Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here Review

This week's novel is Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here, contemporary YA by Anna Breslaw.

Scarlett Epstein writes fanfiction for the TV show Lycanthrope High and is devastated when it gets canceled.  She's not very popular at school with her reduced price lunch and her C average, so most of her friends are online in the Lycanthrope fandom.  Worried she's about to lose her friends, she starts a new story populated with characters from her high school: her best friend, the boy she has a crush on, and the girl that bullies her.

First, story time!  My teenage niece came to visit one summer.  At the time, she was super into The Hunger Games to the point where she and her best friend skipped school to dive to Dallas to go to that creepy, ironic mall tour that the movie cast did.  We were sitting around when my husband made a random joke about Peta.  Honestly, it was not that great a joke, but that didn't matter to my niece.  She started crying, overwhelmed with emotion about Peta and his tragic life as a boy shaped piece of flat bread.  After crying for a few minutes, she called her best friend and repeated the joke, at which point her friend also started crying.

So!  When Scarlett starts crying thinking about how her favorite show got canceled, Breslaw nails it.

She also nails internet fandom--the interactions, the people you meet there, the fics that show up.  It was nice to see all the terms used correctly and used in the way someone familiar with them would use them, instead of like an anthropologist wading into a strange, backward culture.  Scarlett makes groan-worthy rookie mistakes in her fic, that you know are going to come back to bite her even before she realizes she's done anything wrong.  "Oh, you naive sunfish," I think, "find/replace those characters' names."  "Oh, you sweet summer child," I think, "don't insert yourself into your story."  That can never end well.

Scarlett's dad now lives in New York with his new brilliant, beautiful wife and their new brilliant, beautiful daughter.  He gets a book deal for a novel that turns out to have characters that are unflattering portrayals of Scarlett and her mom.  (The snip-its we get are painfully accurate snip-its of a man-book-with-manly-man-feels book.)  This hurts Scarlett tremendously, yet Scarlett never seems to make the connection between what her dad did and what she did.  It's a hugely obvious parallel, but it's never made explicit.  Maybe it's so obvious that Breslaw doesn't feel it needs to be made explicit?  Maybe Scarlett never put it together that directly, but it affected her response just the same?  It's strange.

On the other hand, I didn't like how when these problems do inevitably rear their ugly head, Scarlett takes all the blame.  Although her actions are hurtful, I don't like that her bully never sees that she was hurtful as well.  All the guilt is heaped on Scarlett even though her bully spends the entire book being awful.  Yes, Scarlett should (and does) learn from her mistakes, but this rings of victim blaming and it ruins the only productive outlet Scarlett had to vent her frustrations.

So it's strange that I feel so differently about the situation between Scarlett and her bully and Scarlett and her dad.  Scarlett's dad says she's unpopular and I don't blame Scarlett for that.  Scarlett says her bully is mean and fake and I do blame her bully for that.  It's a difference between an adult saying mean things about their child and a kid saying mean things about a peer.  It's a difference between being unpopular, which isn't a choice, and being cruel, which is.

So yeah, there's a lot of ground to cover there, but it just ends up being that Scarlett feels bad about everything and blames herself for writing her story AND being unpopular.

***

Next week: A Criminal Magic--mobsters and speakeasy magic shows! by Lee Kelly.