"You come back here again, I'll be handin' you your balls in a cereal bowl."Atlanta Burns is not a chick to be messed with. When a boyfriend of her mother's came at her with ill intentions of the sexual sort, she shot him in the you-know-whats with a shotgun. When a fellow classmate comes to her with burns all over his body and needs her help with a White Supremacist group who's bullying him, she grabs her shotgun. When a girl comes to her wanting to know what happened to her dog, she heads into the nasty world of dog fighting.
She's a really tough teenager, but this is not a young adult book. Atlanta does drugs and other things parents don't want their kids doing. She also thinks she should just be given a B-plus in school due to the bad things that have happened her.
She's hard to like at times. And to be honest, this book was hard to like at times. It's an ugly story that takes place in an ugly town full of the ugliest people. I was really enjoying Atlanta and her kick-ass-iness for a while but then I realized I was meeting a LOT of ugly people in this town--the bullies, their parents, the dog fight folks, the "twins". And the things they do...to others, to dogs. I got tired of it.
I began say, "Seriously? Everyone in this town is pure evil?" Because the things they do...and there are so many of them. It seems everyone Atlanta meets is horrid and nasty and ready to shove chili peppers in places I won't mention, hang people, or pull out all of a dog's teeth. Or they're selling drugs. There's one decent adult, a teacher. That's it.
I will not be visiting any Podunk town in Pennsylvania, that's for sure.
The dogfighting is of course, a very ugly thing. Mr. Wendig holds nothing back. I had to skim these parts; they were too difficult to me. I began to worry that someone would come abduct my toy breed dogs and do this to them. That's how vivid the scenes are. This author knows how to write. The ugliness came through the pages and frightened me.
He's a good writer. Atlanta Burns could be a great heroine. She's got flaws--that makes her real, but the drug use and the grades thing put me off. I wouldn't call her a role model, that's for certain. This book was just too ugly--yea, I've used that word a lot--for me to really enjoy as much as I wanted. While I was totally engrossed in the first half, the last half I mostly skimmed. It got to be too much for me and I don't see myself reading the rest of the series.
I received this via Amazon Vine.
IT doesn't soumd as if I'd like this very much, but the cover art really pulls me in.
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