Books, Girls and Bullying.
I just finished reading a YA book called Freak by Marcella Pixley. (I got a number of YA books out of the library today, because the teen room, unlike every other area containing fiction in the library, is on the first floor and therefore does not require an eternally broken elevator for access.) The book was very good and very painful for three-
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I read an article about her (by accident--I was looking for a webpage, as I would LOVE to contact her) and this is what she said:
"I want every kid who has ever come into my classroom in tears because they've been teased or had problems with friends to read this book and realize they're not the only one this has happened to. It happens to my character, and it happened to me. And just like my character, I found the strength to overcome it."
There's just a few problems with this.
A) I don't know of a single kid who's been bullied who thinks that he or she is the only person that has ever been bullied. How many people have been bullied is not the issue. When you're the victim of bullies, knowing that the bullies are also picking on a lot of other people DOESN'T MAKE IT BETTER.
B) Miriam doesn't overcome the bullying, nor does she learn to go on and continue to fight it on a daily basis. Instead, she sees the bully-brat crying in the office (my assumption was that she was crying because she'd been caught, and that she would end up handing Miriam her ass later for GETTING her caught), hears a teacher say that she and the bully have a lot in common (which they don't) and, based on this, decides that she's going to go to a party hosted by the chief bully's best friend and...watch the bully make out before turning on the lights? Don't ask me. Miriam is presented as having a plan. And after this, Bullygirl fake-apologizes (seriously, writing FREAK on the new notebook she's giving Miriam doesn't sound like she's sorry, just taking the battle in a different direction) and we're supposed to presume that All Is Well in La-La Land. Miriam is going to be fine and no one will ever bully her again.
Except...
...what about Chief Bully's friends? Aren't THEY going to want to attack Miriam for daring to defy their Evil Empress?
...what's to stop the chief bully from changing her mind and attacking Miriam again? Or even escalating the campaign?
...what's forcing the Bratz gang to keep the bullying to in school and whispers. They have cellphones? Possibly SmartPhones. And the Internet. They will use what is available to help them bully. That is what bullies DO.
It doesn't make sense. It's the start of a horrific story that should be much longer than it is...and then there's this fake happy ending tacked on for no reason. And it's about as credible as the "All Is Well" concept at the end of Deathly Hallows.
Oh, and Miriam shaved all her hair off. She started doing this to thin out her hair and her eyebrows and made a mess of it; and her friend shaves the hair all off to make Miriam look punk. The fact that Miriam needed to shave all her hair off because she screwed up is okay by me. It would also be okay by me if she really wanted to make a fashion statement, or try being punk for a while, or whatever.
What is NOT okay is that despite Miriam being a fairly unattractive girl throughout, she instantly becomes much more "feminine" and "attractive" when she goes bald. Kind of like Persis Khambatta in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. As is stressed over and over again in this book, if you're a girl, you're nobody unless somebody thinks you're hot.
You know, I'd really expect a teacher to know better than to spout this shit.
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What's the power issue that has been missing from recent attention over bullying?
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