Review: "Hate Follow" by Erin Quinn-Kong

Hate Follow by Erin Quinn-Kong
Published October 2024 via William Morrow Paperbacks
★★

Whitney has pulled herself up by the bootstraps—or perhaps by the Instagram reel. Since her husband died a few years ago, she's been paying off bills and raising her four children through #influencing.

The problem: Her oldest child wants out. Whitney can't see a way to pay the bills that doesn't involve putting her children's lives online...but when Mia gets a lawyer, she might have to figure it out.

I've been very curious about this book. It feels so timely: Today's teenagers are growing up with a level of scrutiny and publicity that cannot really be overstated, and there are precious few safeguards in place for children whose parents are making money through that scrutiny. Illinois recently passed a law requiring parents who use their children in paid social media 1) track how much their children appear and 2) compensate them accordingly...but that law has a lot of limits, and it only applies to content made in Illinois, and the provision is not 'if you don't do this, X happens'—the provision is 'if you don't do this, your kid is allowed to sue you. If they want. And if they can find a lawyer on their own. And if they can figure out how to pay legal fees on their own.'

And that's basically it. Social media is basically a Wild West as far as regulation goes—but that won't last forever, and more and more children and teenagers whose parents' livelihood depends on their lives being available for anyone to see and opine on are growing up and realizing that this is not right.

But this book just...didn't do it for me. I didn't love the writing, which felt quite shallow (do we actually know anything about Whitney, beyond her family obligations and her parentified childhood and that she likes to get weekly $400 spa treatments? We don't know anything about her boyfriend except that he's hot and doesn't want either kids or commitments; we don't know much about Mia except that she'd like some privacy, thanks, that she has terrrrrrrible judgement in boys, and a throwaway line about her giving great presents; and Mia's younger siblings are completely devoid of personality) and chockablock full of telling rather than showing (she knew...she felt...). But more than that, I couldn't shake the feeling that the only legal research the author had done was to read My Sister's Keeper, and even then I think half of whatever common sense was in that book went out the window.

Here's how it goes in the Hate Follow: Mia talks to a lawyer, who agrees to take on her case pro bono. He has Whitney served. And then we hear almost nothing from him throughout the rest of the book, because apparently lawyers don't do anything until the case they're working on goes to trial. Meanwhile, Whitney finds a (sexist) lawyer of her own, who gives her a couple of pieces of advice and then...does very little other than tell her to sit back and wait for the trial. The judge agrees that Mia should live with another family for the duration, because it would be a little awkward to live at home while trying to sue your mother.

Now, I'm not a lawyer—so I called my brother, who is. This is not his specialty (and in case I need to say it, he's not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice), but he cheerfully talked me through the many many steps and many many months it would realistically take for a case to get to a point where it was likely to go to court. Starting with: Why is Whitney's lawyer assuming a trial? He should be filing a motion for dismissal, trying to kill this case dead in the water. He and Mia's lawyer should be negotiating, trying to come to an agreement without the involvement of a judge—or, barring that, asking the judge to find in their favor without a trial. They should not be sitting on their pretty (Mia's lawyer) or sexist (Whitney's lawyer) bums and waiting for this trial, which might take years. My brother wasn't sure what would happen with Mia (again, not his specialty), but when Mia's friend's parents say "yes, stay with us as long as you want", do they understand that Mia might be with them until she goes to college...?

Spoilers below:

Here's the thing: The book would be more interesting if Mia's case did go to trial, or if the lawyers did more than jack shit. When Whitney makes a drunken, emotional post about how her daughter is suing her...? I spent the rest of the book waiting for Mia's lawyer to find a way to use that. (At the very least, to point out that Whitney has brought the wrath of thousands of strangers on the Internet down on her kid because she's upset.) Or when Mia makes a social media post...I was waiting for Whitney's smarmy lawyer to try to find a way to use it against Mia. I wanted to know what arguments each lawyer would use in court, and what evidence they'd present—not just offhand mentions in the few meetings they have about how many sponsored posts Mia has been in. If Mia was going to leave home for a while, I wanted more of a reason for that—for example, that her mother is still posting content about her while the case is ongoing. When Mia gives her mother a photograph as a gift, I wanted to know if she worried that her mother would in turn put that on social media to show what a good mom she is. When a creep at a store recognizes Mia from Whitney's social media and hits on her—and then finds her online—I wanted that to come up in the nonexistent trial. Whitney also treats Mia living with friends as a no-contact order (it's not), and it would have dialed up the tension quite a bit if she had been speaking to Mia throughout and realizing just how much she thinks of her daughter as a content horse to flog—or if there had been a no-contact order because Whitney wouldn't quit, and we'd seen Mia's relief at waking up to a day knowing that nothing she did would make it online.

I wanted to like this, and I'll be curious to read books with similar premises in the future—but this was just not what I was hoping for.

Review: "Poisoned Polluted" by Kathryn O'Reilly

Poisoned Polluted by Kathryn O'Reilly
Published November 2019 via Nick Hern Books
★★★

Two sisters: Her and Sister are probably the only ones who can possibly understand what they went through as children—and even now, they can't quite connect. Her has found a tenuous stability in adulthood; Sister is in a cycle of addiction and rehab and narrow misses. They prop each other up and they drag each other down and they pull their childhood round and round and round.

I think I expected a bit more of the present day in this one. There is the present day, certainly, but more than that Her and Sister spend quite a lot of time rehashing their (very valid) pain and trauma from their upbringing, and for whatever reason that just wasn't what I was looking for in this play. This cycle they find themselves in—Her trying but unable to really help Sister, Sister trying but unable to see a way out, each Her and Sister struggling to empathize with the other's perspective—is fascinating and sad, but gosh it's heavy, with precious few bright spots. I can see the value in the play, but I'm not sure it's one I'd choose to see performed.

Review: "Confessions of a Fitness Model" by Madelyn Moon

Confessions of a Fitness Model by Madelyn Moon
Published February 2016 via Archangel Ink
★★

Brief look at the author's experiences with fitness competitions and distorted body image. I was hoping for a bit more memoir and a bit less self-help-motivational material. Even after finishing the book, I'm not entirely sure what Moon is referring to when talking about being a 'fitness model'—the fitness competitions she took part in, or more traditional modelling (e.g., photoshoots for athletic brands)?

Moon is in a unique position to talk about the pressures and problems within the culture (subculture? industry?), and with more research and depth this could be really interesting—think interviews with other fitness models and/or competitors, interviews with trainers, data, details. In the current form, though, it feels a bit more like a bunch of blog posts that were expanded and strung together. The messages are decent, but the presentation doesn't have the depth I'd hoped for.

Review: "Eating at Me" compiled by Rain Maddin

Eating at Me, compiled by Rain Maddin
Published December 2023
★★

Short compilation* of themed poetry. I’m reminded a little of a publication scam (not calling this book a scam, but bear with me) that was going around when I was a tween—you’d submit a poem at no cost, and a couple of weeks later you’d get a letter saying “Wow! We loved your poem! We want to publish it! You can buy a copy of the book we publish it in for $20!” If you sent off the money, they’d send you in return a book packed with hundreds if not thousands of poems, all in tiny print and multiple poems to the page. (I did not do this, but I knew at least one person who did.) Perhaps “scam” is an overstatement—you did get the book, after all, and your poem was technically published. It’s just that quality control wasn’t really a thing, and if you went back and read your poem years later you’d probably cringe and be grateful that the only other people who bought the book were highly likely to be other contributors who were only interested in their own poems and had never read yours.

At a guess, the average age of the contributors for Eating at Me is about 13; there’s a heavy reliance on shaky rhymes, and no proofreading was involved (My body is so sheik, p. 55). I expect that some of these contributors will go on to write, and perhaps publish, more complex things, and I hope these poems were cathartic to write, but as it is the book just isn’t doing it for me.

*Cover says "by", but "edited by" or "compiled by" would be more accurate.

Review: "Mismatched" by Anne Camlin, illustrated by Isadora Zeferino

Mismatched by Anne Camlin, illustrated by Isadora Zeferino
Published September 2024 via Little, Brown Ink
★★★

Evan is living out his Queen Bee status at school—he has a thriving Instagram account, he's head of the GSA, and he shepherds his friends as he sees fit. Never mind that he doesn't have much of a love life of his own—that'll come with time.

This is the second campy-ish gay Emma retelling I've read recently, and I can't be disappointed by that. I like how clear it is, too, that Evan is trying to do the right thing—he makes mistakes, but he owns up to them pretty quickly and genuinely does try to do better.

The art is not really for me. It's attractive, and I'd enjoy it in a comic book, but I prefer a more complex style for graphic novels. (I also struggled with the placement of some of the speech bubbles—many panels where there's only one character in the panel, but two are talking, and the off-panel character's speech bubbles have little relation to where they are and no directional...arrow? I'm not sure what that little part of a speech bubble is called.) I'd also have liked to see a bit more...humor? Emma is so witty, bitingly so, and while Evan has his moments, we're missing characters like Mr. Woodhouse to add that extra layer of snark. Still a fun read, but not quite the level of depth I'd have liked to see.

Review: Short story: "Ushers" by Joe Hill

Ushers by Joe Hill
Published November 2024 via Amazon Original Stories

Agent Duvall has a task—to investigate a train crash that killed dozens and injured many more. In particular, he needs to investigate Martin, a young man who should have been on the train but wasn't...and who has escaped death before. He's sure that Martin has secrets. And he's right—he just doesn't understand quite what those secrets mean.

This was a satisfyingly creepy short story—swallowable in one or two sittings, but with enough depth to learn something about each of the main characters and to worry about their fates. I don't want to get too much into it (it's only about 30 pages, so there's not too much to say about the plot that won't contain spoilers), but I appreciate how much is left up to interpretation until the end.

Altogether, feels like a very classic spooky (not quite horror) story for autumn. Kept me reading but won't keep me up at night; had creep factor without ick factor.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "The Nutcracker Chronicles" by Janine Kovac

The Nutcracker Chronicles by Janine Kovac
Published November 2024 via She Writes Press
★★★★

Kovac got her start in ballet the way so many children do: with the Nutcracker. Even when the magic of the show was ruined by seeing it up close, behind the scenes, something in it called to her. And as she stayed with it, with the Nutcracker and with ballet, advancing her technique, she knew that this, this was what she wanted to do.

I didn't always find my inner light, but I always worked for it. When I did catch it, if felt like catching a live wire. (loc. 1587*)

By my reckoning, Kovac was successful as a dancer; she danced professionally for years, in the US and internationally, and was able—more or less—to sustain herself doing so; in the arts, that is no sure thing. But there are varying degrees of success, and one of the things that makes The Nutcracker Chronicles so interesting is that Kovac was not a principal dancer or dancing for, e.g., NYCB; she was a working dancer, doing things she loved and constantly striving to improve, but she never really had a sense that she'd 'made it'. I love the way she talks about dancing Fritz in the Nutcracker (becoming one with the role, quite by accident, by dint of jealousy of the girl playing Clara), and the way she describes the ballet world in El Paso, where she grew up and learned to dance:

My mother always said Ballet El Paso's party scene [in the Nutcracker] was the best party scene she'd ever seen. Better than the Baryshnikov version on PBS and Pacific Ballet's movie put together. Better even than San Francisco Ballet.

"When you're watching San Francisco Ballet, you know it's going to be perfect. But with Ballet El Paso, you never knew what was going to happen. It was like a real party."

It was true. Someone's costume might tear, or a piece of precariously built scenery would break. In 1982, the guy who danced the role of Clara and Fritz's father packed his pipe with pot and smoked it onstage; the same guy spiked the party punch with vodka. Once, Drosselmeier didn't show up to the party at all, rumored to be stuck in the drunk tank of a Juárez jail cell. Fritz had to be the one to give Clara the nutcracker, only to grab it from her thirty-two counts later to break it. (loc. 252)

I love this because it feels real—not that young dancers shouldn't dream of dancing for NYCB and ABT and so on, but the vast majority of dancers don't, and I'm...I was going to say I'm just as interested in reading about the smaller, scrappier ballets, but actually in some ways I'm more interested in the smaller companies (later in the book, Kovac describes dancing in Italy on a stage so small that they had to replace some of their props—for example, borrowing the only table in the only café in the village), because their stories feel so specific and also with (if I'm honest) less risk of the book becoming one long name-drop.

This is a good story, and it's good writing. I don't know where Kovac found her early readers, but she has quotes from Sara Nović and Putsata Reang, and my gosh I swooned when I saw that (generally I don't bother to read praise quotes, and I can't for the life of me tell you what either of these ones said, but my eyes caught on the names because they're two of the small number of authors who have written books for which I really have no critiques. (And: I'm happy to report that they have good taste.)

Probably nobody else has had Kovac's exact career trajectory. Her career eventually went the way of many—but what that means, I'll leave you to read.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Review: "Only Here, Only Now" by Tom Newlands

Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands
Published November 2024 via HarperVia
★★★★★

Oh gosh, yes. Only Here, Only Now takes us to Muircross, a grotty wee town on the Firth of Forth. It's the 90s, and Cora and her mother are getting by—sure, their council house isn't properly accessible, and sure, opportunities are more or less limited to what trouble Cora can get up to, and sure, Cora dreams of bigger and better things; the lights of Abbotscraig are calling to her. But it's at least a life she knows.

Then Cora's mother brings Gunner into the picture, and Gunner moves in with them, and things are no longer so predictable—in small ways and in big.

This makes for such a beautifully classic, gritty coming-of-age story. Cora is...she's a teenager. She's stubborn and angsty and occasionally petulant; she loves her mother fiercely and hurts her mother and can't imagine life without her mother. The rest of the characters are similarly grey: Cora's mother loves her fiercely back, but she's not always sensitive; Gunner is not exactly the most law-abiding of folks, but he's also determined to try to do right by Cora; the other people who come in and out of Cora's orbit throughout the book take it in turns to support and to stumble.

It's clear from early on that this is a world Newlands knows. Muircross is fictional, but the book is steeped in local 90s slang (you don't need to understand every word to get the gist), and the low-key trouble that Cora and her cohort get up to feels very in line with, well, a post-industrial town where the jobs have dried up and new opportunities haven't taken hold yet. There's a thread of ADHD running through the story, but what interested me more was the way Cora understood places throughout the book: in Muircross, she dreams of Abbotscraig; in Abbotscraig, she dreams of Glasgow; in Glasgow, she starts to understand that no matter where you go, there you are.

I don't read all that many male authors these days, but whoever runs acquisitions at HarperVia has excellent taste, so...exceptions. If you read any interviews with Newlands, too, he has some interesting things to say about why he chose to write Only Here, Only Now from the perspective of a girl growing up in this environment. This is a debut novel, but it doesn't read like one, and I can't wait to see what's next.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Lottie's Luck on Beam" by Mem Mather

Lottie's Luck on Beam by Mem Mather
Published November 2021
★★

Lottie is super excited to move up to Level 8 gymnastics—until she's more or less shut out by her teammates and struggles to find her footing on the beam.

I'm temporarily diving back into Kindle Unlimited, and I thought I'd ease into things with some good old middle grade. This one has some clear lessons to it (Be Nice to Mean Girls, Even When They're Mean to You, Because Hurt People Hurt People), and it's a very short read (read 90% of it on the way to and from the grocery), but I can't really recommend it even for the target audience. Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think that books for younger readers should have a firm grasp of grammar and syntax—kids absorb things. The amount of tense shifting in Lottie's Luck on Beam was enough to give me a headache...and that's even before getting to the punctuation, the awkward dialogue (what tweenager in Colorado says "she reckons the coaches were awful" (7)?), and the typos and/or awkward word choices (As I looked right I sore Tasha (5); "Yup," I muffle back" (13)). I actually think that's a fun use of "muffle," but you'd be hard pressed to convince me that it's intentional.

I have a soft spot for light gymnastics books, and I'll probably read more along these lines before I tap out, but I'd recommend looking elsewhere.

Review: "The Final Gambit" by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Final Gambit by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Published August 2022 via Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
★★★

And with that I’m through the tril—what’s that? There’s one more book? Well. We’ll see.

In any case, time has passed, and Avery is nearing the end of her year-long probation period (so to speak) as billionaire heiress. Just a few more weeks, and she’ll be in full control of the money—and the power that comes with it. But there are new players in town, and they aren’t playing by the rules…

The pace picks up here, though the backstories get ever more convoluted and I had to do a fair amount of mental backtracking to remember who was who at certain points. The house gets, of course, ever bigger (among other things, we learn that there’s a 1,900-square-foot closet in one of the wings—substantially larger than the house I grew up in, and two and a half times my apartment now), and Avery finally has to think about what she might want to do with the money she’s inherited…if she survives to take control of it.

The villain is a little obvious here (or—there are two—one of whom hasn’t been introduced in other books and thus isn’t clear, but one of whom is pretty obvious in this book), but the stakes are high. I love the point Avery makes at the end (vaguesauce to avoid spoilers)—when you have that much money it is pretty much impossible to spend it (because assuming your investments are even reasonably sound, you’ll get back in interest way more than you spend), and the money instead becomes about power. And what do you do with that?

Will probably have to read book 4 now. Just, you know, on principle. How could I resist?