TL; W[on’t]R[read the review]: This is a stunning book, blending romance with a high-stakes journalistic takedown of a serial Hollywood predator. It’s got glitz, it’s got teen love, it’s got nuanced processing of trauma, and it’s got affirmations galore. Read it, if you can handle the content warnings listed below.
Content warnings [via the author on Goodreads]: “mentions of sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and sexual assault”; anxiety and accompanying panic attacks
Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: Ever since seventeen-year-old Josie Wright can remember, writing has been her identity, the thing that grounds her when everything else is a garbage fire. So when she wins a contest to write a celebrity profile for Deep Focus magazine, she’s equal parts excited and scared, but also ready. She’s got this. Soon Josie is jetting off on a multi-city tour, rubbing elbows with sparkly celebrities, frenetic handlers, stone-faced producers, and eccentric stylists. She even finds herself catching feelings for the subject of her profile, dazzling young newcomer Marius Canet. Josie’s world is expanding so rapidly, she doesn’t know whether she’s flying or falling. But when a young actress lets her in on a terrible secret, the answer is clear: she’s in over her head. One woman’s account leads to another and another. Josie wants to expose the man responsible, but she’s reluctant to speak up, unsure if this is her story to tell. What if she lets down the women who have entrusted her with their stories? What if this ends her writing career before it even begins? There are so many reasons not to go ahead, but if Josie doesn’t step up, who will?
[Note: This review is based on an eARC from NetGalley and Knopf Books for Young Readers [Random House Children’s].]
First off, how did Camryn Garrett write this amazingly nuanced book, with a variety of well-developed adult characters in addition to her fabulous teen ones, at such a young age?! Maybe precocious main character Josie’s abilities aren’t that unrealistic.
This book contains one of the sweetest and most endearing YA romances that I’ve read in a very long time. Overall, it was a joy to read, despite its heavy themes at times. Garrett manages to weave a glorious wish-fulfillment plot about young Black (bisexual) women taking down a powerful serial sexual abuser with a joyful Black-movie-star-meets-brilliant-plus-sized-journalist romance. It gives Black love AND Black-led-and-centered justice. I LOVED it, and it’s so needed. (If this appeals, check out Garrett’s superb essay about intersectional representation, fat positivity, and writing what she couldn’t find for Shondaland.)
From the description, it REALLY doesn’t seem like this blend of plots and tones should work. And there admittedly were moments when I was reading it that I wanted to get back to either the avenging-journalist plot OR the fairy-tale-esque romance, but the fact that I switched allegiances between the two all the time speaks to how well developed and how well balanced both of them truly are. And this isn’t to say that the plots didn’t interweave in intriguing (and sometimes disturbing) ways–they did, expertly. But that gets into
SPOILER TERRITORY
For the majority of the novel, main character Josie’s role as contest-winning magazine interviewer of up-and-coming young Black, bisexual movie star Marius Canet serves as the impetus both for her blossoming romance with said movie star as well as for her increased exposure to the Hollywood whisper network around a famous director’s history as a serial sexual harasser, assaulter, and rapist. The plotlines mainly intersect because Marius is about to work with the famous director, and he balks whenever Josie tries to bring up the whispers about the older man’s predatory nature. Since all of the whispers and accusations about this director have been made by women, the reader assumes (along with Josie) that Marius is simply refusing to see something that doesn’t affect him and which would adversely affect his career if he were to acknowledge it. However, in a reveal halfway through the novel, Marius is forced to disclose to Josie that the director has also assaulted him. The young actor is worried that if word got out, a biphobic backlash would victim-blame him, and he’s also worried his caring parents would try to make him leave Hollywood. (He’s also, of course, worried about being blacklisted and disbelieved in general.) This unintentionally forced disclosure creates a rift between the pair, though, fortunately, Josie never remotely considers publicly disclosing Marius’s secret for the high-stakes piece she’s writing about the director. Instead, she painstakingly manages to secure enough ‘on the record’ disclosures from women in Hollywood to proceed with the story in The New York Times (!!). I appreciated the way Garrett challenged Josie’s (and, possibly, the reader’s) heteronormative assumptions about sexual harassment and assault, pointing out how damaging those assumptions can be.
At the beginning of this review, I referred to this plotline as “wish-fulfillment,” and I think it is, but in a good way. I’ve seen some pushback against the novel from other reviewers for its ‘unrealistic’ depiction of a Weinstein-esque takedown being completed in the span of a few weeks by a 17-year-old rookie journalist. And of course it isn’t realistic (why does it need to be realistic?) BUT, it imagines a world where the short timespan AND the youth of the writer are possible in bringing someone extremely powerful to justice…and that’s one step toward making such a world possible. It imagines a world where teens can be believed (albeit only in large numbers and with ample evidence) and where the might of powerful institutions (like the Times’ legal team and editorial board) can be used for moral and ethical good. It’s an empowering idea, if done right, as I think it is here. (And I don’t think it’s setting unrealistic expectations for teen OR adult readers, because…the realities of the world we currently live in are difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. Very few would confuse the two.)
The publication of Josie’s exposé at the end of the novel is a massive victory, though it’s built on a variety of women (and Marius) disclosing and working through their own personal traumas. Garrett never shies away from showing the stakes and PTSD that come up for these survivors, and she allows Josie to have a similar freedom to express and come to grips with her own trauma from a variety of triggers. From the beginning of the novel, Josie is established as a bright and (relatively) self-aware teen journalist with massive ambition and great instincts. She doubts herself, though, when it comes to authoring this exposé, since she hasn’t experienced the things the women she’s interviewing have. However, after a lot of internal struggle, she realizes that she is a legitimate voice for the piece she’s being asked to write, because while she wasn’t assaulted by the director in question, she was a victim of sexual assault in the past. In the early parts of the story, she remembers incredibly traumatizing experiences with a monstrous boy in middle school–culminating in an encounter where he followed her into the girl’s bathroom and tore her shirt–as being bad but not full-blown assault, because they were children. The events did, however, seem to trigger fairly extreme and lasting anxiety, with regular, disabling panic attacks. Her new friends help her process her feelings and acknowledge that what she experienced was assault, and that it didn’t have to be rape to ‘count’ as valid, traumatizing violence. (This seems SO USEFUL in a YA book–I so appreciated the author being really explicit about all of this.)
Another great, politically clear message of the book comes when Josie insists on finding (or at least attempting to find) POC women who experienced trauma from this director, so she can be sure to add their voices to her exposé. Initially, it seems like the director exclusively preyed on young white women, but Josie soon finds a former intern of color who is willing to talk ‘off the record.’ By the end of the novel, some white actresses are pulling out of the piece, and this intern’s non-standard NDAs are a crucial piece of evidence for the case. At the very end, Josie manages to convince this woman to go on the record. (This section, while handled sensitively, might be disturbing to some readers, since it could be seen to involve tacit, unintentional coercion on Josie’s part.) I love that the book dealt explicitly with the failures of #metoo for women of color (despite the hashtag’s origins with Tarana Burke), and the way white feminism fails.
One of the few things I didn’t love, though it was addressed explicitly, was way the book handled the fat-shaming and fatphobia Josie’s family expressed at various points in the novel. Josie’s own internalized body dysmorphia and her issues with her weight were handled with nuance and sensitivity, and her love of fashion and fraught relationship with clothes were featured at more than one point in the story. (There’s a scene where Josie goes shopping with her sisters and settles for less-than-stellar-fitting clothes, and later there’s a scene where she unexpectedly gets immaculately fitted for a designer gown, which she wears for the fairy-tale ending. This juxtaposition was really great and made the emotional resonance of the gown very obvious for the reader.) But while Josie’s sister does apologize for her (supposedly unintentional) fat-shaming and snide comments by the novel’s end, her mother’s weight-shaming rhetoric never gets a similar resolution, though the novel does call it out as problematic and triggering every time it occurs. I do wish the book had made Josie’s parents more self-aware and apologetic (but I guess not EVERY facet of the book could–or SHOULD–fall into the wish-fulfillment category…).
That being said, the book’s overall focus is on empowerment, autonomy, and establishing your own control over your life, and it insists on the idea that we COULD live in a world that (for the most part) recognizes these as the crucial, foundational things that they are. The very end is so sweet, like the best kind of rom-com but with added stakes, and it happens on a red carpet, with a movie star, with our heroine (who happens to have penned the current front-page Times viral feature) in a gorgeous gown she looks like a dream in. She ends, affirmingly, “I’m not worried about how I look or what anyone thinks. Not tonight.”
YAY.
