Really Bad

2024 52 Book Challenge - 7) At Least Four Different POV

This was the first audiobook I ever purchased, purely because Aaron Tveit was one of the narrators. It's such a shame that the book itself is not fantastic.

This book follows four main characters, Cara, Sean, Kendra and Andre, who are all striving to find perfection in their own ways. Cara to be the perfect Grade A student and daughter that her parents want her to be. Sean wants to be the best baseball player. Kendra wants to be thin and a model. Andre wants to be a dancer.

I really didn't like how two characters in this novel were raped, and both were blamed for why it happened. There was no justice for either of them, in fact at the end its all glossed over with "a look of understanding" passing between the victim and the rapist and the other character just being passed off with a "it was what she deserved" mentality, with even the author writing before the novel started that the character deserved to be raped because she used her beauty in the wrong way.

There is blatant biphobia in this book. One of the main characters struggles with developing feelings for a woman while in a relationship with a man, cheats on him with said woman, who instantly refers to her as a lesbian, because apparently bi people don't exist.

One of the characters reveals to their future stepparent that their parent/the partner was abusive which led to the characters eating disorder, and this is just passed off and explained away as "he's a recovering alcoholic, he can't help himself" and help still wasn't being given to this character for either abuse trauma or the eating disorder which the character hadn't come to accept by the end of the novel. In fact, this characters entire 1/4 of the book felt incredibly pointless because nothing is learned, nothing is helped and in fact, the message that Kendra's story gives to the audience, primarily young girls, is incredibly dangerous, considering that the entire thing talks about how beauty is the most important aspect of a person, and to be beautiful you have to be skinny, and to be skinny, you have to starve yourself.

Honestly, Sean was such a bad character that I don't want to think about him any further. The author made some really... she made choices when she wrote his sections, and I was very upset that my favourite actor voiced him.

Andre was possibly the only decent-ish character in this novel, and even he wasn't great. It was so nice of this white author to use this character to tell us that reverse racism exists and that Andre has never suffered from any problem because of the colour of his skin, and he was actually treated better than his white contemporaries because he has money. At the same time, he admits that he would never want to date a BIPOC woman. I wish this author has taken some advice from people who have suffered racism, and had actually put something in the novel to make the readers think about racism and xenophobia in the context of striving for perfection because that could have been a hard hitting topic. Instead, we just had this nonsense, which included one of the characters dating him purely to incite their father to an apoplectic rage in the middle of a crowded restaurant because he was racist. Something that Andre had absolutely no problems with because she was beautiful.

Also, why does the book feel like it was super unfinished? There was no resolution for any of these characters. Kendra's mental health was arguably worse at the end of the book than when she started, her anorexia is still untreated and she was still in a sexually abusive / sexually coercive relationship, which the author seems to have completely forgotten about. Sean had no comeuppance over the fact that he was a steroid addict or a rapist, and was just going off to live his best life. Cara had just lost her brother, her parents still didn't accept her sexuality and she's about to go to school with her rapist. Andre still hadn't decided if dance was his passion, or if he was going to pursue it further. So the book ends, with none of the plots tied up.

The only thing that I actually liked about this novel was the change of POV. I liked seeing the plot from the different points of view, and how all four were interlinked (though, not so much for Andre, who didn't really have anything to do with the other characters, except that he was dating Kendra's sister).

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