Tag Archives: cyberbullying

Review: Take Three Girls by Cath Crowley, Simmone Howell, and Fiona Wood

Book Review and Content, Contemporary, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , , ,
Take Three Girls by Cath Crowley, Simmone Howell, and Fiona Wood

Take Three Girls
Cath Crowley, Simmone Howell, and Fiona Wood
Sterling Teen
Published April 6, 2021 (Orig. 2017)

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads

About Take Three Girls

Popular Ady seems cool and confident at school, but at home her family is falling apart. Brainiac Kate wants to pursue her dreams of playing music, even if it jeopardizes her academic scholarship. And swim champ Clem finds herself disenchanted with the sport . . . and falling for a very wrong boy. When these three very different girls are forced to team up in a wellness class, they’re not too pleased. But over time, they bond—and when they’re all targeted by PSST, a website that dishes out malicious gossip and lies, they decide to take a stand, uncover the culprits, and fight back. But can they really fix a broken system? With each girl’s story told by a different author, as well as intriguing questionnaires from the wellness class included throughout, this empowering novel explores today’s most relevant topics— from cyberbullying and fat shaming to drug abuse and financial stress.

“Mean stuff spreads so fast. One click. Post. Send. Share. Online bullying = sometimes suicides, so all the private schools have strategies for dealing with it. At St Hilda’s, it’s Wellness classes. We greeted the idea with genuine enthusiasm. Why not? Everyone loves the chance to slack off.”

Three authors. Three appealing and relatable characters. One smart YA novel about a trio of unlikely friends who team up to take down the school cyberbully. 

My Review

My favorite thing about this book is the way the friendships develop between the girls. At the beginning of the story, it’s clear they don’t really like or respect one another. They do have things they grudgingly admire about each other, though, which felt really real. The way their friendship grows felt so natural and believable. I wanted to celebrate every moment of it. It totally took me back to those deep friendships I had in high school, too. I loved that.

There can never be enough stories that shine a light on the power and empowering effect of girl friendships. I love that this book paid such a beautiful tribute to them.

One of the things I feel like I can never get enough of in a book are characters who are artistic in some way. I love living vicariously through them. So I really enjoyed all the scenes in which Kate is playing her cello. I loved that she took playing music, something we’ve all seen done before in books, in a fresh direction, too, by having her also mixing in other sound tracks and giving it a tech aspect– that’s something I’ve never seen done before, I don’t think. And while I know nothing about that process, I felt like I followed what she was doing just fine and loved it. It made me wish I could listen to the music she was writing.

Ady’s family crisis over substance abuse really drew me in, too. I felt like her experience of trying to figure out what was going on and especially doing that through reading the other people in the room and even some eavesdropping felt totally real to me. I remembered a lot of those kinds of moments in my own teen life during the process of discovering someone close to me was addicted to alcohol.

I think I struggled the most with Clem’s story, even though to be honest, that resonated with me, too. For me it was painful to read, not because the story was bad, but because it also kind of called up some things in my own life that were hard to think about. Falling in love can be so hard. I love that Kate and Ady admired things about her from the beginning, and that the story kind of helped reframe her certainty about what she wanted as a positive thing, even though it came with some really hard lessons.

I feel like the back cover copy is a teeny bit misleading because taking down the school bully is really one girl’s idea moreso than the others for most of the story. I thought from reading the cover copy that the story would focus on that takedown, and that doesn’t really emerge until late in the book. Each section does begin with what would be a screenshot of content posted to the online bullying site, so the bullying is a central part of the story that impacts many of the characters. Eventually the girls do all work together on a plan to make it happen, though.

On the whole, I enjoyed reading this book, though I found some of the content was hard for me personally. I’ve made notes below on other potential triggers in the book, so please check those out. Here’s my review of GRAFFITI MOON by Cath Crowley, one of the TAKE THREE GIRLS authors, in case you’re interested in that, too.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 16 up.

Representation
One main character is bisexual. One main character is struggling with her weight.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Extreme profanity used pretty frequently.

Romance/Sexual Content – Trigger Warning for Sexual Bullying
Kissing between boy and girl. A man asks for nude photos of a sixteen-year-old girl, which she sends him. He also sends some explicit pictures to her. Several brief descriptions of sex and sexual acts. Kissing between two girls.

Each section includes a post from the PSST site which uses explicit, often sexual language to demean and bully girls whose real names are used.

Spiritual Content
None.

Violent Content
One boy punches another in the face.

Drug Content
Underage drinking. One character discovers that her dad is an alcohol and cocaine addict.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support running this blog. I received a free copy of TAKE THREE GIRLS in exchange for my honest review.


 

Review: Blue Gold by Elizabeth Stewart

Book Review and Content, Contemporary, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , , ,

Blue Gold
Elizabeth Stewart
Annick Press

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads

Three fifteen year-old girls: Fiona, the daughter of an executive at a technology company in Vancouver who has just misplaced her phone, Sylvia, who bears the scars of an attack in her village in Congo and now lives in a refugee camp in Tanzania, and Laiping, a girl from a rural town working in a factory in Shenzhen, China so she can send money home to her family. They lead vastly different lives, but they all share one common connection: the mineral Coltan, or “blue gold” used to make electronics and cell phones.

After sending her boyfriend a topless picture of herself, Fiona loses her cell phone. Though her dad works for a company that makes electronics, he insists she get a job and pay for a new phone for herself. In Nyarugusu, Sylvie cares for her younger siblings and her mama, who won’t get up from her sleeping mat some days and insists that Sylvie’s father will join them soon. Sylvie’s brother, wooed by a local warlord, is slipping away from the family. The only way Sylvie can save them is through sponsorship to go to Canada. Laiping wants to please her supervisors at her new factory job and be a good daughter, sending money home for her father’s life-saving heart surgery. But when the company withholds her pay and punishes her for another’s defective work, Laiping begins to wonder whether she’ll ever be able to make a life for herself as a factory worker.

Told from the point-of-view of all three girls, Blue Gold relates three separate stories connected by the world’s desire for the mineral coltan. A nurse at Sylvie’s refugee camp sets up an online campaign to request aid for her, and Fiona and Laiping see the pictures of Sylvie posted online. They don’t know much more about the girl with the machete scar on her face, though. The politics surrounding the use of coltan are present in the novel, and it’s clearly a book with a message. Each girl’s story is compelling, however, and the passages certainly raise empathy for the real people enduring the conditions related in the tale, such as factories and refugee camps.

I really didn’t know much about coltan before reading this book. Through this story and the references included in the back, I’ve done a little more research and begun to look at which products and companies seem to be interested in or succeeding at supporting human rights and ethical production. One suggestion from a section at the back of the book suggests downloading an app called buycott, which can be used to scan the bar codes of items and provide information about whether it was produced in ways that cause harm to the environment or humanity. I’m eager to check it out.

One element that I found interesting was the way the use of cell phones and technology was portrayed throughout the story. A refugee camp worker uses a cell phone to take pictures and videos of Sylvie and her family in order to gather financial support and sponsorship to bring her to Canada. A photo of Laiping taken to test the cell phone camera makes its way across the globe to Fiona’s hands, connecting them, if only for a moment. For Sylvie, a viral photograph has the power to save; for Fiona, in the case of her nude picture, it can destroy. And certainly, where war and slavery rule the harvesting of coltan, technology and our need for the latest greatest gadgets can destroy lives. Technology connects us all, Stewart seems to be saying, for good or ill.

I liked that Stewart didn’t present the topic as a simple black-and-white issue. I really like that she includes a list of other sites and encourages readers to research products and companies for themselves. In reading reviews posted by others on sites like Goodreads, it seems clear that this book has elevated our awareness of problems surrounding coltan mining and factory conditions in China. I have to applaud her for those efforts, and I enjoyed reading this novel about them.

Language Content
None.

Sexual Content
Sylvie briefly remembers being raped by soldiers before fleeing her home. There are a few details given, and it’s definitely the kind of scene that could be a trigger for rape or sexual abuse victims. Sylvie thinks about what it would be like to be married to a man she does not love, and compares it to what the soldiers did to her, saying she will withdraw inside herself, that the man can have her body, but never her.

Fiona sends her boyfriend a topless picture of herself which ends up being distributed online. She’s super embarrassed, and refuses to let her parents handle it, insisting she’ll make things right on her own. Her school principal warns her that distributing the picture is child pornography, and anyone (including Fiona) caught posting it or sending it out can be arrested. When Fiona finds out who first posted the picture, she refuses to out them. While I understood her reasons, I felt like it was a bad decision, and I found myself wishing her parents had insisted on being involved in the situation.

Spiritual Content
When one of Sylvie’s allies dies in a fight against a warlord, she prays that his spirit will not be trapped in Nyarugusu.

Violence
Sylvie and her mother were raped by soldiers before they fled from their home in DRC. Sylvie briefly remembers the event. For readers who are also victims, it could definitely be a trigger. A powerful warlord threatens Sylvie and her family. Soldiers exchange fire with refugees in one scene. In China, Laiping witnesses police brutalizing workers who’ve gathered for a rally to discuss rights and injustices at local factories. She is knocked to the ground and beaten.

Drug Content
Sylvie fears drunk men in the refugee camp who make lewd comments to her and may try to take advantage of her.

Fiona and her boyfriend go to a party where she gets very drunk. So drunk she’s ill and has to go home. Still drunk, she sends a topless picture of herself to her boyfriend. While she comes to deeply regret sending that picture, neither she nor her friends evaluate the role that drinking alcohol played in her willingness to send the photo to begin with.