Review: Some Boys by Patty Blount

Some Boys
By: Patty Blount
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Published: Aug. 5, 2014
Genre: Young Adult
Rating:

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Some boys go too far. Some boys will break your heart. But one boy can make you whole.

When Grace meets Ian she’s afraid. Afraid he’ll reject her like the rest of the school, like her own family. After she accuses the town golden boy of rape, everyone turns against Grace. They call her a slut and a liar. But…Ian doesn’t. He’s funny and kind with secrets of his own.

But how do you trust the best friend of the boy who raped you? How do you believe in love?

Grace was raped while at a party. The rapist took a video of Grace while in the act as proof that she was “into it”, and then proceeded to post it online. The rapist is none other than the popular lacrosse star. The moment Grace calls foul, the entire school turns on her. She’s labeled a slut. Her teachers, the principal, her parents, her friends, all look at her as the girl who cried wolf.

I honestly thought this was going to be an empowering story with romance mixed in. It’s really not. Ian is not nice, funny, or kind to Grace. He’s the rapist’s close friend. He believes his friend is innocent. Just because he got in trouble and is now stuck cleaning the lockers with Grace during spring break doesn’t change anything. Sometimes he may forget that she’s the liar trying to drag his friend’s name through the mud and ruin his future, but he always comes back to himself and remembers who she truly is.

This book brought out a lot of anger from me. Grace was raped. End of story. However, no one believes her. Her father practically tells her she was asking for it with the way she dresses and the fact that she was drinking that night. When she’s attacked at school, the teachers look the other way, that is until Grace retaliates, then she’s sent to the principal’s office. Where there, she’s met with disdain and judgement. Her mother tells her to apologize to her ex best friend for sleeping with the guy that she liked. The sad thing is, those are the adults! The only one who stood up for Grace in the entire story was Ian’s father. He was the only sane, level-headed one who said “there are two sides to a story”, and even went as far as saying, you don’t always know someone unless you live with them.

I thought for sure this would be like a few other YA books revolving around rape but this one missed the mark for me. The only character that handled themselves was Grace and Ian’s father. Grace never backed down, always challenged everyone who judged her, and never felt like she’d done anything wrong. Let me just say that I was bullied in school, I seriously got attacked by three girls. My mom was ready to yank me from the school, my dad wanted to start knocking on doors, and my best friend was confronting the attackers, letting them know that I was not alone and that she had my back. I’ll be honest, she’s a scary girl, I am glad I have her in my corner. That is how those closest to you should act. Sure I had some friends who when my attackers came around to harass me, they’d look down at their shoes and remain silent, but not everyone. And that’s just for being attacked. Grace was RAPED! So the fact that all of the adults in this book were blaming Grace for what happen to her was outrageous.

Ian was borderline disgusting. The author tried to portray him as your average teen but he’s only a hair away from being just as bad as the rapist. Ian gets the details about that night and how Grace was way past simply being drunk, how her friend threw her beer on her which resulted in Grace taking off into the woods away from the party, and how even though she’d said “no” to Zac multiple times that night, he followed her into the woods planning on pulling the sympathetic friend card to get laid. And Ian thinks “I’d have done the same”. He even admits to doing the same thing with a girl the night he lost his virginity and at the end of the book apologizes to said girl. A girl who clearly needed to hear those words from him. WHAT?! And this is the love interest? Nope, no thank you.

I wish there was no romance in this story. The direction that this author took the story just didn’t work for me. The random happily ever after at the end was ridiculous. After all the horrible things that happens to her, by the people who should have protected her and had her back, to have them just pop back into her life once there’s concrete evidence that she was raped is just absurd. This could have been an amazing book. This could have told a great story, but it didn’t.

“Am I still Grace? Or am I what everybody says I am because I was drunk, because I believed him? I hoped Mom was right – that this would blow over.”