Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu
Hachette, 2017. ISBN 9781444940633
(Age: 13+) Highly recommended. What a wonderful book for young women
- one that validates being a woman, takes joy in women's friendships
and speaks strongly of a woman's capacity to thrive in the modern
world.
Jennifer Mathieu has written a story that outlines how girls are
treated as second class to boys in a modern west coast United States
high school. This is a story about bravery in the face of
mistreatment, of girls facing daily damning condemnation and
feelings of isolation. Here we have a young woman in high school who
is exasperated by the constant denigration the girls receive from
the boys, and sick of the licence their society allows boys to
consider themselves superior to girls. This licence, supported by
the school, that will do nothing to redress the hierarchical
structure of boys as heroic, high-achieving sport stars, seems to
give them the right to verbally abuse girls, to demand favours from
girls and to make offensive and derogatory sexual innuendos in
class, in the schoolyard and in the outside world.
Yet this is modern America and we would think that this couldn't
happen. But it does, Poehler clearly tells us, and Vivian is
absolutely fed up with the constant abuse, verbal slights, and
denigration of girls. So she makes a 'moxie', paper slips of words
and images spread throughout the school, and the outcome is
explosive. We are so drawn in to her anger that we can't help but
hope that she can sustain the rage and build it in the other girls,
and stay safe. Good men are in evidence, and decent boys, so this is
not a man-hating novel.
What a wonderful achievement for Mathieu, in composing a
well-written modern novel that faces reality, that depicts
adolescence as school teachers know what it is like, and fearlessly
tackles that which is not only unrecognised, but ignored. Highly
recommended for high school students of all year levels, and
particularly of interest in its informative capacity for parents and
school teachers. Brilliant!
Liz Bondar