Book-review post!

Here are some books you must read. They are YA or YAish, really – Sarah Bannan’s book is being marketed as a crossover, while the other two are pitched as YA but get marvellously dark and adult along the way and are the sort I think should be pressed into everyone’s hands. They are all gorgeous.

Sarah Bannan – Weightless

Pitched as The Virgin Suicides meets Prep, so, y’know, you can’t lose with this one. Told from the point of view of a group of girls looking back at the year beautiful Carolyn Lessing moved to their small town, this book explores bullying and rumour and jealousy and responsibility in a way that is compelling and unsettling. The subject matter is familiar but the first-person-plural is absolutely the strength of this novel, letting us get sucked into this world and watch the manipulations and power struggles of adolescent (and small-town) life. Sarah Bannan has worked in the arts and literary world for a while – I mention this only because we need some reason or justification for why this debut novel is so damn good.

Moira Fowley-Doyle – The Accident Season

Every year, it happens – accidents befall Cara and her family, ranging from minor scrapes to serious tragedy. This year is no different. Meanwhile, there’s a girl at school who shows up in every single one of her photos, regardless of where they’ve been taken – a girl who’s disappeared and no one seems to remember except for very vaguely.

This is a dark, twisty story grounded in the real world but with an unsettling supernatural threat hovering over everything; it manages to brilliantly convey both the everyday school and family life and the chilling spookiness. There are friendships and love stories and secrets and I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s a very pleasing book and I can’t wait until it’s out in the world (coming this summer).

Courtney Summers – All The Rage

There are echoes of the pilot of Veronica Mars in Courtney Summers’s latest book, and I mean that in the best possible way. Like Veronica, we meet Romy a year after her life’s been shaken up, after a rape, after her family circumstances have shifted and after the small town she lives in has decided she’s not to be trusted. But Romy doesn’t get to be a quippy girl detective. She’s still hurting. In some ways her life is better – her mom’s back with her old high school boyfriend, and her alcoholic father’s out of the picture – but she’s perpetually branded a liar for saying that one of the town’s golden boys – his father’s the sheriff, his mother runs their business empire – raped her. Her former best friend Penny won’t talk to her, and the boy at work she likes, Leon, seems nice, but Romy knows you can’t trust nice, can’t trust anything. When Penny shows up at Romy’s workplace and then disappears that night, and Romy wakes up in the middle of the road with no memory of what’s happened and ‘rape me’ scrawled on her stomach in her trademark red lipstick, it’s the beginning of a town search that can only end badly.

I wanted to read this book and I also didn’t. Because it is a tough read, an upsetting read; it’s about the prejudice in small towns and the powerlessness of people, and the insidious nature of rape culture and how dangerous it is to be a girl in this world. The line I’ve seen quoted over and over again is when Romy thinks about her boyfriend’s newborn niece: “She doesn’t even know how hard it’s going to be yet, but she will, because all girls find out.” There is some hope, some redemption, but there is also a lot of pain and anger that refuses to be solved by the end of the book – and rightfully so, because this is a struggle against culture and society, not against particular individuals. I am glad this book exists. I wish it wasn’t so real.