Some books I've read (fiction)
*Possible triggers* (This post is about abuse and vigilante justice)
I've been reading a lot recently. I've read some books (fiction) that were about abuse, or at least it was part of the plot, two of them were actually about males, which I thought was pretty cool. I spent a lot of time trying to find books like this when I was a kid, but all I ever found was The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I absolutely hated. I thought I would post about them here, in case anyone else was looking for books like this to read - not sure who would, but also I just wanted to talk about it.
The first book was called Jumping the Scratch, by Sarah Weeks. I'm not sure I can even explain how this book made me feel. It was so sad and depressing but also very hopeful at the end. I don't know who its target audience is though. The main character is an 11 year old boy who is trying to forget about what happened to him. You'd think that 10-12 year olds would be the target audience but because of the way it's written I'm not sure kids that age could fully understand what was going on. I think I'd recommend this book, but it does make you feel utterly depressed and reminds you of how lonely it was back then (or at least it reminded me of that) but I loved the ending.
The second book is Forgive Me Leonard Peacock, by Matthew Quick. Leonard plans to kill his old school friend Asher, and himself on his 18th birthday. Leonard has been bullied and also sexually assaulted by Asher (that's not exactly a spoiler, it's pretty obvious from the start). Asher is supposed to be the bad guy and you can kind of sympathise with Leonard for wanting to kill him, but then Leonard talks about how it started, they were friends when they were kids but then Asher went on a trip with his uncle and came back different. All the bullying and stuff was a cry for help, and Leonard knew it at the time, but he couldn't do anything about it because he was just a kid, he didn't know what to say or do and the adults weren't paying any attention anyway. Reading this just depressed me so much, not the book, but the thought of a kid being abused and then other innocent kids being affected because of it. It's an interesting plot, I wondered if the author was abused, because it seems like he gets it. (Leonard is obsessed with footnotes though, and it's a bit irritating).
The last book was called Psycho Inside Me, I totally forgot the name of the author. There's this girl, she's 13 I think, she is almost raped by someone from her school, but then this old friend of hers turns up and saves her, but they end up accidently killing the guy. Instead of telling someone they push his body into the river and go home. One year on they kind of accidently kill her friend's abusive uncle. The next year she purposely looks for someone to kill, and ends up killing this abusive undercover policeman who picks her up. At some point the old friend who saved her at first randomly drops the fact that he was abused as a child into conversation, that's why he's cool with all the killing. The next year she attracts the attention of a pervy teacher, and kills him. Each time she kills someone it's set up so she has no choice. If she doesn't kill them then she'll be killed or raped by them. This made me think, well maybe you shouldn't have gone out looking for perverts in the first place? Then you wouldn't be in this situation? But then when you think about it, if it wasn't her then it would have been someone else, maybe a more helpless victim.
There's this whole weird thing about her old friend, how the only time he'll spend with her is when they are killing people. She seems pretty obsessed with him, so it's not even like she's killing pedos as a public service, it's more because of her obsession with the boy. They kill more people, there's some disturbing stuff, then she goes to jail - for 4 years (for like 8 murders or something, because yeah, fiction) and somehow no one seems to notice she's a psychopath, in fact people actually thank her for what she did.
This whole thing disturbed me. I think if you are going to write books for teenagers then you have some kind of responsibility to them. Making out that you can just murder anyone who has hurt you and that you'll hardly even get any jail time, and in fact people will be all like "nice work" is really not good. It also annoyed me that the book makes out like sexual abuse is violent and involves totally creepy/dangerous/violent guys who deserve to die. But I don't think most abuse does involve violence? And what if it's someone you also love at the same time, like someone from your family? You're not going to feel good about killing your own uncle or whoever, when all you really want him to do is stop abusing you and act like a normal person.
At the end of this book there is advice for anyone who is being abused (murdering them isn't given as advice). Then the author says that she was abused as a child, so I guess writing this novel was probably pretty cathartic, I think that's the word. But then she says if she had a knife at the time she was abused her abusers would have gone home missing body parts. I thought a lot about that statement, like how unlikely it would be. Maybe I'm just weird or my own experience was weird but I just don't see that happening. Anyway. I didn't really like this book, though it was kind of an interesting concept.
I just remembered another book I read recently, called Shattering Glass by Gail Giles. There's this bunch of friends who decide to make the school geek popular, but they end up killing him (that's not a spoiler either, they tell you this from the start). I thought this was going to be like some kind of a psychological thriller, but I was kind of thrown when the main character mentions that he was abused by an older guy at a camp. He talked about how his dad was never there for him and this guy showed some interest in him and he ended up being abused. One of the other characters is also abused (and is a possible psychopath), he has his abuse used against him in the end, which was really disturbing to me.
Sorry, this is getting kind of long.... This last thing is a complaint. I got this book, called Vegan Freak 2.0, obviously it's not fiction, it's a book about being a vegan in a non-vegan world. I thought it sounded pretty interesting. The authors start off by saying that no one likes one of THOSE vegans, (the angry, rude, judgemental kind that berate other people about their food choices). But then they turn round and become one of THOSE vegans, by launching an attack on vegetarians, saying how evil they are, and making a comparison to paedophiles, saying something like "is it any less bad if a pedo only abuses two children rather than three?" I was like WTF??? Then I quit reading because it made me so irate. I'd have thrown it at a wall if I wasn't reading the ebook version.
I'm done now! But I'm always looking for new books to read if you have any recommendations. Thanks for reading this reeeeeally long post!
I've been reading a lot recently. I've read some books (fiction) that were about abuse, or at least it was part of the plot, two of them were actually about males, which I thought was pretty cool. I spent a lot of time trying to find books like this when I was a kid, but all I ever found was The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I absolutely hated. I thought I would post about them here, in case anyone else was looking for books like this to read - not sure who would, but also I just wanted to talk about it.
The first book was called Jumping the Scratch, by Sarah Weeks. I'm not sure I can even explain how this book made me feel. It was so sad and depressing but also very hopeful at the end. I don't know who its target audience is though. The main character is an 11 year old boy who is trying to forget about what happened to him. You'd think that 10-12 year olds would be the target audience but because of the way it's written I'm not sure kids that age could fully understand what was going on. I think I'd recommend this book, but it does make you feel utterly depressed and reminds you of how lonely it was back then (or at least it reminded me of that) but I loved the ending.
The second book is Forgive Me Leonard Peacock, by Matthew Quick. Leonard plans to kill his old school friend Asher, and himself on his 18th birthday. Leonard has been bullied and also sexually assaulted by Asher (that's not exactly a spoiler, it's pretty obvious from the start). Asher is supposed to be the bad guy and you can kind of sympathise with Leonard for wanting to kill him, but then Leonard talks about how it started, they were friends when they were kids but then Asher went on a trip with his uncle and came back different. All the bullying and stuff was a cry for help, and Leonard knew it at the time, but he couldn't do anything about it because he was just a kid, he didn't know what to say or do and the adults weren't paying any attention anyway. Reading this just depressed me so much, not the book, but the thought of a kid being abused and then other innocent kids being affected because of it. It's an interesting plot, I wondered if the author was abused, because it seems like he gets it. (Leonard is obsessed with footnotes though, and it's a bit irritating).
The last book was called Psycho Inside Me, I totally forgot the name of the author. There's this girl, she's 13 I think, she is almost raped by someone from her school, but then this old friend of hers turns up and saves her, but they end up accidently killing the guy. Instead of telling someone they push his body into the river and go home. One year on they kind of accidently kill her friend's abusive uncle. The next year she purposely looks for someone to kill, and ends up killing this abusive undercover policeman who picks her up. At some point the old friend who saved her at first randomly drops the fact that he was abused as a child into conversation, that's why he's cool with all the killing. The next year she attracts the attention of a pervy teacher, and kills him. Each time she kills someone it's set up so she has no choice. If she doesn't kill them then she'll be killed or raped by them. This made me think, well maybe you shouldn't have gone out looking for perverts in the first place? Then you wouldn't be in this situation? But then when you think about it, if it wasn't her then it would have been someone else, maybe a more helpless victim.
There's this whole weird thing about her old friend, how the only time he'll spend with her is when they are killing people. She seems pretty obsessed with him, so it's not even like she's killing pedos as a public service, it's more because of her obsession with the boy. They kill more people, there's some disturbing stuff, then she goes to jail - for 4 years (for like 8 murders or something, because yeah, fiction) and somehow no one seems to notice she's a psychopath, in fact people actually thank her for what she did.
This whole thing disturbed me. I think if you are going to write books for teenagers then you have some kind of responsibility to them. Making out that you can just murder anyone who has hurt you and that you'll hardly even get any jail time, and in fact people will be all like "nice work" is really not good. It also annoyed me that the book makes out like sexual abuse is violent and involves totally creepy/dangerous/violent guys who deserve to die. But I don't think most abuse does involve violence? And what if it's someone you also love at the same time, like someone from your family? You're not going to feel good about killing your own uncle or whoever, when all you really want him to do is stop abusing you and act like a normal person.
At the end of this book there is advice for anyone who is being abused (murdering them isn't given as advice). Then the author says that she was abused as a child, so I guess writing this novel was probably pretty cathartic, I think that's the word. But then she says if she had a knife at the time she was abused her abusers would have gone home missing body parts. I thought a lot about that statement, like how unlikely it would be. Maybe I'm just weird or my own experience was weird but I just don't see that happening. Anyway. I didn't really like this book, though it was kind of an interesting concept.
I just remembered another book I read recently, called Shattering Glass by Gail Giles. There's this bunch of friends who decide to make the school geek popular, but they end up killing him (that's not a spoiler either, they tell you this from the start). I thought this was going to be like some kind of a psychological thriller, but I was kind of thrown when the main character mentions that he was abused by an older guy at a camp. He talked about how his dad was never there for him and this guy showed some interest in him and he ended up being abused. One of the other characters is also abused (and is a possible psychopath), he has his abuse used against him in the end, which was really disturbing to me.
Sorry, this is getting kind of long.... This last thing is a complaint. I got this book, called Vegan Freak 2.0, obviously it's not fiction, it's a book about being a vegan in a non-vegan world. I thought it sounded pretty interesting. The authors start off by saying that no one likes one of THOSE vegans, (the angry, rude, judgemental kind that berate other people about their food choices). But then they turn round and become one of THOSE vegans, by launching an attack on vegetarians, saying how evil they are, and making a comparison to paedophiles, saying something like "is it any less bad if a pedo only abuses two children rather than three?" I was like WTF??? Then I quit reading because it made me so irate. I'd have thrown it at a wall if I wasn't reading the ebook version.
I'm done now! But I'm always looking for new books to read if you have any recommendations. Thanks for reading this reeeeeally long post!
