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glitter_n_gore(Is it bandom blasphemy to use a My Chemical Romance album title in a review for a book written by the singer of The Birthday Massacre? Meh, I'm rolling with it.)
The increasingly arbitrary line between Adult and Teen fiction continues to bewilder me. Why is Sara Taylor’s (aka “Chibi’s”) Boring Girls not a teen book? I'd guess the violence, but Danielle Vega's The Merciless is on a comparable level of gruesome, so it's not that. Maybe it's the realistic setting, as opposed to fantasy or dystopia. This isn't a clearly imaginary world like Holly Black's The Coldest Girl In Coldtown or Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, which makes it feel like something that could happen, even though it's entirely fictional. Then again, Tiffany Jackson's Allegedly is in that boat too, so never mind.
View on Goodreads
Honestly, what this reminds me of most isn't any particular novel in any age category, but horror movies centered on dangerous young women. Heavenly Creatures, Ginger Snaps, Stoker, The Craft--all films told from the point of view of the teenage protagonist, but with a restrictive rating that won't allow their age peers to view them in theaters without adult supervision. There's something insidious and fascinating about that. The truth is being a teenage girl is inherently dangerous, violent, and terrifying. Only this time, the catalyst for our main character, Rachel's, transformation, isn't witchcraft or lycanthropy, but death metal music.
Rachel does not fit in. I know basically every teen character is framed as a "misfit," but Rachel really doesn't fit in. There's no gang of outcasts for her to hang out with, the popular kids taunt her, the social pariahs who grovel for acceptance disgust her, and the nerds ignore her. She has nobody but a persistent bully who loves to humiliate her for petty reasons, like her clothes or her hair. And then she discovers a band called Die Every Death, and the warped, wonderful world of death metal.
Before we go any further, you should know: This is a rape-revenge story. That’s an automatic “Nope!” for some readers, and you need to be prepared for some really uncomfortable stuff right out of the gate. Again, I mostly see this in horror movies. I Spit On Your Grave, The Last House On the Left, American Mary--there’s a whole sub-genre of this exact storyline, with the set dressings and methods switched up. So, what does “rape-revenge” mean exactly? It’s a deceptively simple concept: the main character survives an attack of sexual violence, then swears--and gets--revenge. I say “deceptively” because it’s an easy concept to get wrong. The worst ones err on the side of more exploitative than empowering. If you’ve been a victim of sexual violence, you need to tread very, very carefully. One gets weary of seeing the “Woman with a dark and mysterious past!” tagline and going, “So, she was raped, is what you’re telling me?” and being right over and over and over. It’s easy to see the line between creators who do this to be ~edgy, and those who have a real-life axe to grind and by god, they are going to grind it into the metaphorical skulls of the assholes who hurt them.
Boring Girls is one of the good ones. It starts with Rachel already in jail for mass murder, pleading desperately with the reader to let her claim responsibility for her own crime. See, the cops and psychiatrists keep asking why she did it, wanting to assign the blame to some influence like the music, or drugs, or her parents, or anything of the other usual suspects. “It was for revenge,” she insists, and it isn’t until halfway through the book that we find out who her targets were and why.
If you think you know where this is going, well, you do, but you don’t. Rachel’s actions in the latter half of the book are shaped by the people who attack her and her friend Fern, but that’s not the only thing driving her growth as a character. She has a lot of rage and frustration that she ultimately channels in a positive direction. The way her attitude comes out in the beginning makes you think she was always going to do something destructive and violent, but that’s not really what happens. She initially starts listening to death metal because it gives a voice to her sense of powerlessness over school bullies and adults who don’t understand her. She has gruesome fantasies about the people in her life who have wronged her, but she never carries any of them out. She starts her own band with Fern partly as a “Fuck You” to the gatekeeping jerks who don’t think girls should even like metal, but the more young girls come to her shows telling her how much they look up to her, the more her anger and isolation dissolves.
At the end, Rachel realizes she has to make a choice. On the one hand, she has her career, her friends, and her family. She has the support of hundreds of teenage girls who now see her as the role model she never had. But she only gets to keep that life if she ignores this horrible thing that happened to her, effectively condemning more girls to the exact same nightmare, because these guys will never be held accountable. On the other, she could take the path we already know she took from the prologue, planning out a way to take grisly revenge, because she wasn’t the first victim and won’t be the last. That path destroys her career and her future, and it doesn’t bring her peace. Taylor hammers home the fact that violence is never poetic or pretty. It’s grimy, disgusting, and hollow, even if it’s justified. It’s also the only way to stop them. At least that’s what Rachel believes. I can’t decide whether or not I agree with her.
I don’t want to speculate too much about how much Taylor’s pulling from real life experience here. The part where Rachel forgets to pack more than one pair of increasingly grungy knee-socks for a tour is based on fact, because Taylor's mentioned that story in interviews. I know her actual band, The Birthday Massacre, is not a death metal band, nor would anyone mistake them for one. I also know that the hard rock scene overall is littered with misogyny, racism, and homophobia, which sucks for those of us who love the music but don’t feel like there’s a place for us in its audience. For women specifically, it doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re on the floor or on the stage; dude-bros will still see you as a piece of meat. Not all of them, but enough of them that it can be really uncomfortable, and is one of the reasons I’m hesitant to go to concerts alone. As far as I know, the most dramatic thing Taylor’s done to a creep yelling gross things at her from the audience is this. And it was glorious, but it should never be necessary.
This is a difficult story to read, but it’s even more difficult to put down. Rachel is both frightening in the intensity of her rage, and relatable at the same time. I admire her creativity and determination, but also wouldn’t want to meet her because I’m pretty sure she could break me in half. I understand her, but part of me wishes I didn’t. Bottom line, I needed this book right now. I needed Rachel. Most of all, I needed TBM's music, without which I wouldn’t have found the other two.
The increasingly arbitrary line between Adult and Teen fiction continues to bewilder me. Why is Sara Taylor’s (aka “Chibi’s”) Boring Girls not a teen book? I'd guess the violence, but Danielle Vega's The Merciless is on a comparable level of gruesome, so it's not that. Maybe it's the realistic setting, as opposed to fantasy or dystopia. This isn't a clearly imaginary world like Holly Black's The Coldest Girl In Coldtown or Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, which makes it feel like something that could happen, even though it's entirely fictional. Then again, Tiffany Jackson's Allegedly is in that boat too, so never mind.
View on Goodreads
Honestly, what this reminds me of most isn't any particular novel in any age category, but horror movies centered on dangerous young women. Heavenly Creatures, Ginger Snaps, Stoker, The Craft--all films told from the point of view of the teenage protagonist, but with a restrictive rating that won't allow their age peers to view them in theaters without adult supervision. There's something insidious and fascinating about that. The truth is being a teenage girl is inherently dangerous, violent, and terrifying. Only this time, the catalyst for our main character, Rachel's, transformation, isn't witchcraft or lycanthropy, but death metal music.
Rachel does not fit in. I know basically every teen character is framed as a "misfit," but Rachel really doesn't fit in. There's no gang of outcasts for her to hang out with, the popular kids taunt her, the social pariahs who grovel for acceptance disgust her, and the nerds ignore her. She has nobody but a persistent bully who loves to humiliate her for petty reasons, like her clothes or her hair. And then she discovers a band called Die Every Death, and the warped, wonderful world of death metal.
Before we go any further, you should know: This is a rape-revenge story. That’s an automatic “Nope!” for some readers, and you need to be prepared for some really uncomfortable stuff right out of the gate. Again, I mostly see this in horror movies. I Spit On Your Grave, The Last House On the Left, American Mary--there’s a whole sub-genre of this exact storyline, with the set dressings and methods switched up. So, what does “rape-revenge” mean exactly? It’s a deceptively simple concept: the main character survives an attack of sexual violence, then swears--and gets--revenge. I say “deceptively” because it’s an easy concept to get wrong. The worst ones err on the side of more exploitative than empowering. If you’ve been a victim of sexual violence, you need to tread very, very carefully. One gets weary of seeing the “Woman with a dark and mysterious past!” tagline and going, “So, she was raped, is what you’re telling me?” and being right over and over and over. It’s easy to see the line between creators who do this to be ~edgy, and those who have a real-life axe to grind and by god, they are going to grind it into the metaphorical skulls of the assholes who hurt them.
Boring Girls is one of the good ones. It starts with Rachel already in jail for mass murder, pleading desperately with the reader to let her claim responsibility for her own crime. See, the cops and psychiatrists keep asking why she did it, wanting to assign the blame to some influence like the music, or drugs, or her parents, or anything of the other usual suspects. “It was for revenge,” she insists, and it isn’t until halfway through the book that we find out who her targets were and why.
If you think you know where this is going, well, you do, but you don’t. Rachel’s actions in the latter half of the book are shaped by the people who attack her and her friend Fern, but that’s not the only thing driving her growth as a character. She has a lot of rage and frustration that she ultimately channels in a positive direction. The way her attitude comes out in the beginning makes you think she was always going to do something destructive and violent, but that’s not really what happens. She initially starts listening to death metal because it gives a voice to her sense of powerlessness over school bullies and adults who don’t understand her. She has gruesome fantasies about the people in her life who have wronged her, but she never carries any of them out. She starts her own band with Fern partly as a “Fuck You” to the gatekeeping jerks who don’t think girls should even like metal, but the more young girls come to her shows telling her how much they look up to her, the more her anger and isolation dissolves.
At the end, Rachel realizes she has to make a choice. On the one hand, she has her career, her friends, and her family. She has the support of hundreds of teenage girls who now see her as the role model she never had. But she only gets to keep that life if she ignores this horrible thing that happened to her, effectively condemning more girls to the exact same nightmare, because these guys will never be held accountable. On the other, she could take the path we already know she took from the prologue, planning out a way to take grisly revenge, because she wasn’t the first victim and won’t be the last. That path destroys her career and her future, and it doesn’t bring her peace. Taylor hammers home the fact that violence is never poetic or pretty. It’s grimy, disgusting, and hollow, even if it’s justified. It’s also the only way to stop them. At least that’s what Rachel believes. I can’t decide whether or not I agree with her.
I don’t want to speculate too much about how much Taylor’s pulling from real life experience here. The part where Rachel forgets to pack more than one pair of increasingly grungy knee-socks for a tour is based on fact, because Taylor's mentioned that story in interviews. I know her actual band, The Birthday Massacre, is not a death metal band, nor would anyone mistake them for one. I also know that the hard rock scene overall is littered with misogyny, racism, and homophobia, which sucks for those of us who love the music but don’t feel like there’s a place for us in its audience. For women specifically, it doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re on the floor or on the stage; dude-bros will still see you as a piece of meat. Not all of them, but enough of them that it can be really uncomfortable, and is one of the reasons I’m hesitant to go to concerts alone. As far as I know, the most dramatic thing Taylor’s done to a creep yelling gross things at her from the audience is this. And it was glorious, but it should never be necessary.
This is a difficult story to read, but it’s even more difficult to put down. Rachel is both frightening in the intensity of her rage, and relatable at the same time. I admire her creativity and determination, but also wouldn’t want to meet her because I’m pretty sure she could break me in half. I understand her, but part of me wishes I didn’t. Bottom line, I needed this book right now. I needed Rachel. Most of all, I needed TBM's music, without which I wouldn’t have found the other two.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-28 10:35 pm (UTC)BTW, I hear you so much on the not-too-good things that circulate around the hard rock scene. I've been lucky enough to almost always have family with me, or to be at a sitting-down concert. But yeah, I'd be leery of going alone, too.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-29 01:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-30 01:45 am (UTC)(I keep forgetting people do that, and keep being reminded. Bunnytrail: yesterday the bank teller saw me with The Neverending Story. We started talking fantasy, and she half-apologetically said she liked YA. I said I did, too, but it bugged me she had to brace for possible snootery.)