Just Started This, 30 Pages In.
I'm very much enjoying this novel so far. I really like Evie and I find her different from a lot of mainstream young adult female protagonists. So far, I find her very relatable and her experiences similar to those I have gone through. I like the way she thinks. She's a teenage girl, an introvert raised by a hippie mother, who doesn't understand the necessity of make up, being super-thin, or why people follow the ridiculous social politics of our society.
There also some great quotes from the first 30 pages:
"If she could no longer be called beautiful, she possessed something better - a knowledge of beauty, its inflated value, its inevitable loss." (p. 9)
[After her best friend put make up on her] "I looked rubbery, sort of embalmed. My cheekbones were gone and my lips glittered like one of those plastic bracelets with sparkly stuff inside. My eyes burned and my skin felt itchy ... I made my way to the sink, and as I rinsed, I watched myself ... reappear in the mirror." (p. 14)
"Having to talk to people is one thing, but soliciting conversation was something else. If I acted squirmy or didn't make eye-contact, they would want to know what was wrong, and I would have to say, 'Nothing,' since nothing really was wrong. Nothing is an easy thing to feel but a difficult thing to express." (p. 19)
[Commenting on the amount of make up her classmates wear] "'Wow,' I thought, and on such a hot day! Girls are truly game as soldiers, with the brave things the do their bodies and the harsh conditions they are able to tolerate." (p. 23)
"I wondered if he was annoyed by Nico and Billy and others like them, by the way they occupied the classroom, establishing through body language a right of place that their brains could not." (p. 26)
"Boys will be boys, that's what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether, We are expected to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to express. We are to use gossip as a means of policing ourselves, This way those who do succumb to the lure of sex but are not damaged by it are damaged instead by peer malice. We are to remain united in cruelty, ignorance, and aversion. We are to starve the flesh from our bones, penalizing the body for its nature, castigating ourselves for advances from men that we are powerless to prevent. We are to make false promises, then resist the attentions solicited. Basically we are to become expert liars." (p. 27)
