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A review by sawood
Final Girls by Riley Sager
1.0
Men should not be allowed to write women characters if they haven’t taken some feminist theory classes.
Sager’s women characters fall into one of two categories: Virgin or Whore/Bad Girl. Does this thriller deserve the level of critical analysis I’m about to give it? Absolutely not but if I had to suffer through this crap then I’m going to write about why it’s crap.
Quinn: Virgin. She’s innocent and sweet and beautifully covered in blood because she’s a perfect “Final Girl.” She spends the night of the murders thinking almost exclusively about having sex with her boyfriend and losing her virginity. She decides not to sleep with her boyfriend because it’s not a special enough experience and then turns around and has revenge sex with a rando freak who showed up at the cabin in the woods. This was one of the stupidest “twists” in this book. There is no character consistency and something about this being such a huge part of the book gave me an ick. It didn’t add to the story and I have some aggressive questions for Sager.
Sam: Whore/Bad Girl. Sam shows up dressed in black leather. She’s edgy, she commits crimes, she’s violent, she wears black nail polish, she drinks whiskey, she ~smokes~. The writing about Sam portrays her as immoral, bad, wreaking havoc. It rubbed me the wrong way.
Janelle: Whore/Bad Girl. Janelle is a party girl who likes to have sex (gasps)! She’s violently killed off almost immediately. Obviously.
On to the bad guy. The twist at the end when we find out who did it was out of left field and done almost exclusively for shock value. The character did a 180 with no build up. And this part especially just reeeeeeeked of misogyny. Maybe Sager thinks he’s being satirical and edgy when he writes a stalker, obsessive murder man who just couldn’t kill Quinn because she was #notlikeothergirls but there was no critical satire to be found in my opinion.
This book was gross and gave me an ick. People who are way more eloquent than me could probably break it down better but those people shouldn’t waste their time reading even two sentences of this book.
Sager’s women characters fall into one of two categories: Virgin or Whore/Bad Girl. Does this thriller deserve the level of critical analysis I’m about to give it? Absolutely not but if I had to suffer through this crap then I’m going to write about why it’s crap.
Quinn: Virgin. She’s innocent and sweet and beautifully covered in blood because she’s a perfect “Final Girl.” She spends the night of the murders thinking almost exclusively about having sex with her boyfriend and losing her virginity. She decides not to sleep with her boyfriend because it’s not a special enough experience and then turns around and has revenge sex with a rando freak who showed up at the cabin in the woods. This was one of the stupidest “twists” in this book. There is no character consistency and something about this being such a huge part of the book gave me an ick. It didn’t add to the story and I have some aggressive questions for Sager.
Sam: Whore/Bad Girl. Sam shows up dressed in black leather. She’s edgy, she commits crimes, she’s violent, she wears black nail polish, she drinks whiskey, she ~smokes~. The writing about Sam portrays her as immoral, bad, wreaking havoc. It rubbed me the wrong way.
Janelle: Whore/Bad Girl. Janelle is a party girl who likes to have sex (gasps)! She’s violently killed off almost immediately. Obviously.
On to the bad guy. The twist at the end when we find out who did it was out of left field and done almost exclusively for shock value. The character did a 180 with no build up. And this part especially just reeeeeeeked of misogyny. Maybe Sager thinks he’s being satirical and edgy when he writes a stalker, obsessive murder man who just couldn’t kill Quinn because she was #notlikeothergirls but there was no critical satire to be found in my opinion.
This book was gross and gave me an ick. People who are way more eloquent than me could probably break it down better but those people shouldn’t waste their time reading even two sentences of this book.