See more of my reviews on The YA Kitten! My copy was an ARC I got from the publisher via Edelweiss.
Warning: ableism, anti-asexual sentiment
MAJOR SPOILER WARNING. As in, I detail the mystery's resolution so I can tell you how fucking awful this book is.
tl;dr this book is an ableist horror show about a girl with delusional disorder. Her love interest calls her autistic and inhuman but she ends up with him even though he never apologizes for it. Also, the characters explicitly link being on the spectrum to being inhuman and sociopathic (the book's word, not mine). Bonus talk of "correcting" asexuality too!
Fuck Bombshell, fuck its author Rowan Maness, and fuck spoilers because I'm too furious to care. I'm making this one personal because she made it personal by using a developmental disorder I and millions of other people have as an insult in her garbage-ass book.
Joss Louisa Wyatt is the queen of catfishing. An Arizona school girl who's also a jet-setting model, an abused Southern society housewife, and an art school student. She's catfished plenty of people and seems like she'll catfish many more--except she's so astonishingly bad at it that I'm surprised it's only blown up in her face once (she was thirteen and it was her first catfishing ever). She doesn't use a burner phone to talk to her victims, nor does she use any of the many smartphone apps that generate a fake number for you. By all indications, she uses her own cell number to text these guys.
To be fair for a second, maybe she uses some kind of chat/messenger app to do her "work." Bombshell, as poorly written and consistently unclear as it is, never specifies what she uses to text and call them on her phone. She also chats with them on her computer, but nothing indicates she uses a VPN service or any other method to hide her IP address. Joss keeps meticulous logs of all her catfishes in a fake school folder on her computer with no password protection or anything.
Seriously, how has this not gone to shit again sooner?
Except TWIST! Things haven't gone to shit after all because she's doing it all to herself and has developed pinpoint amnesia about when she arranged it so readers don't find that out until she remembers it herself at the end of the book! Had she not had a combination crisis and mental breakdown, she could have kept going!
Look, I meant it when I said I was going to spoil things. If you're here and mad about it, it's your own fault for ignoring my first two warnings.
And speaking of twists, the revelation of what mental illness Joss has is treated as one in typical ableist fashion, so let me spoil that too. She has delusional disorder, she hallucinates a coyote, she completely disassociates at times, and she blacks out multiple times. Since nothing else seems to explain why she catfishes people, I guess it's because she's bored and mentally ill. No one's mental illness makes them catfish people, so I call ableist bullshit on that too. She does it more after her dad's death, sure, but she started it while he was still alive.
I could give you an enumerated list of all the ableist things in this book, but it would add many more words to what's already a very long review. Here's something else offensive instead: a joke about correcting asexuality when the character in question isn't even ace! He just isn't pushy about sex!
Me: ...maybe
Rhiannon: omg you need to stream updates constantly
Me: He's weirdly asexual
Rhiannon: Not for long
Now I can tell Maness to go fuck herself as an autistic person and an asexual person! Shane the love interest is also introduced as such: "[My cat] hates women. And men too, actually, but she really likes Shane--maybe because he is neither." Don't get excited thinking Shame is nonbinary, though. He's cis. It's meant to get across that Joss has never thought of her longtime best friend as a guy she could be attracted to, but like
maybe use better, clearer phrasing? But maybe that's asking too much from a novel so poorly written.
Now let's get back to the autism thing. As it turns out, Shane is catfishing Joss because he loves her and felt that was the best way to make the girl who's oblivious to his feelings fall for him. (You best your ass I laughed at the catfish queen failing to recognize the obvious signs she herself was being catfished. It's all ludicrous.) Once the jig is up, they argue and he handles his spurned affections by calling her autistic and inhuman. I CHECKED THAT SHIT AGAINST THE FINAL COPY. IT'S THERE.
Let me count all the things about this that make me say FUCK YOU:
* using autism as an insult
* him correlating it with being inhuman
* Joss's brother later saying she's more sociopathic
* Shane never apologizes for it
* THEY END UP TOGETHER
There is not a single excuse for that bullshit. Teens talk like that? No they don't, I was in high school ten years ago and students ran their own campaign to get everyone to quit using the r-word, so today's teenagers are surely even better than that. It is a writer's responsibility not to write dehumanizing, anti-autistic horseshit--or any of this ableist horseshit in general. When it comes to writing, follow the same rule as doctors: do no harm.
God, I'm SO MAD I misspelled "responsibility" three times because fury made me forget how spelling works. I am literally unable to parse all the ableist bullshit in this book.
That's it. Don't read the garbage fire that is Bombshell. And don't say a goddamn word to me, Rowan. I don't want to hear it.