A review by fatbookishfemme
Rust Belt Femme by Raechel Anne Jolie

2.0

I can't place exactly why this didn't hit for me - I was very excited to read it and felt it fell flat. There were some political references - "feeling" poor after getting out of poverty, and a weird hunk late in the book about how white people who are poor/"white trash" and not ""really"" white (including a throwaway line of, of course white people benefit from white skin privilege, but..), and a few times where the author "know it's not 'feminist,' BUT.." - which sucked. There's an odd number of super academic quotes sprinkled throughout, and even though the author is 30+, the timeline essentially stops at 18 years old. There's also queer feelings/ideas but no depictions of relationships with anyone queer/anyone other than cis men. The most fun to read was 90s/2000s reference to pop punk and band shows and talking about how powerful music felt when discovering it.