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A review by justabean_reads
Skid Dogs by Emelia Symington-Fedy
4.0
Non fiction about a young woman from the BC Interior, which alternates between memories of her middle-high school years, and an adult return to the town to be with her ill mother. The return is in part sparked by the murder of a teenager on the railroad tracks, a place Symington-Fedy and her friends used as their primary hang out.
The central conversation of book is a reaction to the victim-blaming media question about the murdered girl: Why was she on the tracks in the first place? Which is a jumping off point for discussing why teen girls do a lot of things that are a really bad idea, and how society treats them for those choices. Also known as: being a teenager with anxiety in the 1990s wasn't a whole lot of fun.
Symington-Fedy spends most of her youth trying to figure out the balance to hit where if you want to not be constantly sexually assaulted by the male population in general, you need a boyfriend, but if you want to get and keep a boyfriend you have to have sex with him, but if you have sex too soon you're a slut and no one wants to be your boyfriend, and also all the adults treat you like shit. (This is even less fun for her clearly lesbian best friend, who because of the combined universal homophobia and general homoeroticism between female friends no one understands is gay.) Also, any sexual violence up to and including rape is always the victim's fault. It's painfully-well drawn.
The modern sections are somewhat weaker, since there weren't many developments with the murder investigation for most of it, and the author only talked a bit to contemporary teens. Every other section being about dating some guy, trying to look after her mother, and her theatre career didn't feel as connected as it might have been, and I kind of wish it'd been bookend sections rather than woven though. The 1990s sections shone in comparison.
Because of her acute anxiety, a lot of the school stress was heightened for Symington-Fedy, to the point where her choices were sometimes incomprehensible to her peers (not like there sure wasn't any kind of mental health care in schools, either!), but it still made me want to write my mother a thank you letter for homeschooling us.
The central conversation of book is a reaction to the victim-blaming media question about the murdered girl: Why was she on the tracks in the first place? Which is a jumping off point for discussing why teen girls do a lot of things that are a really bad idea, and how society treats them for those choices. Also known as: being a teenager with anxiety in the 1990s wasn't a whole lot of fun.
Symington-Fedy spends most of her youth trying to figure out the balance to hit where if you want to not be constantly sexually assaulted by the male population in general, you need a boyfriend, but if you want to get and keep a boyfriend you have to have sex with him, but if you have sex too soon you're a slut and no one wants to be your boyfriend, and also all the adults treat you like shit. (This is even less fun for her clearly lesbian best friend, who because of the combined universal homophobia and general homoeroticism between female friends no one understands is gay.) Also, any sexual violence up to and including rape is always the victim's fault. It's painfully-well drawn.
The modern sections are somewhat weaker, since there weren't many developments with the murder investigation for most of it, and the author only talked a bit to contemporary teens. Every other section being about dating some guy, trying to look after her mother, and her theatre career didn't feel as connected as it might have been, and I kind of wish it'd been bookend sections rather than woven though. The 1990s sections shone in comparison.
Because of her acute anxiety, a lot of the school stress was heightened for Symington-Fedy, to the point where her choices were sometimes incomprehensible to her peers (not like there sure wasn't any kind of mental health care in schools, either!), but it still made me want to write my mother a thank you letter for homeschooling us.