Enjoyable and a fun read!

The story caught my eye from the moment I read the blurb, and I just knew I wanted to read this book. I was not let down and can recommend this to everyone!

"Wake up, Philomena. Wake up now."

* * 
2 / 5

It's official: I am simply not a fan of Suzanne Young. I tried The Program a few years ago and now I've tried Girls With Sharp Sticks, and the problem is that Young comes up with some fantastic sounding premises and then fails to deliver on them in a way that I find enjoyable. 

"You can be girls to be afraid of"

The premise of the book - a pseudo-Handmaid's Tale world where the previously suppressed and well-behaved women rise up and fight for their freedom - intrigued me. What I absolutely will praise this book for is its ability to make the reader feel supremely uncomfortable. And I mean that as a genuine compliment. Young has crafted a world in which the young women of Innovations Academy are treated terribly and she conveys how horrible and wrong it is to the reader. 

Philomena, or Mena, is a first year student at Innovations Academy, where she is taught how to be a lady. It's very Victorian finishing school with flower growing and etiquette classes and male guardians that slap them around and force feed them drugs. Fun. Mena is a sweet girl that cares for her friends deeply and is supportive of the girls she doesn't even like very much, which makes for a refreshing heroine. She is a little bit dense though!

"I daydream too often, drift away in my thoughts. I just can't seem to stay out of my head"

My biggest problem with Girls With Sharp Sticks is that it felt flat. There's a lot that isn't clear and doesn't seem to make coherent sense. Why is a man that wants to help Mena so heavily invested in funding the Academy? Why is it communicated to the reader through the speech of the characters that women, in this world, have had their rights stripped away, yet when the girls venture out into the town or meet up with boys, this doesn't seem to come across at all? The start is also rather slow and the twist was weird - it was cool, but it didn't seem to make a lot of sense with respect to how the girl's 'parents' treated them. 

Girls With Sharp Sticks was too unsettling and not nuanced enough to be an enjoyable read. It felt a little heavy handed and overwrought to be an adult novel, yet too serious and disturbing to sit comfortable in the YA genre. 

My thanks to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for an ARC of Girls With Sharp Sticks.

I think this falls into ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ territory. I read Young’s ‘The Program’ series and became increasingly annoyed with her style and sentence structure there. She tells a compelling story but I think her style is just not for me. This reminded me of Louise O’Neil’s Only Ever Yours – which I hated btw – and it’s clearly in the vein of Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The trouble is, many of these types of books that speak out against misogyny have come along after that bit of the battle has already been fought, so they lack impact for me. I know there are whole new generations to raise awareness in but my problem is that so many of these YA Handmaid imitators is that they are unnuanced and very black and white. Anyway, this wasn’t for me. I don’t think it’s a bad book. It was just a combination of not liking the style and just really wanting to see sexism and misogyny addressed in better, more positive ways.

‘They’re beautiful, but it’s not all they are’.

Welcome to the world of Innovations Academy. A world of beauty, serenity, and obedience. A world of professors and guardians, redirection and guidance, and if that fails, a course of impulse control therapy will soon get you back to one hundred percent...

Now, I will start by saying I didn’t have high hopes for this one. I’ve never read anything by Suzanne Young before, but I do read a lot of YA dystopian fiction, and it’s getting rare for me to really feel like something stands out as truly special. Add to that the reference on the back to The Handmaids Tale, and I was ready for another disappointing knock off.

I. Was. Wrong.

I loved it. The idea felt really unique, and it was so well executed in the quality of the writing. I found reading this incredibly unsettling, not just because of the content, but the tone too - the way that, through Mena, you experience the slow burn of an awakening as the horror of the situation becomes more and more real.

I also liked the fact that it didn’t fall into the insta love trap. Mena’s actions aren’t driven by her desire to get with the cute boy, and I was so glad to see this - insta love in feminist leaning novels always reads as a play for fans, and it was nice to see Young sticking to her message.

My only real criticism?


SPOILERS AHEAD!







The summary of the novel that I saw before reading was different to that on GoodReads, and included a quote stating that the Girls With Sharp Sticks is like a combination of handmaids tale and a TV show that will remain nameless just to avoid spoiling as much as possible.

Now, I’m not saying the twist can’t be guessed at. But, there are certain scenes that, for me, would have been a lot more disturbing if the back cover hadn’t of literally shouted what the twist was. In big letters. Right before the synopsis. So you couldn’t miss reading it.

This didn’t overly affect my enjoyment of the book, as I still found it very well written, the tone was fantastically sinister, and I loved Mena - but I can’t help thinking that maybe not knowing that element of the novel in advance could have made it even better.

Nonetheless, I will definitely be picking up the second book in this series, and I found it a really enjoyable read that was surprisingly unsettling - always the sign of high quality writing!

I received an advanced reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review

Woozers. YA feminist dystopia and I am here for it. One of the better of the lady-dystopia books; the characters and the narrative feel real and authentic. And the sad part is that I don’t not believe this is happening somewhere already. Sharpen your sticks!