Published in 2023
384 pages
Olivia Cole is an author and blogger from Louisville, Kentucky. She spent eight years in Chicago and two in South Florida before finding her way back home. She is the author of Panther in the Hive and its sequel, The Rooster’s Garden, as well as her latest young adult series, A Conspiracy of Stars and its sequel An Anatomy of Beasts. She is on the Creative Writing faculty at the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts and is the founder of the sci-fi art show for young Kentucky women, Kindred: Making Space in Space.
What is this book about?
This searing and intimate novel in verse follows a sixteen-year-old girl coping with sexual abuse as she grapples with how to reclaim her story, her anger, and her body in a world that seems determined to punish her for the sin of surviving.
I’m starting to realize
that a woman doesn’t get that mad
so mad that her hair turns to snakes
so mad that her rage turns blood to boulder
all on her own.
Sixteen-year-old Alicia Rivers has a reputation that precedes her. But there’s more to her story than the whispers that follow her throughout the hallways at school–whispers that splinter into a million different insults that really mean: a girl who has had sex. But what her classmates don’t know is that Alicia was sexually abused by a popular teacher, and that trauma has rewritten every cell in her body into someone she doesn’t recognize. To the world around her, she’s been cast, like the mythical Medusa, as not the victim but the monster of her own story: the slut who asked for it.
Alicia was abandoned by her best friend, quit the track team, and now spends her days in detention feeling isolated and invisible. When mysterious letters left in her locker hint at another victim, Alicia struggles to keep up the walls she’s built around her trauma. At the same time, her growing attraction to a new girl in school makes her question what those walls are really keeping out.
[This] fierce and brightly burning feminist roar…paints a devastating and haunting portrait of a vulnerable young woman discovering the power of her voice, her courage, and her rage. –Samira Ahmed, New York Times bestselling author of Internment and Hollow Fires
