Welcome to Litsy!

A terrifying mirror of our time; unspeakable daily violence and cruelty, saturated in deep, deep absurdity. The protag's casual acceptance of the violence she faces sharpens the text's silent condemnation and rhetorically asks the reader: "Don't you do the same?" The problem: the text spares the white characters' overt racism its analysis, an odd omission in a story that gives so much time to rightly condemning overt anti-Semitism.

"The dressing room is emptying out, cubicles abandoned harum-scarum with Pageant clutter..."

Do minor misuses of idioms annoy anyone else here? "Harum-scarum" means frighteningly aggressive. She seems to have meant something like "pell-mell" or "willy-nilly" or "helter skelter," which make it an easy mistake, and it doesn't affect the quality of the book much for me, but still. I'm so pretentious. :P

#RiotGrams, Day 11: Today's prompt is "underrated read." This amazing 2002 novel set in a dystopian America, where a teen girl is rebelling against participating in a government-mandated beauty pageant and the chaos of the world, is even more important and scary now. ??☠️ -Rioter @Liberty

#RiotGrams, Day 11: Today's prompt is "underrated read." This amazing 2002 novel set in a dystopian America, where a teen girl is rebelling against participating in a government-mandated beauty pageant and the chaos of the world, is even more important and scary now. ??☠️

"Finally she really looks at me, and everything inside my chest tumbles like puppies."

"It's business as usual in the [high school] infirmary: Nurse Fogg bellowing at the patients to keep it down, her chapped hands full of catheters, feeding tubes, and surgical clamps and saws." ?

Also the teachers at the protagonist's school use torture devices (including stretching racks, thumbscrews, cattle prods, clubs, public bondage devices, and something called a "microtwisto capacitor") on the students, and it's an odd "old-fashioned" thing worth mentioning when a teacher doesn't. This is all mentioned offhand. DEFINITELY not for the faint of heart.

Girls have to have gotten their menarche to be eligible for the beauty pageant, and the protagonist hasn't gotten hers yet so her mother puts leeches on her privates because she thinks that will bring it on. This book is DEFINITELY not for the faint of heart. D:

I was worried this might be The Core of the Sun all over again, but thankfully it doesn't take itself so seriously.

My current Open Library read. It opens with the protagonist's mother putting her through foreplay drills with a blowup doll, for the "Electric Polyrubber Man" event in the upcoming national beauty pageant. In this event, the preteen contestants demonstrate their sex skills on a dummy modeled after a cisgender man. Points for opening with the vomit factor.