Reviewed by empressbrooke on
It started off really well, and at the 33% mark I was still feeling really positive about it. I liked that unlike THUG and Dear Martin, which featured black teens in predominantly white schools, this one featured teens in an inner city school and showed how the lack of resources and the school-to-prison pipeline were their daily reality. The school resource officer attacking a student with medication in her locker brought to mind cell phone videos of school resource officers assaulting teens for showing normal levels of teenage defiance. The school's response to install metal detectors felt like a response a school would make in real life, as did the teens' activism and protests against feeling like their school was turning into a prison.
But then the metal detectors pulled out someone's surgical pins and it all went downhill following that ridiculous bit of implausibility (we're later told it wasn't really a metal detector, but that explanation was fuzzy).
The book's biggest flaw is the utterly melodramatic, over-the-top villainy coming from cardboard characters. According to the author's acknowledgments at the end, it started out as science fiction and then his agent convinced him to turn it into a contemporary novel. I'm not sure if the tone didn't completely get changed over to be fully grounded in reality, but something went awry. When the school administration calls in the police to stop a student walk-out, the tone goes pure camp. The police are walking around actually saying things like, "You can't stop me! I answer to no one!" before beating the principal who changed his mind about their presence there. All that was missing was some comic book villain laughter. The police release something that "distorts" peoples' faces, but it's counteracted by hand sanitizer? And then a cop kills someone and runs away and goes into hiding - because the real life injustice of how few cops are held accountable when they comply with their departments' policies and go through the criminal justice system (or don't, really, when they're not indicted) isn't good enough for this book? There's also some utterly bizarre weirdness with a communications manager who shows up at a community meeting to read a press release, and then apparently gets fired because she didn't effectively do....something? Read the press release intimidatingly enough? And then within days there is a "surprise" new communications manager who smirks at the main character a lot? There is a lot of fuss over these communication managers. There are a number of sinister conspiracies thrown in too - the main character's dad didn't just get killed by police when they responded to a burglary at the wrong address (something that is completely grounded in reality), but it's suggested later on that he was targeted because the main character's mom was an activist. The metal detectors weren't just installed at the school in some security theater bullshit in response to a resource office attacking a student (again, something that was probably ripped right from real life), they were really super secret magnet machines they had been planning to install already that could see inside peoples' bodies put there for some super nefarious purpose....which was never actually explained, but felt like something thrown in when the author's editor pointed out metal detectors don't pull out surgical pins. I didn't understand the addition of all the camp and conspiracies when real life is bad enough.
And then the melodrama just kept going on and on, and I kept wondering why it needed to be 400+ pages long, and the main character keeps screaming, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO, MAMA!" and his mom kept yelling back, "I LOVE YOU, BABY!" And then the main character would yell something like, "YOU POLICE/SCHOOL ADMINS/COMMUNICATIONS MANAGERS ARE BAD BULLIES AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD!" and the people he was talking to would drop their jaws in awe and act like he had just laid some astonishing truths they had never considered on them. I was so glad when I reached the end. But the end was such bullshit too - if the conflict was unrealistically over the top, so was the resolution. After the police incite a riot in response to a peaceful protest, there is a press conference where the mayor and police chief take full responsibility and apologize. And the cop that went into hiding after killing the main character's boyfriend shows up at this press conference in tears and apologizes and accepts responsibility and cries out, "I'M SORRY I TOOK JAVIER FROM YOU!" So not only did the conflict go beyond reality, but so did the conclusion. I would say the ending was left over from when this book was still science fiction, but it's actually pure fantasy.
Beyond the plot, my other issue was with the characters. There are so many of them, and it's like the author wanted to be able to represent every possible person on the planet. The main character, Moss, is a gay black kid who has anxiety. His friends include: a gay undocumented immigrant, a Latina lesbian who was adopted by white people, a biromantic disabled guy, the biromantic disabled guy's asexual girlfriend, a genderfluid person who has epilepsy, someone else who uses "they/their" pronouns, a Muslim girl, a trans girl, and if you are sitting here shaking your head that I'm summing them up by reducing them to these labels, that's because that is basically all the author did. They have no personality characteristics aside from randomly announcing that they're asexual, or having their disability exacerbated so that the main character can get ~inspired~ by them. There's also all of these characters' parents who get screen time, and random friends-of-friends who pop up a couple times then disappear, and friends-of-parents (one of the friends-of-parents mentions that she has depression and takes medication for it, and it is literally never mentioned again - but hey, another checkbox)....The author really should have cut the cast list in half and fleshed them out into real people instead of walking labels.
The main character is also really self-centered, and not in the way YA teens sometimes are (where the point of the book is that they realize this and grow). One of Moss' defining issues throughout the book that his friends all help him deal with is that his dad was shot and killed by police, so he has anxiety and panic attacks. He's so bloody self focused that it's not until the end of the book that he finds out another one of his friends also lost his dad to gun violence. Way to not use your friends as props, dude! (As mentioned above, the disabled guy is a prop, too, on multiple occasions). He also gets really angry with his best friend, the Latina lesbian who was adopted by white parents, for not understanding racism. At first it was really well done - she goes to a school in a wealthier area, so she doesn't really understand when Moss complains about how only community colleges showed up at his school's college fair. Their conversation felt like something out of real life. But later, the best friend's mom tries to help in a really misguided way that results in the school knowing about the walkout ahead of time (and therefore calling in the police), Moss takes all of his anger out on the best friend. And the book presents this as completely justified and I'm scratching my head going, are we really not going to tackle ANYTHING about what it's like being both a lesbian and Latina in a predominantly white neighborhood and school? What it's like for non-white children of white adoptive parents? Does she not experience any racist or homophobic friction in her life? Has she ever had any frustrations over how her parents didn't or couldn't fully equip her to deal with it? Of course, if she had, Moss wouldn't have known (see the part above about him being super self-focused).
But so many authors that I love really seemed to love this book! And it got a Kirkus starred review! So what do I know!
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 31 May, 2019: Finished reading
- 31 May, 2019: Reviewed