Author: Carrie Mesrobian
Description (from Goodreads.com): “AT FIRST YOU DON'T SEE THE CONNECTION.
Sex has always come without consequences for seventeen-year-old Evan Carter. He has a strategy--knows the profile of The Girl Who Would Say Yes. In each new town, each new school, he can count on plenty of action before he and his father move again. Getting down is never a problem. Until he hooks up with the wrong girl and finds himself in the wrong place at very much the wrong time.
AND THEN YOU CAN'T SEE ANYTHING ELSE.
After an assault that leaves Evan bleeding and broken, his father takes him to the family cabin in rural Pearl Lake, Minnesota, so Evan's body can heal. But what about his mind?
HOW DO YOU GO ON, WHEN YOU CAN'T THINK OF ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER?
Nothing seems natural to Evan anymore. Nothing seems safe. The fear--and the guilt--are inescapable. He can't sort out how he feels about anyone, least of all himself. Evan's really never known another person well, and Pearl Lake is the kind of place where people know everything about each other--where there might be other reasons to talk to a girl. It's annoying as hell. It might also be Evan's best shot to untangle sex and violence.”
Review: Sex & Violence is the second of my Morris Award YA debut reads. In many ways, I liked Belle Epoque, the first one I read, better. But I think Sex & Violence is more likely to win, and overall a better book – even if it didn’t appeal to me personally quite as much. Mesrobian’s ability to bring to life the mind of a seventeen year old boy is remarkable, as is the setting of Pearl Lake. Pearl Lake feels so much like somewhere I could go, and someplace I want to go.
But the core of this book is really one teenage boy’s reaction to some pretty severe trauma. This is not a major spoiler, because the events I’m talking about happen really early in the book, but what Evan suffers is much more than an assault. He is brutalized (he has to have his spleen removed), and moreover, the “wrong girl” that he slept with is gang-raped by the boys who tore him to pieces while he lies semi-conscious and physically destroyed on the floor. So not only does he suffer his own horrific trauma, he blames himself – and his identity as “Dirtbag Evan” – for her trauma. So that’s the place Evan is coming from for most of this book, and I think that’s what makes it so compelling. Not only is Evan recovering from his own brutalization, but he’s dealing with a lot of guilt. He’s victim-blaming himself for someone else’s victimization, and he is so clearly a teenage boy while he does it.
Just because he’s been traumatized doesn’t mean Evan isn’t still Evan. He still ogles hot women and tries to categorize them in terms of who would have sex with him and who wouldn’t. He still has casual hook-ups in Pearl Lake, but there’s more fear and uncertainty involved. And while he’s doing all that, he’s also developing real friendships – the first real friendships he can remember, with boys and girls. And to me, that’s more powerful than what Evan discovers about himself in terms of romantic/sexual interests – it’s discovering that he can have friendships, can have roots, even in the midst of recovering from a horrific event that shook his entire sense of self.
And after all that, this was also a book that kept me turning pages, despite being a book that’s not really plot-driven at all. The long and the short of is that Carrie Mesrobian is clearly an immensely talented author, Sex & Violence is a great book, and I can’t wait to read what she writes next!
Note: I reviewed this book on my library’s teen blog recently, so much of what I have written was also discussed there.
Second Note: I am posting this WAY after the fact. As of the time the award winners were announced on January 27, I had read four out of five Morris nominees. Also, this book did not win.
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