Book Review: Moxie By: Anonymous

Moxie

By: Jennifer Mathieu

This book centers around "an unlikely teenager, Vivian Carter who starts a feminist revolution at a small-town Texas high school in this novel from Jennifer Mathieu"

Vivian Carter is the book's protagonist who battles with her self identity as someone who is struggling to make her way through high school under the radar while finding her own voice in high school. This aims to be rather difficult due to the constant harassing, belittling, sexist behavior that the high school girls endure by the jocks in the small town high school. 

Due to this constant behavior by the boys which is never addressed by the school administration "because the school and small town feed into the notion that the football team can do no wrong". 

Vivian becomes "fed up with sexist dress codes, hallway harassment, and gross comments from guys during class. But most of all, Viv Carter is fed up with always following the rules." 

Through her journey of self discovery Vivian starts getting to know more about her mom who also grew up in the same small town and high school. "Viv's mom was a tough-as-nails, punk rock Riot Grrrl in the '90s, and now Viv takes a page from her mother's past and creates a feminist zine that she distributes anonymously to her classmates. She's just blowing off steam, but other girls respond. As Viv forges friendships with other young women across the divides of cliques and popularity rankings, she realizes that what she has  started is nothing short of a girl revolution" (Moxie, MacMillan)

I really wanted to like this book. It had all the makings of a book that I felt an instantaneous connection with. I identified with the protagonist, Viv but the predictability of the events, outcome, and overtaking the school administration felt too fictionalized and just overplayed.

The "Girl Power" anthem was lost in the book which had a "cheesy" feel as well as losing the message of what a revolution, being "woke" feels like. I felt that this book generated a mass appeal due to the ability to touch on feminism without tearing down an oppressive system or noting how oppressive it can be to grow up as a teenage girl. I feel every now and then you would see subject matter that would interest me, lets delve more into rape culture in high school, but then it would stop and glaze over the subject. This annoyed me because if we are going to have a book that explores what it is like to grow up as a feminist in Gen Z we need to explore it more in depth, the good, the bad, the in between. So I guess if you are looking for a general read that is more like a starter guide to what feminism could look like in high school this would be the book.

2 out of 5 stars