it. like, tripping her in the halls
> bronwyn: it isn’t like i cheated / jude: not on antonia [bronwyn’s previous girlfriend]. just on your IDENTITY
>who talks like this
>literally every teenager in this book talks like they’re in a weird twitter echo chamber. also like they’re in therapy perfectly describing their own emotions. like
>jude: we didn’t do stonewall so you could go to prom with a STRAIGHT BOY
>“gee,” thinketh i, a humble lesbian, “lesbians definitely can be biphobic, but doesn’t this feel almost cartoonish? also, i am a little uncomfortable with having the only lesbian character in this book so far be a Big Mean Bully Lesbian. that said, i know bi women get a LOT of biphobia and misogyny combined for dating men, and as a lesbian, i can't personally speak to those experiences, so let me read on!”
>it is revealed that jude hates bi people because she’s repressing her own bisexuality because, and this is true, her mother left her father to go join a bisexual polyamorous throuple
>ok
>"my mother couldn't pick a side... or a PERSON"
>bronwyn, her cousin cass (cassius), and porter decide to prove that jude is a hypocrite because she’s actually bi. they catfish her to try to get incriminating screenshots. they feel no remorse about this
>at a party they find her having sex with a guy (sex they think is consensual) and cass video records it
>they email the video to the entire school
>don’t worry, the fact that this is a felony will never come up again!
>(suicide tw)
Spoiler
jude tries to kill herself>(rape tw)
Spoiler
it is revealed that jude was raped>(incest tw)
Spoiler
it is revealed that the guy who raped her was HER COUSIN>WITH WHOM SHE WAS FLIRTING ON PURPOSE. NOT THAT THAT MAKES IT OKAY OBVIOUSLY, BUT IT’S FUCKING WEIRD
>this has no relevance except to traumatize jude more
>porter stops his bipolar meds so he can fuck nasty. i mean there are other reasons but it seems like the prime one is that he wants to fuck nasty and it was giving him erectile dysfunction before. which i know does happen i’m just stuck on him going off his meds so he can fuck and his GIRLFRIEND going “okay!! i did always want to do P in V secretly”
>antonia (jude’s ex-girlfriend and best friend who’s still in love with her) makes her friends romans countrymen speech which actually doesn’t really have plot relevance now that i think about it. but antonia is a cool she/they so whatever
>bronwyn, cass, and porter start falling apart which culminates in individual breakdowns for all of them. they face no consequence for this
>bronwyn confesses to sending the video out to the principal. once again: felony. she faces no consequences for this except getting expelled from school and going to do senior year at a different school
>bronwyn and jude meet up and talk everything out. and then everything is fine. bronwyn wanted jude to literally die before. she sent out a video of jude
Spoiler
being raped>calpurnia (a very minor side character) turns the story of all of this in for her final english project and gets an A. the last chapter is her teacher saying it was very well-written
>i crawl into bed and go the fuck to sleep.
so.
some thoughts:
i genuinely do like the concept a lot (calpurnia is doing a school project; this is her final assignment; she gives all the characters pseudonyms based off of julius caesar; it’s purposefully meta and that’s sexy) and i love funky formatting (some chapters are testimonies from the characters, but we also get monologues given at the time, diary excerpts, campaign speeches for the school election, etc). the soothsayer plot in julius caesar is transplanted to the cassius character doing a tarot card reading, and that fucking SLAPS. it’s also set up in five acts, like the original julius caesar! hell yeah!
except the pacing of this book is so fucking weird. the first act is half of the book. it’s so long. if this book removed all the extraneous exposition, it would be two-thirds the length. if this book ALSO removed all the repeat information that WE ALREADY KNOW because WE WERE TOLD, it would be half the length. there are at least four entirely irrelevant side characters. by the time i got to the midpoint, i was exasperated by the amount of buildup and the number of times we got “jude is a gross biphobe and bronwyn literally wants her dead but this is hard for her because they used to be friends; also bronwyn and porter are having tons of sex.” my midread notes read “94 pages into this book. no metaphorical stabbing. tick tick cass and bronwyn i’m only awake until midnight”
all this exposition and buildup would be easier to deal with if these characters were interesting, but they’re very one-note, and they only get worse. jude is the most interesting character despite the gross biphobia, because she has a personality that goes beyond “rich girl” or "innocent but secretly a killer." antonia is also fucking awesome. she is everything. she/they trans lesbian with ocd mwah mwah mwah.
but bronwyn, cass, and porter all fell through for me, which is heart-wrenching, because i fucking love brutus and cassius. i am insane about brutus and cassius. but bronwyn is deeply fucking annoying. she acknowledges that she’s rich and spoiled, but never stops being rich and spoiled; her aunt has taken her in for convoluted reasons (her dad did embezzlement and went to jail and her other dad went to hike the appalachian trail to cope. yeah. this book is fucking insane), and she keeps bitching about how she lives in a garage now, even though 1. it is not a straight-up garage; it's a room that used to be a garage and has been converted to a bedroom and 2. HER AUNT TOOK HER IN OUT OF THE GOODNESS OF HER HEART. she also lets her boyfriend go off his meds cold turkey because... she likes to fuck with his dick which doesn’t work on his meds. and she refers to him as a “beta male.” okay. that is NOT my brutus that is NOT my best friend. cass has potential, but her chapters were very repetitive: wanting to impress bronwyn, cheerleading metaphor, conflicting feelings about porter, asexuality crisis, wanting to impress bronwyn. porter was the best-written of the three; his relationship with his bipolar was genuinely interesting; but i have little to say about him because there is just so much going on in this book that no character ever gets full focus and most of their traits are told to us instead of shown.
speaking of stuff told to us repeatedly: let’s talk about jude’s biphobia, huh? because it makes no fucking sense. she’s totally fine with trans and nonbinary people; she only hates bi people. which doesn’t work logically, but whatever, sometimes prejudice isn’t logical. (sidebar: this book is kind of weird about trans people. not innately weird, but there are a few times when someone is like “how dare you date a CIS man” and uhhhh… okay. if trans people want to avoid cis people, sure, but when cis women are like “yeah, i would date a trans man, but not a cis man” …girl. you may just be transphobic. plus this book keeps saying gender =/= genitals, but then also saying things like “i knew the text was from a cishet man because he said u instead of you” and “i could tell he was a guy because of his voice” and
Spoiler
“i can tell the guy raping jude is a man because he has a PENIS and he STANDS with the ENTITLED STANCE of a STRAIGHT BOY”jude is constantly talking about needing to “bring back the lesbian label,” and later on another character mentions that kids these days think the lesbian label is outdated, which just… isn’t true? who is saying that? go on tumblr and throw a rock and you’ll hit twenty teenage lesbians. jude is also seen as the de facto leader of this school, with enough social power to completely isolate bronwyn. i’m not denying that bi people face disgusting prejudice; what i don’t believe is how the fuck this school works. the narration beats into your head that this is a SMALL, PRIVATE, LIBERAL, MOSTLY FEMALE school—but it’s clearly not solely gay people or solely leftists, because bronwyn talks about being afraid of getting groped by cishet men post-trump election. so why does this read like that youtube video about living in a world where being GAY is the norm and being STRAIGHT is a crime? (bi people are not straight; bi relationships are inherently queer; but the way the characters in this book shit on straight men factors into the way they treat bronwyn’s relationship with a straight man.) are you telling me one lesbian has enough social power to make her biphobia the entire school’s problem? are you telling me this school is so far left that “the cishet boys were downright deferential” as if in apology after trump’s election? the cishet boys at my middle school followed me down a hall to yell TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP the day after the election. cishet boys don’t know what deference means. what kind of fucking world do you people live in? is it paramount heathers? do y’all live in the paramount heathers tv show where the fat gay trans jewish kids are the bullies and the poor wittle cishets are the oppressed group? “at augustus high, no one cares if you’re queer. in fact, they expect it.” IN WHAT FUCKING WORLD?
on the trump note—this book is set in 2017. the characters are constantly referencing the aftermath of the 2016 election. i am of two minds about this, because on the one hand, i really do enjoy the sense that they’re all newly awakened to the fact that adults can’t protect them. the election went the way it went, and the kids had no power over that, so of course they want to reclaim any sort of political power they can, because all of our main characters are marginalized in some way (almost all of them are LGBT women and two of them are people of color). the other day my dad commented that my generation seems deeply pessimistic, and, like, yeah, man, have you seen the fucking news? the sense of being let down by the bleakness of the current world climate hits deeply home! “we trusted the adults in our lives,” bronwyn says, “and they fucked us.”
however. why does every character in this book stan hillary clinton. why does hating trump and being afraid of his power mean you have to lick clinton boot. everyone is like oooh hillary clinton was a powerful woman and we looked up to her and she wore PANTSUITS ooooooh. it’s very #girlboss #progressive #womeninthetwopartysystem. this entire book is very that. it wants to make points about feminism, but that falls through when you remember that the big midpoint scene is... leaking a girl's sex tape. which turns out to be
Spoiler
an assault tape.still, my primary frustration with this book isn't about the politics, believe it or not. it's that i came for a sapphic julius caesar, and this isn't julius caesar. sure, there’s a character named jude who gets deposed from her tyrant status, but the book is not interested in the plot of julius caesar. this book is concerned with 1. delving deep into the weirdest biphobic echo chamber you’ve ever seen, at length, as if this constitutes plot instead of a sign that every character needs to fucking go outside and 2. sex crimes. (which NO one faces real consequences for, except jude, who presumably is just traumatized for the rest of her fucking life. girl, bronwyn should be in JAIL, not finishing the school year at this school before her expulsion takes place.) i know moving a shakespeare play to high school means that THINGS CHANGE, but it felt like the focus was never on the plot so much as it was on, just, the weirdest and most uncomfortable shit you’ve ever heard of.
that said, it also focuses at least a little on product placement for the card game exploding kittens, and i can get behind that because i really like that game.
hold my hand again as i share my favorite lines from this book:
- “Her mouth turned down perpetually like a sad clown’s.”
- “Do you remember that girlboss thing?”
- “He was grunting like a frat boy hopped up on miller lite and toxic masculinity.”
- “If kneecaps were capable of orgasms, mine would have been coming multiple times.”
one star for the genuine effort made (because i do believe there was genuine effort made); one for antonia and jude and their dynamic. i am so fucking baffled by this book god bless