Rachel Reads & Reviews

For the beginning of spooky season, I wanted to highlight some new and old books that tackle the scariest of horror tropes. Female rage. Ie. the vampiress. The mad woman in the attic. The succubus. Woman who don’t tamp down their rage are regarded as monsterous yet they are fascinating.

These books are more in the contemporary vein than horror but they highlight different ways women are told to calm down, to shut up and ignore their gut feelings and the intternal fight to be taken seriously and for their justifiable rage to be heard.

Anger is Only a Shadow by Elizabeth Acevedo

Lil is anything but small. She’s rebellious, she’s loyal; she’s figuring out what kind of good person she wants to be, or if she wants to be a good person at all. But more than anything? Lil wants to be free.

When her instinct for freedom leads to another stay in D.C. juvenile detention, Lil knows she’s lucky to just be on probation. But judgment, guilt, and an ankle monitor weigh heavily on her, and she can’t shake that pinned-down feeling.

The only person who might understand is her big brother, Aldwin. Except he’s more distant now than just the hundred miles where he’s away at college. Something’s been off with him for a couple of months, but only Lil seems to realize how important it is to get to him.

As her court hearing ticks closer, a question looms over Lil as the missed phone calls and strange texts from her brother pile up: will she follow the rules until her sentencing, or put her future freedom on the line?

This book combines Acevedo’s vivid verse, and pathos-infused prose through Lili. Lili seems to be the stereotypical “disrespectful” bad teen. She ditches school, she shoplifts, she crashes cars, and her parents dispair of her horrible decision-making skills. Yet Acevedo gives insight to her choices. She’s a teen. She makes rash decisions but a combination of her race, and her economic status boxes her into the label of bad kid. She isn’t given the benefit of the doubt but continued stays to the juvenile detention system.

And just as Lili is labeled the bad kid, her brother is the golden boy and the stigma against mental health issues in the latinx community make her parents blind to how Aldwin is spiraling.

Acevedo has real-life experience in teaching poetry and creative writing to the incarcerated and she brings humanity to Lili and her cell-mates, showcasing the hope for their future, their desires for freedom, and crushed dreams. But the poetry is a cathartic outlet as well.

There’s more introspective than anger, but the simmering anger is there, raging against societal prejudices and injustices and makes the reader think about how it is so normalized in society, and how the creative writing and arts can remind one another of our humanness beyond our mistakes.

Fight Song by Kirk Van Brunt

It’s not easy to miss Nokes Lasley, especially when she’s on the ice. Towering over the competition at over six feet tall, she routinely dominates on the right wing—and her no-nonsense approach and fiery temper have helped to solidify her reputation as a hockey superstar. Despite her tenuous situation at home, she dreams of hitting the Olympics one day and proving that she can compete in the big leagues.

But suddenly, Nokes’s life is turned upside-down when her father is arrested for murder and she’s forced to enter the foster care system. Nokes bounces from home to home, from one dangerous setting to the next . . . until she decides to escape across the border to Minnesota, where the promise of a family friend with professional hockey connections far outweighs the abuse she’s experiencing in her home province of Ontario.

Through careful lies, and with the help of Aiden, an attractive new friend, Nokes is able to start a new life in a new country—and, most importantly, keep playing hockey. But the past has a nasty way of catching up to her, and soon Nokes has to make a terrible choice: keep running or face her past head-on . . . and maybe even come to terms with her Indigenous heritage.

Hey, I know Heated Rivalry is all the rage so let’s turn our attention to Van Brunt’s badass, and multi-layered protagonist, Nópika, “Nokes.”

The dual timeline allows readers to admire the trials Nokes went through to get to the present-day and how it informs her passion into hockey, a place where she can vent and fight back when she couldn’t in the foster system.

This book is horrific in the reaistic sense, and those who know the worst stories of foster care can expect to find it here. Nokes came from tragic circumstances, but the past timeline is important in formaing the present one where readers can see the urgency in how she tries to get accepted into the mostly-white hockey team and assimilate to the US school system. You can also udnerstand her fear in having to testify against her last set of foster parents, and how her neglect have given her a negative connotation with her heritage.

Van Brunt has crafted a distinctive voice who can be frustrating but real due to the abuse she suffered. I enjoyed the friendships she gained through her team and with Aiden, and the family drama as she learns the truth about her father and connecting with her First Nations aunt. With few indigenous voices sharing in the industry, this was a satisfying book full of sports action and heart.

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