Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

This book was in our New Books Preview section, awaiting a read by an adult before putting it out in the student stacks. All books are previewed this way to see if they are generally suitable or not, and if they need to be flagged for more mature readers (grades 11 & 12). I don't know if this is ever done in public schools, but it is here at my Christian school. This is not done in a puritanical way. Plenty of books with a range of more mature content make the shelves; we just flag them for older kids if they fit that category.

Generally, I liked the book. It was compelling enough to keep me reading and I finished it in just a few days. Bullying is its central theme and our heroine is a goth-punk girl forced to move from cool LA to lame suburb/small town in wine country to live with the father she has never known. In addition to her negativity toward how square the town and nearly all of its people are, her dad is the school counselor, so you know that can't be good. Along the way, she makes a couple of counter-culture friends and bumps up against The Man pretty aggressively whenever she can. As things progress, bullying – even quite violent bullying – is glossed over due to the fact that the A-listers are the perps.

I had a couple of minor problems with the book. First, her name: Poe Holly. She was evidently named after her mom's favorite poet, Edgar Allen Poe. I don't care how much her mom liked Edgar Allen, she wouldn't name her baby girl Poe unless she was a goth chick herself, not a driven type-A med student. It is just an ugly name. It would have made more sense if she was named something girly, Pollyanna, say, and she – as a goth middle school kid � started going by Poe to make a statement. Names in teen novels are notoriously interesting, and I just never bought this one. 2) Several of the teen characters pull out certain references that I just don't think teenagers would know today, making them appear widely well-read and knowledgeable. I don't know if these are editorial oversights or what, but I don't think, for example, that many teens would use the term "drink the kool-aid" and know who Jim Jones was. But I can overlook a few of these things.

More generally, "Brutal" contains/suffers from some of the same things I love/hate about John Green's books. His central characters have a good dose of that distinctive hyper-articulate banter, or in the case of Poe, the ability to get up in a number of The Man's grills to tell them off in a both profane and incredibly compelling manner. We kind of love characters who can do this, don't we? But Poe does it quite a lot, one soap box after another, and a reader starts to wonder if she could really manage that kind of Matrix-level sustained firepower.

Given how arrogant she is, absolutely certain of her ability to read everyone's thoughts and motives, I would have hated this book had it not been for the learning she at least begins to gain along the way. At first, she is just insufferable, but to Harmon's credit, several characters speak truth to her in ways that takes some of the venom from her heart. We come to see her recognize some of her own imperfection, even some of the bad relational habits she has picked up from her mother and can't seem to shake. It isn't absolute redemption, but without this, I would have given up on her. I didn't want her to end up as the hero who stuck it to The Man and we were supposed to admire or see as righteous. That would have been pandering to teens. Instead, she is messier and more flawed, which I really appreciated in the end.


Note: some have reviewed this favorably for kids 13+. As a middle school English teacher, I cannot do that with a book that would be R-rated if it were a movie. I just think that would be irresponsible. The language is pretty relentless, with maybe 30 f-bombs among lots of other words; the bullying violence that occurs is pretty brutal; and there is a bit of sexuality. I personally would recommend it for older teens and 20-somethings.