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A review by horrorbutch
The Arizona Triangle: A Novel by Sydney Graves
1.0
Unfortunately this book was a big miss for me and while most of that ties to the "shocking" twist at the end, there are also some other things that bothered me.
This book follows a private investigator Jo, hired to find her childhood best friend Rose, who has recently disappeared. The only problem is that said friend has stopped talking to her when she turned 14, except for a drug-fulled night to remember during Prom, and so our PI's information is not exactly up to date.
We dive deep into the Rose's life, from her various relationships (including one with a student at the university she was teaching at), her family life, the commune she lives on, her book publishing and her race-faking. All of this also leads us to explore our main character's life as she too grapples with her past and her relationship with Rose, including her relationship with her highschool boyfriend Tyler, who was the reason for their falling out.
I found the first 75% of the book to be mostly interesting and even though there is a bunch of genre-typical police positivity and a PI that mentions how scary it is to be shot at, when she worked as a police woman before, which felt weird ngl, the whole thing really went downhill when the big reveal happened. Before that my main issues with this story were that it was slow and the story's use of ableist language (calling an addict a j*nkie and using the term schizoid to refer to the weather), misogynistic language & asexuality equated to softness (calling a man a "pussy" for not being interested in sex) as well as the fact that the student/professor relationship heavily blamed the student for going along with it (since he was expecting a recommendation out of it.)
I did like the idea of a bisexual PI having to investigate her own past to solve a case and I liked that she's bisexual, but that was by far not enough to balance out the really bad ending.
Here be spoilers & discussions of csa & incest.
We find out that Rose has been murdered! By her own brother! But why? Well, isn't it obvious? As Rose was sexually abused by her father as a child, she made her two brothers reenact Jo's and Tyler's relationship and forced them to have sex and her younger brother, who was raped by his older brother, has now gone "psychotic" (actual word used to describe him. Looove the ableist language here so much!) and decided to kill everybody who was involved in that, including Jo & Tyler. Makes sense right? It's not completely out of the left field and with horrible depictions of abuse survivors to boot! Right?
While csa played a role in the story before, when we found out that Rose had been sexually abused by her father as a child (foreshadowed through mentions of her often sexual play with Jo), I did not see the end coming. And I hated it. It not only portrays abuse survivors as evil (because either you will rape your own siblings or you will kill everybody, even people who weren't directly involved. Sure.), it also does a disservice to the horrifying abuse that is cocsa. The older brother, who was made to rape his younger brother, even now calls him a pussy for not wanting to have sex and somehow, he is still the best character out of the three of them. The younger brother has decided murder is the only way to heal and has used the abuse to manipulate his sister through guilt. And the sister only shows remorse seconds before she's murdered.
While csa can absolutely make children hurt other children I do not think it was handled well here at all. It felt more like a convinient way to tie the story together and to be allowed to have a ~crazy~ murderer, whose actions cannot be predicted, because he's soooooo ~crazy~. He even murders a woman, who has helped him pull this whole thing off, just because.
Oh and in the end he dies. Because why would a life that's so messed up by trauma and abuse need any space to heal or get better or find a way not to abuse others or murder everybody? That's what trauma does, right? Hurt people hurt people, after all. Definitely one of the worse depictions of csa I've read in a while and I cannot believe this was published in 2024.
I also think the difference in depictions in differences between the brothers (the older one, who got to play the active role vs the younger one, who was not only forced to take on the passive role, but also forcible feminized, made to wear dresses and pretend to be a woman) is gross and falls in line with a lot of horror tropes of a male child being forced into femininity by an abuser only to turn around and become a monster. Again, not something I expected to see in 2024.
Trigger warnings:
examined in story: racefaking (claiming an indigenous identity), white feminism (claiming that a focus on BIPOC women somehow cheapens feminist solidarity), corrupt police, murder, child abuse, csa, incest, abuse between siblings, abuse between child and father
not examined: genre typical police positivity, a male student sexually exploited by a female professor and why he's kinda victim blamed for it, csa to explain why someone's evil, aphobic language, misogynistic language, ableist language towards addicts and people with personality disorders and psychosis, abuse victims who are murdered/killed
This book follows a private investigator Jo, hired to find her childhood best friend Rose, who has recently disappeared. The only problem is that said friend has stopped talking to her when she turned 14, except for a drug-fulled night to remember during Prom, and so our PI's information is not exactly up to date.
We dive deep into the Rose's life, from her various relationships (including one with a student at the university she was teaching at), her family life, the commune she lives on, her book publishing and her race-faking. All of this also leads us to explore our main character's life as she too grapples with her past and her relationship with Rose, including her relationship with her highschool boyfriend Tyler, who was the reason for their falling out.
I found the first 75% of the book to be mostly interesting and even though there is a bunch of genre-typical police positivity and a PI that mentions how scary it is to be shot at, when she worked as a police woman before, which felt weird ngl, the whole thing really went downhill when the big reveal happened. Before that my main issues with this story were that it was slow and the story's use of ableist language (calling an addict a j*nkie and using the term schizoid to refer to the weather), misogynistic language & asexuality equated to softness (calling a man a "pussy" for not being interested in sex) as well as the fact that the student/professor relationship heavily blamed the student for going along with it (since he was expecting a recommendation out of it.)
I did like the idea of a bisexual PI having to investigate her own past to solve a case and I liked that she's bisexual, but that was by far not enough to balance out the really bad ending.
Here be spoilers & discussions of csa & incest.
We find out that Rose has been murdered! By her own brother! But why? Well, isn't it obvious? As Rose was sexually abused by her father as a child, she made her two brothers reenact Jo's and Tyler's relationship and forced them to have sex and her younger brother, who was raped by his older brother, has now gone "psychotic" (actual word used to describe him. Looove the ableist language here so much!) and decided to kill everybody who was involved in that, including Jo & Tyler. Makes sense right? It's not completely out of the left field and with horrible depictions of abuse survivors to boot! Right?
While csa played a role in the story before, when we found out that Rose had been sexually abused by her father as a child (foreshadowed through mentions of her often sexual play with Jo), I did not see the end coming. And I hated it. It not only portrays abuse survivors as evil (because either you will rape your own siblings or you will kill everybody, even people who weren't directly involved. Sure.), it also does a disservice to the horrifying abuse that is cocsa. The older brother, who was made to rape his younger brother, even now calls him a pussy for not wanting to have sex and somehow, he is still the best character out of the three of them. The younger brother has decided murder is the only way to heal and has used the abuse to manipulate his sister through guilt. And the sister only shows remorse seconds before she's murdered.
While csa can absolutely make children hurt other children I do not think it was handled well here at all. It felt more like a convinient way to tie the story together and to be allowed to have a ~crazy~ murderer, whose actions cannot be predicted, because he's soooooo ~crazy~. He even murders a woman, who has helped him pull this whole thing off, just because.
Oh and in the end he dies. Because why would a life that's so messed up by trauma and abuse need any space to heal or get better or find a way not to abuse others or murder everybody? That's what trauma does, right? Hurt people hurt people, after all. Definitely one of the worse depictions of csa I've read in a while and I cannot believe this was published in 2024.
I also think the difference in depictions in differences between the brothers (the older one, who got to play the active role vs the younger one, who was not only forced to take on the passive role, but also forcible feminized, made to wear dresses and pretend to be a woman) is gross and falls in line with a lot of horror tropes of a male child being forced into femininity by an abuser only to turn around and become a monster. Again, not something I expected to see in 2024.
Trigger warnings:
examined in story: racefaking (claiming an indigenous identity), white feminism (claiming that a focus on BIPOC women somehow cheapens feminist solidarity), corrupt police, murder, child abuse, csa, incest, abuse between siblings, abuse between child and father
not examined: genre typical police positivity, a male student sexually exploited by a female professor and why he's kinda victim blamed for it, csa to explain why someone's evil, aphobic language, misogynistic language, ableist language towards addicts and people with personality disorders and psychosis, abuse victims who are murdered/killed