With Laura Steven's new book 'a girl called shameless' out earlier this week I thought I would make a spoiler filler overview for those people who want to complain about the characters we hate and fan-girl over the ones we love.
If you've been living under a rock and don't know what The exact opposite of okay is about you can head over to my earlier post 'The exact opposite of okay review'.
If you haven't read this book and don't want any spoilers stop reading now.
You've been warned.
I have a lot of tea to spill about this book and it mainly focuses on how much I hate Danny.
He's the perfect example of a privileged white male and I couldn't say it better than Ajita "Hey, Danny, might wanna cover up a bit. Your privilege is showing." From the very beginning I didn't trust him and I don't know about you but I knew that he would have been the one to start the site. He just wouldn't quit making a fool out of himself going after Izzy even after she told him no. Also they way he spoke to his mum about the holiday and made out like it was the end of the world just annoyed me even more and I almost couldn't believe how petty and all round rude he was being when people don't have that privilege at all.
The teachers in this book especially Izzy's maths teacher and the principal just need a slap in the face and told to grow up and stop acting like little boys. They have no right to make her feel small or treat her like an object when they're literally old men and she's a teenager. It's disgusting but things like this happen all the time. Which is what I like about this book; it unapologetically calls everyone out and I love it for that.
Izzy's class mates in this book bar a handful of people were also a disgrace especially the girls who you would expect, during a situation like this, to rally together instead of throwing around offensive words like 'slut' and 'whore' and making her feel bad for decisions she's made. One of things I would say I'm proud of for our generation is the ability to work together but from this I saw the harsh reality that the good ones are only a handful cases and this is the reality.
Some of the people I love in this book are Ajita and Meg who stay behind Izzy the whole time and support her against everything that's happening in the media especially Ajita who throws fruit at the press for following them to school. One of the many reasons I love her. They also leave class when the teacher refuses to do anything about the comments coming from other students and I like to believe I would do something similar in their situation.
Another character I adore is Carson, who is the model man and shows what men should be like, his reaction to the scandal and the way he treats Izzy as though nothing has happened is the best and although he messes up when he doesn't tell his friends to stop talking about her he makes up for it with his amazing personality and all round awesomeness and I love him so much. We also see his racial struggle through his artwork which I'm thankful was included and gives us more of an insight into his character.
So I think what we learnt from this enlightening experience was there are a lot of characters that I don't like with good reason but there are also model people who we need more of in the future showing why what happened to Izzy is wrong and shouldn't be allowed to happen to more girls.