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Musings: The Cruelty Is The Point: The Burning by Laura Bates

The Burning by Laura Bates

Sourcebooks Fire, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1728206738

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

Reading Laura Bates’ The Burning was like a dizzying fall down a rabbit hole to hell.  Anna, the main character, has moved to a new town and a new school to escape a scandal at her old school, only to find that the perpetrator has established social media profiles for her, posting provocative statements and photos that portray her in a very negative light  to classmates who already were incredibly nasty to each other, giving them the excuse they’ve been looking for to bully her (there is a parallel storyline about her visions during a search for information about a woman also unfairly turned on by her community who was burned for witchcraft in the 1650s). After attempts to deal with the cyberbullying on her own,  Anna eventually speaks up and even uses social media to reclaim her image, but  even after the uproar finally dies down, she can’t really escape what’s out there. Once you’re on the Internet, you don’t easily get your privacy back. I don’t know how common it is for cyberbullying to swing that far out of control, but it is terrifying.

Last year’s  The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter  by Caroline Flarity (review here) didn’t go quite as far wirh cyberbullying: the main character (also named Anna) has a reputation for being odd, and she is bullied, but she’s a stronger character and much of  the mockery she faces is due to her reputation as the spooky daughter of an eccentric ghost-hunter (if you have gone to school with the same kids your whole life, you’ll know how hard it is to change the way they look at you). This Anna faces personal and physical threats in a different way (a bully obsessed with her sets her house on fire) as well as ostracism due to social media (a boy she likes tries to convince her to take off her shirt, and later shows video he took to their classmates) but the cyberbullying doesn’t go nearly as far as The Burning in tearing her down. Unlike Anna in The Burning, who is just trying to make it, and reclaim her identity, with her situation central to the story,  Anna in The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter also has to fight a supernatural force and save the day.

Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin (reviewed here), also from last year, is a revenge tale based on Macbeth, where four girls conspire to eliminate the athletes who raped one of them. The girls use the Internet to track down and identify the boys, and erase Elle’s presence in social media (this seems unlikely, but certainly the plot wouldn’t work without this). Changing her name to Jade, and altering her appearance, she transfers to the school the team attends, and manipulates the team members and the girls they’re involved with until one of the boys starts killing off the others. It’s interesting that a lot depends on who has a a cellphone and where it is. Not only is it horrifying to know these boys were either participants or complicit, but the way Elle is able to manipulate them into turning on each other demonstrates vividly the poor judgment, intense emotion, and peer pressure teens experience.

These girls go through some horrific events, and the cruelty and fear of the teens in these stories is what I find really frightening. The Burning caused me to have conversations with both my middle schoolers about their experiences at school. They don’t have much access to social media, so they wouldn’t be exposed to some of the more appalling incidents, but it doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.  My daughter, who was bullied in elementary school asked what the motivation is for someone to act as maliciously as some of the kids in The Burning. That’s the real horror for me as a parent: for some, there is no reason, or sometimes the cruelty is the point.

 

A final note:  Laura Bates is an English feminist activist and writer who founded the Everyday Sexism Project. At the end of The Burning she offers a list of websites for organizations who offer information and support to girls dealing with issues that appear in the book, and many others,

The Burning contains: cyberbullying, bullying, descriptions of pornographic images, references to abortion, rape, torture, and death.

 

 

 

Posted on April 25, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Five Midnights by Ann Davila Cardinal

Five Midnights by Ann Cardinal Davila

Tor Teen, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1250296078

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, and audiobook

“When the U.S. gets a cold, Puerto Rico gets pneumonia.” In the United States, the mainland tends to forget that Puerto Rico is part of the country, and many Puerto Ricans have learned that federal government agencies don’t really want to get involved when disaster hits due to this (witness the travesty of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria). Five Midnights takes place before the hurricane hit, but it is easy to see that mainlanders, mostly white and wealthy, are viewed with suspicion due to their contribution to gentrification, which is driving locals out of even middle class neighborhoods to areas where gangs, drugs and crime are profitable and attractive tp teenagers trying to make it in a struggling economy. It’s no surprise when Vico, a successful teenage drug dealer, dies violently while on his way to a deal, but what only the reader knows is that the death is due to a shadowy, clawed, supernatural creature.

Enter Lupe, a half-Puerto Rican, half-white teenager who has traveled from Vermont to Puerto Rico to spend the summer with her aunt and uncle (who is also the chief of police). Lupe is independent and contrary, and fascinated by crime, an interest her uncle has previously encouraged. The case of the drug dealer touches on a family member, her cousin Izzy, who has disappeared, and her uncle does not want her involved, but that only makes Lupe more determined. Lupe is feminist in a very teenage girl “I can do it myself, don’t you dare help me” kind of way,  an attitude that made an otherwise independent young woman seem like she needed to be rescued (for instance, walking into traffic because it was suggested she wait, and having to be pulled out of the street after nearly getting hit by a car). Her character does grow a lot as she meets a variety of people and experiences parts of Puerto Rico she wouldn’t have seen as a tourist and begins to understand the impact the mainland, and especially mainland investors, are having on the country. Cardinal does a great job in describing pre-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico. I almost felt like I was there. I want to give her props, too, for her portrayal of adults in the story. YA fiction frequently depicts adults as clueless and closed-minded, but when these teens really needed them, the majority of adults listened, and stepped up, without taking over.

Because Lupe resembles her white mother instead of her Puerto Rican father, she  also gets a lesson in colorism. Although she sees herself as Puerto Rican, the other teens she encounters call her “gringa”, white girl. It’s confusing to her at first, because she identifies as half-Puerto Rican, and can’t understand why no one else understands that. However, she comes to recognize that she does have white privilege and as a mainland American takes some things for granted that many Puerto Ricans cannot. At the same time, the friends she makes come to recognize that there are parts of her that are very Puerto Rican after all, even if they’re not immediately visible.

Our other major character is Javier, who grew up with Vico and Izzy, but kicked his drug habit and is working hard to stay clean and make up for the damage he did while he was involved with drugs. Despite a rocky beginning, Lupe and Javier decide to team up to find Izzy and solve Vico’s murder. They become more and more convinced that El Cuco, a shadowy supernatural creature bent on retribution is after Javier and his friends. It is refreshing to see a monster  grounded in local folklore, appearing in a contemporary story, instead of the same tired tropes.

I loved seeing Puerto Rico take center stage when so often it’s ignored, and enjoyed watching Lupe and Javier puzzle out the mystery and each other. The climax is an outstanding, terrifying, mystical, and visually evocative piece of writing. This was Cardinal’s debut novel, and I look forward to her next one, Category Five, set in post-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico.  This is a truly Stoker-worthy book. Highly recommended.

 

Contains: violence, murder, mild gore, drug abuse

Editor’s note: Five Midnights was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

Posted on April 15, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Rules for Vanishing by Kate Alice Marshall

Rules for Vanishing by Kate Alice Marshall

Viking Books for Young Readers, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1984837011

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

 

 

The legend of Lucy Gallows says that 12 year old Lucy Callow ran into the woods after an argument with her mother, and when her brother went after her, he saw her step onto a road, and as she walked away, both she and the road vanished, never to be found.

Sara Donoghue’s sister Becca was obsessed with the legend of Lucy Gallows, going so far as to fill a notebook with thoughts, drawings, photographs, and clues that could lead her to the vanished road and find Lucy.  A year ago, on April 18, Becca disappeared, and Sara is certain her sister found her way to the road. Now everyone in her school has received a text message to find a partner and a key to find the road by midnight. Anthony, Trina, Kyle, Mel and Nick were Becca and Sara’s closest friends, and despite doubts, all of them show up to see if the road appears. The road has seven gates, and you need a partner to hold on to as you take the thirteen necessary (and disorienting) steps through each gate.  Becca’s notebook contains rules for traveling on the road:

Don’t leave the road.

When it’s dark, don’t let go.

There are other roads. Don’t follow them.

The road does appear, but since three of the friends have shown up with partners for the game, there is an odd number, meaning someone won’t have a partner. And in the dark, it’s easy to get separated and accidentally step off the road. The teens are not on a friendly stroll here; they are on a terrible road with frightening and sometimes deadly obstacles, and once they’re through the gate, they can’t turn back. But they also can’t help breaking the rules. If the reader isn’t filled with dread at the beginning of their journey, it won’t take long for that to happen.

Marshall constructs her story in a complicated way. First, we get Sara’s relatively straightforward narrative, told entirely from her point of view.  Then we move to a point past the events on the road,  with transcripts from interviews with Sara, and others who were on the journey, by Andrew Ashford, a discredited researcher of the paranormal.  There’s also documentation of what happened before the teens stepped onto the road (through text messages between Sara’s friends) and while they were on it (cell phone recordings and videos, and photographs) suggesting that maybe Sara’s story is not as straightforward or reliable as it seems to be. Marshall balances these nicely to create a cohesive, if sometimes hallucinatory, story.   The creativity of the story and the work that goes in to structuring a book like this are impressive. I wasn’t a big fan of most of the characters, but the world-building is outstanding (although I am curious as to why the author chose to ground her story in a legend from Brittany when the book is set in Massachusetts), and the suspense is terrific.

I wonder if this is meant to stand alone (it certainly can) or if it’s meant to be part of a longer series about Andrew Ashford’s investigations of the paranormal, which I would find intriguing. Either way, for those who like the puzzle of pulling a story together, it’s a compelling and worthwhile read. Recommended.

Contains: Violence, gore,  murder

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Editor’s note:  Rules for Vanishing was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

Posted on March 31, 2020 by , Reply
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