Reviews and Comments

This might be one of the worst books I’ve read in a long time. I checked it out because I saw the description said it was “an examination of rape culture.” I wasn’t expecting some groundbreaking work from a YA novel, but I was definitely not expecting this. As I read I kept thinking “there is nothing feminist about this” and by the time I got to the end, I was thinking that this was actively -anti-feminist.-

The book is teeming with “unexamined” misogyny and rape culture. At first I thought these things were being set up to be subverted, but they never are.

Branley, for instance, is just a MRA “slut” meme trope, and at no point is this challenged. The book relishes in over the top descriptions (“friend to all penises” “auditioning for manga porn”). She gets beer dumped on her and we get a description of her jiggling breasts. This isn’t a teenage girl, this is how MRAs think teenage girls are.

When she’s not wearing makeup, when she’s described as not being “pouty” and speaking “normally” then everyone is like “wow Branley you could be cool without all that.” Pairing that with the fact that Jack found it sexy that Alex was a virgin (that is also rape culture, and also goes unexamined) this book heavily accepts as read that there is something wrong, weird, artificial about Branley. She is a slut, and it is kind of bad, according to the text.

Just before Ray tries to rape Branley, Branley is pressuring Jack for sex, which is also rape culture, and also goes unexamined. Egregiously so. Since this book loves nothing but to reiterate that teenage boys can’t help but want sex, including in that scene, congrats on reifying every single way that rape culture also affects boys. Holy god.

The text can’t seem to let Alex be a vigilante. So much of the book relies on telling us that Alex is motivated by an disturbing, inherent anger, a thing that is -wrong- with her. Up to and including having a part about how she got this anger from her father, who she knew sometimes -wanted- to hit their mother. So I guess fighting back against rapists=the same thing as being an abusive man?

So there’s no payoff, because she isn’t a vigilante. We get a little bit of character-tells-how-they-feel (this happens a lot, there is SO MUCH telling) at the end about how she felt after her sister died, but we get none of that from book. In fact, her guilt is treated as -character growth-. She’s not a “badass fighter against misogyny” she’s treated as an aberration that needs to learn her place.

By the end, the bad rapists are dead, and the good boys get to make sexually harassing comments toward girls, but it’s fine, it’s kind of funny even, because there is no examination of rape culture whatsoever. This book just is rape culture.

She dies in the end in such an asinine way because not only is this book anti-feminist, it’s also lazily written. She had to die, because her murdering which was treated as such an egregious act from her disturbed and dangerous self, is so meaningless that Jack’s just like “ok but like I still love you, so you’re cool” She has to die so the thinness of her murdering others remains thin, so that it doesn’t actually matter, either to the character, or to any real dent in rape culture as a whole.)

Also love that at the end there Branley is the one apologizing. You can’t uphold rape culture in your anti-feminist text without humbling the slutty girl. For a book about “examining rape culture” it can’t subvert any rape culture tropes and desires.

This book is so clichely rape culture I don’t even know if any feminist even signed off on this book. Any basic feminist understanding would’ve criticized 2/3rds of this book that never goes “examined.”

Anyway, I’ll cut this short to not keep writing a wall of text. This book deserves its own hard swift kick by some actual feminist woman, straight into the trash bin.

I was very excited for this book because so many of the recipes seemed more interesting than just a standard cookie. I made the mocha crackle first, and it came out very dry. At first I thought it was me—I’ve never baked with silken tofu before, maybe I didn’t measure it quite right. Then I made what I felt was a standard cookie—a mocha white chocolate pecan cookie, and that dough also came out very, very dry and crumbly. There is no photo in the book for this cookie aside from a photo of a cup of pecans, so I had no sense of how these were supposed to look. I added more and more liquid and then tried baking it, and after my first bite realized that at no point did the recipe call for sugar!

Then I found out all the photos are stock photos, many are simply “close enough” and whatever the author clearly couldn’t find a picture of she just used really generic photos of an ingredient. The cookie I tried isn’t even the only one that doesn’t have sugar, and the liquid to dry ingredient proportions make no sense. This isn’t a cookbook—this is just pretty photos stuck with untested recipes that weren’t even thought through. Do not recommend, do not even bother with this one.