I am three for three with the five star books over the last week. And I don't give five stars lightly, so I consider myself highly lucky to have found these three books, as different as all three of them have been.
The final book in my trio of excellence is Mindy McGinnis's The Female of the Species. And my god, what a book it's been. It had me completely glued the whole way through. At one point I was stirring a saucepan of soup for lunch with one hand and reading this book with the other.
I went into The Female of the Species thinking that it was a revenge book. I mean, the blurb talks about some girl called Alex knowing how to kill someone. So I kind of thought okay, this character has probably been bullied or abused or whatever and she'll plot some big revenge spree, but she'll get derailed at the last minute, because characters in YA books aren't allowed to go around killing people. Are they?
Well, apparently no one told Mindy McGinnis that.
What I actually got was a sharp, incisive look at the insidiousness of rape culture and what it takes to bring it down. I got a love story. I got flawed characters in spades. I got a Mean Girl who was actually portrayed with a shred of humanity. I got a thesis on internalised misogyny and the difference in reactions to violence perpetuated by men and violence perpetuated by women.
I got a killer I rooted for the whole way through the book.
This book is so relevant and so important. There are going to be a lot of people who say it's too dark, the themes are too mature for a teen audience. Well guess what? Sexual violence is being committed against countless teenaged girls every single day and a book like this might go some tiny way to encouraging them to speak out against it, to show them that damn it, no, this is not acceptable. Obviously McGiniss isn't advocating a vigilante justice system, but the book does ask why it's seen as so unacceptable for women to speak out loudly and aggressively about the injustices we face.
The book is told from three viewpoints - Alex, Peekay and Jack - and I think three viewpoints was just right. We get Alex, who can't trust herself around normal people for fear of what she might do, Peekay, who is struggling with the Preacher's Kid label she has been saddled with since kindergarten, and Jack, the boy who thinks with his dick until the day he doesn't.
This book is amazing. Every strand is relevant and everything weaves together perfectly until the final explosive conclusion. Perfection.
5 stars