They hold her together when she cannot, though she fights to stand alone always.Ī piercingly compelling read, this is a compelling feminist book that teenagers need to read to understand our society and what has to change. These people make up Romy’s family and heart. And a stepfather who is kind and lovely, disabled and disrespected. And a mother who is involved and cares deeply but is unable to save her daughter from the world they live in together. Add to the appeal an African-American love interest where that is not the issue at the heart of the book. She is a ball of ferocious pain, painted with makeup that allows her to control things, searching for a way to be a new person and finding it impossible to leave her anger and herself behind.

It is a story that is brutal in its fierce honesty and burning with anger at what we are allowing to happen to ourselves. She does that all by having a story where women are abused, raped, objectified and thrown away and where girls are called names, bullied and beaten. She also has a distinct feminist point of view that is a delight to read, one that shows the violence towards women and girls and rejects the notion that women are to be used and thrown away. Summers makes the act of putting on finger polish and lipstick into one of battle paint and bravery. The prose is beautiful, roaming and wild with a lusciousness that lingers in the mind. As the annual senior party approaches, Romy knows she can’t attend but news that another girl may have been raped in a neighboring town sends her into a downward spiral, one that she may not survive.

Romance starts to bloom with the cook at the diner, a boy whom Romy is not sure she can trust and knows that she can’t let anyone at her hometown know about. But all is not good, she is bullied mercilessly at school for the “lie” that she told and she can’t trust anyone at her high school to have her back. Romy works at a diner where no one knows about the scandal that she was involved in. She and her mother have moved in with her mother’s new boyfriend and her alcoholic father has left town. A year later, Romy has tried to put her life back together. After all, she accused the sheriff’s oldest son and she’s the daughter of the town drunk. When Romy is raped at a party after having too much to drink, no one believes her that it happened. All the Rage by Courtney Summers ( InfoSoup)

All the rage by courtney summers