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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Borrowed from Pig.
Rating: 3/5
Pages: 360
Started: 30 October 2022
Finished: 2 November 2022
Summary:
Che and his family haven't been back home to Australia for years. With his parents' job of starting and selling companies around the world, putting down roots hasn't been in the cards for him--he's more focused on keeping his sister Rosa from killing anyone. She's a psychopath, Che is certain, just like her grandfather and her uncle. She steals and manipulates and hurts because she's curious, because she thinks it's funny. But when Che's family relocates to New York City, he quickly becomes tentatively hopeful. He's still afraid of what Rosa might do, but he liked his boxing gym, he's made friends, and for once, he wants to stay more than he wants to return to Australia. But psychopaths are clever, unpredictable. Unstable. And it's dangerous for Che to drop his guard.
Thoughts:
The concepts in this book were better than the execution of the book as a whole. I liked the psychopath sister premise, and the weirdness of Che's family. The idea that their unusual parenting tactics hid their even more unusual personality flaws was clever. And the story was relatively engaging; I read it in just a few sittings. Though the twist wasn't the really cool one I was hoping for (Che actually being more evil than his sister) what did happen was moderately surprising and fun. The ending was ridiculously anticlimactic--there was zero closure to any of the conflicts--though it could have been worse.
But something about the book felt off to me. I'm not sure if it's the fact that it was written in 2016, and so was trying to be modern but just missed the mark on a few things, or if the author originally wrote a bunch of problematic things and then had them fixed by other people, but the tone surrounding representation in the book made me feel icky. Where I was so surprised and impressed by Sierra Simone's takes on religion and politics, I was disappointed by Larbalestier, especially in terms of gender identity. There was a non-binary character in the book, but they were never referred to with they/them pronouns, only by "He? She?" and "he/she" while the protagonist was still trying to figure out their gender identity, and then just by their name after that. And apparently this was after the author had gotten a sensetivity reading from a non-binary person. I had higher expectations for a modern book.
I don't regret reading this book. It was engaging and interesting, and gave me some food for thought about psychopathy. But I certainly won't be looking for more books by Larbalestier in the future.