Jeanette Winterson said O’Neill ‘writes with a scalpel’ and, reading this book, I see it couldn’t be more true. Each page packs the emotional punch of a small fire engine, tearing and scraping away bits of your heart. By the end of the novel, I’d had run out of tissues, tears and hope.
Emma O’Donovan is 18, young, happy and the most beautiful girl in Ballinatoom. She has her whole life ahead of her – university, a family, a future – until one night, one party, snatches all that away. The morning after the night before she wakes up on her doorstop. She doesn’t know how she got there, doesn’t know why it hurts. But everyone else does. Pictures scattered on social media show in horrific detail the events of that night. They say she is a slut. They say it was her fault. They say she was asking for it. Sometimes Emma doesn’t know what to believe…
Poignant and powerful, I don’t think I’ve ever read a sadder book!
O’Neill addresses the taboo subjects in our society that too many writers don’t have the courage to breach. The issues of sexual consent, victim blaming, depression, self-harm and social media are confronted head on. It’s an incredibly brave book and its release will cause a lot of controversy, being so topical. There’s often questions about how far YA fiction can go. Admittedly, this book was so emotionally hard hitting that reading it sometimes felt like choking down tar, parts even made me physically flinch, but it opens up so many topics we’re afraid to talk about and hopefully this book will inspire many much needed conversations.
Particularly, I admire O’Neill for writing this book in first person, from the perspective of the victim. This was emotionally crippling to read and must have been even harder to write, yet even then it only conveys a fraction of the suffering rape victims go through. Thanks to O’Neill’s research at the rape crisis centre and the stories shared with her by rape victims, we get a genuine and honest account of what this experience would be like. There is no fictional miracle that somehow sees things righted, nor does Emma have some super human strength or power to help her cope with her ordeal. She is an ordinary human being, just like anyone of us, and for me that makes this book so much more real.
Now onto our protagonist. In the first half Emma’s not exactly likeable. She goes out of her way to prove she’s the prettiest and, despite pretending to be nice to most people, she’s bitchy towards her closest friends. Plus, some of her choices seriously annoyed me, she seemed to have a constant need to prove herself. To be more than what people expected. To be different.
This is a problem relatable to many YAs, including myself, that nagging insecurity that maybe you’re not good enough. But, here, we see how this drives Emma to make wild and reckless choices. I suppose it outlines the dangers of the pressure put on young people by their peers, particularly through social media, to appear popular. It helps to expose how damaging it is to be caring more about the number of likes you get on a photo than whether you were actually having fun when it was taken. Plus, by making Emma so unlikable O’Neill is able to undermine the defence of ‘they were asking for it’ and shame victim blaming. For, although Emma was not a nice person, she definitely did not deserve this.
If I had one criticism of the book, I’d say the beginning is a bit slow. In the first few chapters any reader may be mistaken into thinking this is just another run of the mill, teen cliché novel. Yet, maybe this normalcy is needed to juxtapose the depression, pain and fear that come later. It makes the events in this book relevant, showing how they could potentially happen to anyone.
Finally, the ending was devastatingly brilliant – it was horrible and it hurt in so many ways. The idea of the broken girl frozen in time, as the monsters responsible move on, never brought to justice, left me hollow. It was a brutal reminder that life doesn’t always have a happily ever after.
A soul–shattering novel that will leave your emotions raw. This story will haunt me forever.
Everyone should read it!
- Buy this book at the Guardian Bookshop
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