Title: Shine by Lauren Myracle
Genre: Contemporary YA Fiction; "Mystery"
Pro-Feminist Content: ★★★
Rage-Induction: >:( >:( >:( >:(
I apologize for the long hiatus. I've just found it hard to find any YA books worth reading. For that matter, I haven't found any books of any genre that were worth reading beyond the first chapter. I'm at a point in my life where I am too busy to stick with something that doesn't interest me, mainly because I don't have a commute anymore so there's no time to read.
I picked up Lauren Myracle's Shine after two significant events in my outside life. The first was getting jury duty on the day that Rutgers student Dharun Ravi was sentenced to thirty days in prison, and being witness to the ensuing brouhaha in both the Indian-American community as well as the gay community in Middlesex County. Full disclosure: I both went to Ravi's high school and am Indian (though I was older than him and did not know him), and I was an active member of my high school's gay-straight alliance group. It was while thinking about the gay bullying incidents that I decided to pick up this book.
The second was after reading Gwenyth Paltrow's dumbass Tweet about black people. The incident--and the reactions to it--were so mind-boggling that I knew that when confronted with that much stupidity, I'd have to take a stand. So that's why I decided to actually blog about the book.
