This week, my Waiting On Wednesday pick is Asking For It by Louise O'Neill. It sounds like a fairly harrowing story, but in an age where the media and society thinks that victim-blaming is completely okay and where slut-shaming is the norm, it is one that totally needs to be told. Here's the Goodreads blurb:
It's the beginning of the summer in a small town in Ireland. Emma O'Donovan is eighteen years old, beautiful, happy, confident. One night, there's a party. Everyone is there. All eyes are on Emma.
The next morning, she wakes on the front porch of her house. She can't remember what happened, she doesn't know how she got there. She doesn't know why she's in pain. But everyone else does.
Photographs taken at the party show, in explicit detail, what happened to Emma that night. But sometimes people don't want to believe what is right in front of them, especially when the truth concerns the town's heroes...
I think I'll need to get into a happy place before I start reading this, because my spidey-sense is telling me that Emma's not going to be having a great time ...
Asking For It is being published on the 3rd September by Quercus.