Didn't See That Coming by Jesse Q Sutanto

 Pages: 320 

Publisher: Electric Monkey 

Released:  7th of December 2023 

Seventeen-year-old Kiki Siregar is a fabulous gamer girl with confidence to boot. She can’t help but be totally herself… except when she’s online.

Her secret? She plays anonymously as a guy to avoid harassment from other male players. Even her online best friend―a cinnamon roll of a teen boy who plays under the username Sourdawg―doesn’t know her true identity. Which is fine, because Kiki doesn’t know his real name either, and it’s not like they’re ever going to cross paths IRL.

Until she transfers to an elite private school for her senior year and discovers that Sourdawg goes there, too.

But who is he? How will he react when he finds out Kiki’s secret? And what happens when Kiki realizes she’s falling for her online BFF?

What I Have to Say 

Okay first off I want to say I think this is a really great book. It had great characters, a strong plot and a good message of feminism and standing up to bullies. The only reason I'm rating it so low is because it hit really really close to home with me and I found that I didn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to. 

The main bulk of this book is about school trauma and misogyny. It showed a very real situation in a school that had a really toxic environment. It really sheds light on the situation that exists in many Asian schools, where standing out or making waves is punished harshly. I really respect the author for taking a stance on this. 

The friendships in this book were my favourite part. Not only the main friendship between Kiki and Sourdawg, but the female friendships she has before the novel. It really shows a feeling of girls banding together and sticking up for one another. 

I'm really sad that I couldn't enjoy this book because of my own trauma, but I want to emphasise that this is a really good book that everyone should read. 

3.5 stars 

My thanks goes to Electric Monkey and Netgalley for providing me with this gifted copy for review. 

Girl, Goddess, Queen by Bea Fitzgerald

Pages: 496 

Publisher: Penguin 

Released: 20th of July 2023 

To hell with love, this goddess has other plans...

Thousands of years ago, the gods told a lie: how Persephone was a pawn in the politics of other gods. How Hades kidnapped Persephone to be his bride. How her mother, Demeter, was so distraught she caused the Earth to start dying.

The real story is much more interesting.

Persephone wasn't taken to hell: she jumped. There was no way she was going to be married off to some smug god more in love with himself than her.

Now all she has to do is convince the Underworld's annoyingly sexy, arrogant and frankly rude ruler, Hades, to fall in line with her plan. A plan that will shake Mount Olympus to its very core.

But consequences can be deadly, especially when you're already in hell . . .

What I Have to Say 

Unapologetically feminist, this book was fun, daring and imaginative. It takes the toxic qualities shown by certain Greek gods and shows what it might be like to try and be a women in a time when just anyone can kidnap you and take you for their own. Running away from all that, Persephone acts boldly and goes to the underworld hoping for a better life. 

This was a really interesting take on Hades. Artistic, sensitive and caring for many people he would be the perfect man, though best look elsewhere if you're looking for a bit of dark romance, this novel is about stereotypes that are cast on people and how there might be something different hiding underneath the surface. 

There were just two things that held me up about this book. One was that the slow burn romance was a little two slow for me in some places and everything would have been solved so easily if the characters had just hurried up and talked to each other. The other was that the Greek god of life was Phanes and the god of illusions was Dolos (a quick google search told me this much) and not the characters these things were attributed to in the book. 

Overall though, this was a good read, great for teenage feminists looking for a bit of girlbossing. 

4 stars 

My thanks go to Penguin Random House and Netgalley for gifting me with this copy for review. 

The Sharp Edge of Silence by Cameron Kelly Rosenblum

Pages: 496 

Publisher: Hot Key Books 

Released: 11th of April 2023 

Students at Lycroft Phelps are marked for success.

As a straight-A student and girlfriend of the school's star rower, Charlotte believes in what the school has to offer. Meanwhile, scholarship student Max is struggling. Until he's asked to join the rowing team offering him popularity - but at what cost? Then there's Quinn, a sixth-generation legacy student, who should be able to lay claim to the school in a way others can't. Who instead must watch the boy who assaulted her continue to play at the top of the school's food chain. Only in the dead of night does Q realize the solution to her suffering: Colin Pearce must die.

But Lycroft Phelps has more than one dark secret at its heart, and as the three students uncover just how far the school will go to keep those ugly truths hidden, there's a lot more than reputation at stake...

TW: Misogyny, panic attacks/ disorders, rape 

What I Have to Say 

I will never get tired of reading books about girls bringing down the system and getting revenge on boys for all the shit they put us through. The only downside was how long it took to actually get to the plot of bringing down the system. It felt like there was a lot of set up with the different relationships and the crew team. I don't know if anything could have been taken out, because a huge part of the plot was Max getting caught up in the crew team and that was very necessary, but it just slowed down the book a lot. 

I wasn't sure at first about having a male voice in a book about rape, but I really really liked Max's POV. I think it really added a lot to the book. Because it showed how boys, even boys who know better, can be pulled into the toxic masculinity and become part of it. It was good to see one of the "good ones" and how easy it can be to stand by and not stop things like this from happening. 

In all, I think this was handled really well. I liked how the emphasis wasn't on the rape. The rape had happened before the book even started and was only shown in flashbacks. The emphasis was on the fall out and how to stop it happening again. 

Definitely on my list of best feminist reads of all time. 

4 stars 

My thanks goes to Netgalley and Hot Key Books for providing me with this copy for review. 

The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

Pages: 304

Publisher: Harper Voyager 

Released: 18th of August 2022 

Sunyi Dean's The Book Eaters is a contemporary fantasy debut. It's a story of motherhood, sacrifice, and hope; of queer identity and learning to accept who you are; of gilded lies and the danger of believing the narratives others create for you.

Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.

Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairytales and cautionary stories.

But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds. 

What I Have To Say 

I think I read this book at entirely the wrong time. It wasn't nice to read about women being treated poorly and being forced to have babies at a time when abortion laws were being passed to do precisely that. It just made me so tired with the state of the world. 

The other parts of the book were interesting though. I really liked the descriptions of the houses and the peek into book eater society that we saw. I wonder if maybe there could have been more viewpoints or a bit more time when Devon was ignorant of how bad it was, just to give us a bit of a break from the doom and gloom. I'd have liked to enjoy a world where books can be absorbed just by eating them and whole languages can be learned in a single bite but there was no time for that. 

Perhaps if I'd read this book at a different time of my life, I would have felt differently, but for now it was just not the book for me. 

My thanks go to Netgalley and Harper Voyager for providing me with this copy for review. 

 

Devoted by Jennifer Mathieu

Synopsis (from Goodreads) 

Pages: 306 

Publisher: Hodder Children's Books 

Released: 10th of Januray 2019 

Rachel Walker's family and community have turned away from the world.

Every part of Rachel's life is controlled, from what she reads to where she goes and what she wears. Her parents dictate how her life must be: marriage, modesty, children and obedience to her future husband. But when a former member of her community, a girl who escaped, moves back to her small Texas town, Rachel's world turns upside down.

She realises that her life is her own. But can she find the courage to fight for it?

What I Have to Say 

This was such a great book. Moxie is still my favourite, but this had a lot of the same things in it that made Moxie so great: A fantastic main character, a well constructed setting and a need to fight back against the patriarchy. 

I loved Rachel so much. She was so easy to get inside the head of and empathise with. I wanted her to get away from her family and out of the community that was confining her so badly. But I also wanted to see more of it. I really wanted to see what Journey of Faith was like. I was torn in two ways, interested to see more but also wanting so much for Rachel to get away and not have to go there. I've never felt so torn while reading a book like this before. 

The community was constructed really well. You could see how everyone was made to believe in the ways that they did things, that the way that they were living was the right way that would take them to heaven. And it was also easy to see where there were holes in their argument, if only Rachel would just figure it out quicker!! 

This was such a great book and it's definitely one that everyone should read. 

My thanks go to Hodder Children's Books for providing me with this copy for review.