Ashleigh Paige

I'm only about halfway through and this just about made me cry with how people are treating Ani, what's happening to her, and how she's feeling.

That might be because it struck me that Ani could be any girl. One of my roommates went to a party recently where there was a lot of drinking going on, quite a bit of it underage. With just minor tweaks to the circumstances, she could have been Ani and people would try to treat her the same way.

THIS is how to write a book about rape and how to subvert ideas about "good" rape victims (the ones who get attacked out of nowhere), how rape happens, what rape is, and the way society treats people who are deemed "bad" rape victims because they were drinking at a party or were drugged or can't remember what happened (and sometimes, it might be all the above). No matter the circumstances, rape is rape. Some people can try to say the circumstances are too unclear and try to say it didn't happen, but the truth stands and they've simply exposed themselves as horrible people.