Tsundoku reviewed Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis
About Justice, Vigilante or otherwise
5 stars
Content warning Sexual Violence, Pedophilia, Regular Violence and Gore, animal cruelty, the horrors of a small town, and death; my review contains spoilers
Whether or not you think Alex Craft deserves to die for what she has done, she HAS to for the sake of the book.
You know from the jacket copy that Alex Craft is a killer.
Specifically she horrifically murders a man because he raped and murdered her older sister, and there wasn't enough evidence to charge him even though everyone in the town knew he did it.
There are other problems. The Tweekers in the woods who roofie one of the viewpoint characters and very much intend to rape her.
The Child Molesting Uncle that people won't keep away from their family, won't publicly condemn.
It's the sins of the small town that won't condemn people. That will report to animal control a sack of puppies, but not actually report that they were dead.
Alex takes care of all of these (except the animal abusers). You could argue her only problem with the tweekers is that she didn't kill them until the end of the book and that's what undoes her.
Alex sets a man on fire, but to be clear, if you are paying any attention to the story: Alex can feel emotions. She feels TOO MUCH of them. She's loaded with empathy. Alex is both the girl who cradles baby kittens and the girl who rips a man's face apart for trying to rape her friend.
She knows she can't be normal, like everyone else.
And I think that hurts.
There's a character, Branley who gets a lot of shit for acting like a promiscuous teenage girl. But Alex realizes there's more to her than that. At one point, during Branley's breakup with her more than friend Jack, she admits she does this because she feels she has nothing more to her than her looks and she knows those will fade. She is redeemed, though you could argue it's her "fault" that Alex dies and I don't think that's fair. She's the victim of another near-assault, and the point is she is in love with a boy and doesn't know how to let him go.
I love this book and wish it got the attention it deserved.
