The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis
Rape culture is absolutely real: present and all around us. The best parts of this book are the ones that detail its subtle aspects -- stray comments, graffiti on walls, the underlying attitudes. Micro-aggressions. The female characters' relationships (both positive and negative) in the midst of this background radiation is where the book is the most powerful.Where it lost me was in being so over the top. That it was angry, I liked; I loved Alex's rage over her sister's rape and murder. But McGinnis takes the level of sexual violence in this novel to a level that feels almost cartoonish. This is a small town with a serious rapist/murderer, a sexual predator and child pornographer, and a roving gang of junkie rapists. I think McGinnis actually hurts her argument by having her villains be so plentiful and extreme. Real life is still full of evil people who get away with horrible things, but it's not Mad Max. It would be a shame for young readers to come away from this book thinking that rape culture only really manifests in these most severe terms.
The romance never fully worked for me, and the end felt like a cheap ploy. I've seen reviewers comparing Alex to Dexter, but I would like to note that Dexter got away with it. It's disappointing to me to see the female counterpart getting narrative punishment for what the male escapes yet again. There was a lot that I enjoyed about McGinnis' writing and characterization, but this novel got weaker and weaker as it went along, and the sputtering squelch of an ending does not live up to the sharp intensity of the start.
