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A review by thewallflower00
The S-Word by Chelsea Pitcher
3.0
This book was different than I expected. The style feels like a film noir, with short sentences, an investigation, a troubled personal life.
The book is about what happens after someone's best friend commits suicide after being slut-shamed into a pariah. The main character starts investigating how this came to be and starts uncovering some dark secrets about the people in her high school.
But that's just the hook. This book invokes just about every after-school special trope -- monstrous teens, the too-smart witch, the attention tramp, the handsome sex-crazed jock, cheerleaders, gay/not gay, date rape, the wild teen party, climbing through a bedroom window to see your girl, "Dude, she's like in a coma", defiled forever, driven to suicide, rape leads to insanity, self-harm, sneaking alcohol in high school, "secretly a lesbian", divorced parents, secret molestation, overly Christian parents, the big reveal, and of course, slut-shaming and finishes with a "decoy protagonist/killer in me" combo.
I'm not trying to say a story with lots of tropes is bad. All stories have them. But the problem is that all these tropes are front and center. Like a Lifetime movie. They're all part of the plot turns and revelations. Which means that the characters herein are stereotypes. My beef is that it keeps painting high school with the same brush that all movies and YA books paint it with. Like how no one has academics to worry about. How does the main character get all this "investigating" done? Between passing times?
Don't get me wrong, I like this book, but it's controversial simply because the characters demand it. To the point of being ridiculously implausible. One of the characters is gay. So gay he wears a skirt to school. And of course, the jocks beat him up for it. But then he tells the main character he's not gay, he's just acting like it. Because... reasons?
I was fooled by the summary in its Big Idea piece. I thought this was going to be a book about a girl going vigilante revenge for her friend who got slut-shamed into suicide, and then the revenge starts to consume her, where she couldn't stop. That is most definitely not this book. This book is much like the high schoolers it's portraying -- a hot mess.
It did keep me reading. It was a completely acceptable story with a great style. It's powerful. But it's trying to be a 'super YA novel'. It simply has too many ingredients, like a hamburger with forty things in it. You don't need that many to make a good hamburger. Too much stuff, and it becomes too rich to digest.
The book is about what happens after someone's best friend commits suicide after being slut-shamed into a pariah. The main character starts investigating how this came to be and starts uncovering some dark secrets about the people in her high school.
But that's just the hook. This book invokes just about every after-school special trope -- monstrous teens, the too-smart witch, the attention tramp, the handsome sex-crazed jock, cheerleaders, gay/not gay, date rape, the wild teen party, climbing through a bedroom window to see your girl, "Dude, she's like in a coma", defiled forever, driven to suicide, rape leads to insanity, self-harm, sneaking alcohol in high school, "secretly a lesbian", divorced parents, secret molestation, overly Christian parents, the big reveal, and of course, slut-shaming and finishes with a "decoy protagonist/killer in me" combo.
I'm not trying to say a story with lots of tropes is bad. All stories have them. But the problem is that all these tropes are front and center. Like a Lifetime movie. They're all part of the plot turns and revelations. Which means that the characters herein are stereotypes. My beef is that it keeps painting high school with the same brush that all movies and YA books paint it with. Like how no one has academics to worry about. How does the main character get all this "investigating" done? Between passing times?
Don't get me wrong, I like this book, but it's controversial simply because the characters demand it. To the point of being ridiculously implausible. One of the characters is gay. So gay he wears a skirt to school. And of course, the jocks beat him up for it. But then he tells the main character he's not gay, he's just acting like it. Because... reasons?
I was fooled by the summary in its Big Idea piece. I thought this was going to be a book about a girl going vigilante revenge for her friend who got slut-shamed into suicide, and then the revenge starts to consume her, where she couldn't stop. That is most definitely not this book. This book is much like the high schoolers it's portraying -- a hot mess.
It did keep me reading. It was a completely acceptable story with a great style. It's powerful. But it's trying to be a 'super YA novel'. It simply has too many ingredients, like a hamburger with forty things in it. You don't need that many to make a good hamburger. Too much stuff, and it becomes too rich to digest.