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slowlauris 's review for:
Poster Girl
by Veronica Roth
I know living well is the best revenge or whatever but also on sonya's behalf I am going to reach into this book and kick trudie ward's face in. "I knew you would take your sweet time" fuck OFF. This book made me more of a prison abolitionist than any amount of actual ideological literature ever has* (*this is some percentage a joke but you get to decide what)
ok. ok. my actual serious review is that i thought this book was legitimately amazing, both as a story on its own and as a deconstruction of YA dystopia tropes. my biggest complaint is that i would have liked the epilogue to be just a little longer and to show sonya interacting with the people in her new farm compound thing instead of just thinking about them. i am very pro "sonya living her best life" and i think this change would have taken the ending more strongly in that direction.
what actually REALLY bothers me about the scene i mentioned above is that the wards didn't know what sonya did either when trudie made the recording or when she told sonya about it, which means their actions were not based on justifiable personal hatred, but on hatred of sonya just on principle, which to me makes it SO MUCH WORSE. is no one going to consider the incredible cruelty of wishing that a twenty-seven non-violent offender hurries up and gets back to their life imprisonment without parole?? roth could at least have had trudie phrase it differently, like "we were worried you would just use the opportunity to disappear." did fucking eugenia *feel good* about sending someone back to prison who was arrested when she was probably only a little older than trudie?? i loved where roth did end up taking this point, to "i can't and shouldn't martyr myself into making someone forgive me," a thing i don't think we see often enough in books, but that one sentence from trudie and the fact that we just gloss right on over it kind of soured that whole emotional climax for me.
overall, i wish sonya or at least alexander had at any point at least thought, "hey, fuck you for treating me this way when i spent my entire childhood literally from infancy being spiritually abused." like, everyone who participated in overthrowing the delegation and everyone else who didn't get arrested also grew up under the Insight system, they know what it was like! sonya was already doing moral cost-benefit analysis at the age of, like, four, are we expected to believe that *no one else* was into the system that enthusiastically? of course not! are we expected to believe that *no one* has acknowledged that their society is probably living with collective c-ptsd? maybe! but i wish the book had told us about it! like, the more i think about it, the more i wish we had heard from any other characters about what the old regime was like for them, what their daily thought processes were. i really want to know, IS sonya an outlier or did other people grow up similarly neurotic? what are the society wide effects of an abrupt shift in the dominant system of moral policing, veronica???
speaking of moral policing, everyone in this society seems REAL comfortable with the fact that their new, improved government sentenced sixteen-year-olds AND YOUNGER to life imprisonment! that is some omelas shit! it took you ten years to decide that maybe that wasn't okay?! and people are still fully out there like, "oh that was fine, those children deserved it" with their whole chests?!
honestly, even after saying all that i do still love this book. moreover, i hope stuff like this becomes the next trend in YA specfic. i think there are things i liked here that could be done even better and i hope we get to see that.
ok. ok. my actual serious review is that i thought this book was legitimately amazing, both as a story on its own and as a deconstruction of YA dystopia tropes. my biggest complaint is that i would have liked the epilogue to be just a little longer and to show sonya interacting with the people in her new farm compound thing instead of just thinking about them. i am very pro "sonya living her best life" and i think this change would have taken the ending more strongly in that direction.
what actually REALLY bothers me about the scene i mentioned above is that the wards didn't know what sonya did either when trudie made the recording or when she told sonya about it, which means their actions were not based on justifiable personal hatred, but on hatred of sonya just on principle, which to me makes it SO MUCH WORSE. is no one going to consider the incredible cruelty of wishing that a twenty-seven non-violent offender hurries up and gets back to their life imprisonment without parole?? roth could at least have had trudie phrase it differently, like "we were worried you would just use the opportunity to disappear." did fucking eugenia *feel good* about sending someone back to prison who was arrested when she was probably only a little older than trudie?? i loved where roth did end up taking this point, to "i can't and shouldn't martyr myself into making someone forgive me," a thing i don't think we see often enough in books, but that one sentence from trudie and the fact that we just gloss right on over it kind of soured that whole emotional climax for me.
overall, i wish sonya or at least alexander had at any point at least thought, "hey, fuck you for treating me this way when i spent my entire childhood literally from infancy being spiritually abused." like, everyone who participated in overthrowing the delegation and everyone else who didn't get arrested also grew up under the Insight system, they know what it was like! sonya was already doing moral cost-benefit analysis at the age of, like, four, are we expected to believe that *no one else* was into the system that enthusiastically? of course not! are we expected to believe that *no one* has acknowledged that their society is probably living with collective c-ptsd? maybe! but i wish the book had told us about it! like, the more i think about it, the more i wish we had heard from any other characters about what the old regime was like for them, what their daily thought processes were. i really want to know, IS sonya an outlier or did other people grow up similarly neurotic? what are the society wide effects of an abrupt shift in the dominant system of moral policing, veronica???
speaking of moral policing, everyone in this society seems REAL comfortable with the fact that their new, improved government sentenced sixteen-year-olds AND YOUNGER to life imprisonment! that is some omelas shit! it took you ten years to decide that maybe that wasn't okay?! and people are still fully out there like, "oh that was fine, those children deserved it" with their whole chests?!
honestly, even after saying all that i do still love this book. moreover, i hope stuff like this becomes the next trend in YA specfic. i think there are things i liked here that could be done even better and i hope we get to see that.