phideɭia's Reviews > All the Rage

── .✦2.5 stars

Oh, I'm feeling all the rage, alright.

Let’s begin with the writing, because it deserves its due credit. 🤚 Her prose slices where it needs to, tuned to the frequency of what we call teenage, let’s say even girlhood. It perfectly captures the angst, the choppiness, the sheer turbulence of it all by being jagged, charged, sharp in all the right places. The sharp bite of how shitty people can sometimes be, the bleakness of betrayal and self-hate, the small flickers of joy and comfort, the weirdly sacred hell of female friendship, the creeping depression, the gritty stuff, and of course, the anger - it's all there. And so yeah I get why this resonated with many. I don’t hate it. I really don’t. But it didn’t strike as deep as it could have.

"My heart is heavy with the weight of my body and my body is heavy with the weight of my heart."

This is a novel about a girl silenced by a town that would rather believe a boy than a girl’s truth. And thus, I kept wanting to root for the main character because yes, she’s been through so much, still is. She’s trapped in a brutal cycle of shame and silence, surrounded by voices telling her she’s better off gone being incessantly bullied, isolated, folding into herself. She shuts everyone out, never talks about what happened. Her mom and step-dad try to reach her, but Romy has already disappeared behind her walls. Still, she pushes forward... but also in circles. 😭🥺 And there’s something heartbreakingly honest in that. The refusal to tidy her pain or resolve it for the reader, that’s something I admire. But it didn’t always work in the book’s favor. Plus, girls should not be required to bleed publicly in order to be believed. And yet, this novel reminds us, that’s often the cost.

I was genuinely glad that Romy’s parents weren’t written off as inattentive and unhelpful (which is the bare minimum uh-huh). Her stepdad especially felt like a rare glimmer of warmth in an otherwise cold world. The mother-daughter dynamic had a few nuanced moments, but her mom’s strange detachment around the incident didn’t make much sense to me. Plus, there is something devastatingly ordinary about the violence this book depicts, you know? Not just the assault itself, but the quiet, everyday betrayals that follow: the girls who look away and avoid it. The adults who flinch and escape from the truth. Even those who care, the stepfather, the boy with the kind eyes, can’t fully reach her. Not because they don't want to. But because the damage has already rewritten the language.

“I pull my sheet up over my head and cover my body. Her body. I wish I didn’t have a body, sometimes.”

Primarily, this book doesn't shy away from the ugly and says the quiet part loud. It demands we look. And it should. The topic is heavy, necessary, and so often silenced. Girls, women, and all who’ve been told to keep quiet, this book tries to hold space for them. It wants to say: speak. Believe. Protect one another. And yes, that includes the guys reading, too.

BUT, also on the flip side, there’s an undercurrent of discomfort here, too. like, if it happened to a young woman, I've a feeling that this might unintentionally dissuade her from reporting it. I may be wrong though 🙋🏻‍♀️ but this is a possibility. so please, please check the TW beforehand.

"You know all the ways you can kill a girl?
God, there are so many."

And so, let's see to what problems this had, don't we?
Because this book definitely tries to hold that weight, but it doesn’t always succeed.

It’s hard to ignore how the book’s structure works against itself. I was 85% in, and yet it was all so confusing and broken up and random and we kept dancing around the plot and timelines (told in four segments, Now, Two Weeks Earlier, Now, and After - it's not clear at all even though I'm sure it was deliberate) but I stupidly kept waiting and waiting for it to get better. Basically, there was bullying, then getting wrecked at a party, girl going missing and kept looping around this, but personally, I find it's completely fine if it's just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences and it really, really doesn't have to have one thing follow meaningfully from another. however, here the tension fizzles out instead of climbs. the big reveals are just thrown together that you expect to come together at the end and maybe pack some punch, and they just don't. and gosh, is it too much to ask? this is a mystery, for god's sake. plus, I had an inkling of who and what actually happened right from ~25% 🙄 this was not satisfying, it’s just... undercooked. 🤷🏻‍♀️

And then there’s Romy herself. For all her pain and anger, we never get a fully fleshed-out sense of who she is beyond it. Though it may have been intentional, there was also so much internal repetition, yet so little forward movement. I wanted to know her, to grip the edge of her fury. But her character feels closed off not just to the world, but to the reader. It made connection hard. I was frustrated, even. So, be prepared for some headaches. (on a side note: I've completely mastered the art of painting "perfect" red nail-polish and plastering red lipstick, thanks to her. those descriptions were... a bit annoying tbh?)

Plus, she was so neglectful to her own family and even Leon, although she knows that they're on her side and support her completely, no less, BUT also I get it's really, really hard. and also, the author should have shown more of the logic behind why people would all join together to protect a boy over a girl. (on a side-note: if that's how it is in irl, I— don't even know what to say 😨). Romy is believed to be lying about the assault, yet we know she isn’t. She doesn't explain, not even towards the end. She disappears into silence, and the story lets her stay there. No one thinks twice about believing her, like what the hell?? But girl. What even. It all becomes such a horrendous mess, and she barely fights it. And that’s not on her, that’s on how the story is told.

And, the side characters barely have a pulse. They're all set to the same default: cruel, mean, pointless or oblivious where empathy just goes to die... it's hopeless. and I know, high school is awful, sure. but people, even cruel ones, are more than a single trait... right?

Also, sure, we had Leon (the romantic side-interest) who was completely unnecessary to the story, albeit he provided some resemblance of sanity to our girl (and us). I don't think it added to the story at all. It actually took away from it. His side of family was... comforting and cute, but nothing beyond that. And Penny. Oh, Penny. I wish their friendship had been explored more directly, instead of left to memory and regret.

“Penny Young is the most perfect girl you know and those kinds of girls, they’re put on this earth to break you. Peel back her skin and you can see her poison. Peel back mine, you can still see traces of where her poison’s been.”

And where is Kellan? Like actually, where???? He’s the ghost this whole thing orbits around and we never really see him. No voice, no face, nothing. 😭 For a figure so central, his absence feels like a missing limb.

Honestly, the ending was underwhelming. No resolution. None. And yeah, maybe I shouldn’t have expected it, but I did. So where does that leave us? Yes, angry because of what this book could've been.