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A review by dame_samara
Dead End Girls by Wendy Heard
5.0
CW: Attempted Sexual Assault, Blood, Bullying, Car Accident, Death, Drugs/Overdose, Minor Fatphobia, Gaslighting, Gun Violence, Kidnapping, Murder. Mentions of Vomiting. MAJOR Queerphobia.
The Good.
I loved this book, and it goes hard from the initial moment you hit play. This book has the best hook I have ever seen in an Audiobook.
Natalie Naudus' narration is exquisite as always. Still, the choice of explicitly taking on a News Anchor voice for all pieces of reporting the girls run into raises the bar for this production exponentially. It just further pulls you into the emersion of this book.
Further props to Naudus and Meskimen, I usually am a person who listens to books at a sped-up rate of 1.5+ just because that's typically how my brain best processes Audiobooks typically. But I never felt the need to speed up this book, even listening to it in one sitting.
The final chapter gave me such a level of gender affirmation/gender euphoria.
The Meh.
The choice to use "l'appel du vide" in the summary is weird because at no point did this phrase come up.
I have some mixed feelings about this pseudo(?) Incest romance. It still makes me feel a little ew.
We have a long internal monologue from Frankie in the early part of this book regarding how they feel about their gender identity. It felt forced, whereas most of our other interactions regarding Frankie's consideration feel like a more natural glimpse into how thought processes work.
The Good.
I loved this book, and it goes hard from the initial moment you hit play. This book has the best hook I have ever seen in an Audiobook.
Natalie Naudus' narration is exquisite as always. Still, the choice of explicitly taking on a News Anchor voice for all pieces of reporting the girls run into raises the bar for this production exponentially. It just further pulls you into the emersion of this book.
Further props to Naudus and Meskimen, I usually am a person who listens to books at a sped-up rate of 1.5+ just because that's typically how my brain best processes Audiobooks typically. But I never felt the need to speed up this book, even listening to it in one sitting.
The final chapter gave me such a level of gender affirmation/gender euphoria.
The Meh.
The choice to use "l'appel du vide" in the summary is weird because at no point did this phrase come up.
I have some mixed feelings about this pseudo(?) Incest romance. It still makes me feel a little ew.
We have a long internal monologue from Frankie in the early part of this book regarding how they feel about their gender identity. It felt forced, whereas most of our other interactions regarding Frankie's consideration feel like a more natural glimpse into how thought processes work.