Hoi Today I’ll be doing a Louise O’Neill themed
double review video, in which I’ll be talking about Only Ever Yours and Asking For It.
Just so you know in this video I’ll be discussing things like sexual assault, anorexia and eating
disorders, because those are the topics that these books sort of center around.
This one has been out for about a year, this one isn’t out until September. So we’re
going to start with Only Ever Yours. I found out about Only Ever Yours through the Bookseller
YA prize, which it won. Some of my friends had read it and highly recommended
it so I figured I would give it a go. This is actually Rosianna’s old copy which
I will send over to the U.S. to her once I film this review. So this book is about a
group of sixteen year old girls in a dystopian world where women are basically created for
the very specific purpose of satisfying men. And they have to live in the same building
their whole lives, which is sort of a school. And there are these women called chastities
who look after them which in my head I sort of imagined them as nuns.
And all the characters in this book have the names of famous supermodels cause that’s
who they are modeled after. The main character is a girl called Freida and her best friend
is called Isabel. And they’ve been friends for forever but when the book sort of begins
their friendship slowly starts to unwind. And in this book you sort of follow all the
girls going to their daily classes and going through their daily lives just waiting for
the moment that they‘ll be selected as companions although they can also become a concubine
or a chastity, but the ultimate goal is to be a companion.
They have to be on this sort of very specific target weight so the only thing they worry
about is how thin they are and how pretty they look. They are ranked on a sort of daily
or weekly basis they have to sort of take a picture every morning and send it in and
then people will rank it depending on how pretty they look. And that rank is everything
to them and they’re also encouraged to constantly criticize each other and call out the things
that they don’t like about the person’s appearance. Reading this was really confronting
from the first page. In between there are these pages with these
giant quotes from the rules for proper female behavior by the original father. In the beginning
the man created the new women, the Eves. You think it’s really horrid when you start
off and as you keep reading it, it just gets worse and worse and worse. And then the boys
arrive to pick their companions and it just completely flips out of control. Only ever
yours reminded me of Pretties by Scott Westerfeld. Don’t know if you guys remember, it was
like one of those like first dystopian books I ever read and a lot of the mindset that
the girls and in pretties the boys get taught is fairly similar although not as extreme.
So the setup of the sort of world where everyone is waiting for a certain point where everything
will be perfect. What’s probably one of the most disturbing things about this book
is while you’re reading it it’s a dystopian setting and you think this is so far away
and ridiculous but all the little things in there are things that are happening every
single day and that are already in our society. It’s like beauty and lifestyle magazines
on steroids. The bullying that happens on social media, the little cliques in high school,
the way that girls are sometimes encouraged to look down on other girls for however they
choose to behave. All they want to do is just get out of the school and start their real
life. And so because of that there is such a toxic environment and as a reader you don’t
really have a good idea of what goes on outside of that world. So all these girls are named
after models and look like models and I wasn’t quite convinced by that I think it would have
been fine with them just having normal names. In the beginning it bothered me a little bit
but as the book went on there were more serious things to worry about, so I didn’t really
focus in on that too much. I did find it quite interesting that all their names start with
lower case letters, if to just indicate that they’re all sort of the same and that they
don’t have a lot of value. There is this really interesting thing that happens when
the boys get brought in and that is that they get to play 70 minutes in heaven.
So the boys get to select a girl and like one boy gets to spend 70 minutes in a cupboard
with a girl. And the whole thing is that if you’re a companion you don’t want to have
sex with them beforehand cause that’s not what companions do, but it is what concubines
do. And so again there is this whole thing that happens everywhere all around you where
it’s the girl trying to figure out how her decision on what she wants to do sexually
will influence her reputation and her future. I thought the ending was perfect, I don’t
want to give anything away about it but you know it’s my kind of ending. I could definitely
recommend this book to everyone but have a think about sort of the topic before you start
reading it and make sure that you’re comfortable with reading about it cause this book is pretty
intense. So next I have Asking For It, it is out in
September and it is set in a small Irish town. The main character is called Emma O'Donovan,
one night she goes to a party, she gets drunk, she takes some drugs, and the next morning
she wakes up on her front porch and she doesn’t remember what’s happened to her. And then
she discovers a Facebook page that is filled with pictures that document what happened
the night before and basically she was raped and sort of sexually assaulted in a variety
of ways and these pictures are just all over the place.
She’s piecing together the story of what happened though these pictures and this book
is sort of about what happens to her and everyone around her after this event. So you might
be familiar with the Steubenville case in the U.S. where something very very similar
happened. This book is a really really quick read but obviously it’s a very difficult
topic to read about. It deals with consent and with victim blaming. I think it’s very
interesting that Emma is not a very likeable character.
It also very much goes into the thing that people think that rape is something that happens
in a dark alley when you’re being attacked by a stranger. And it also discusses sort
of how people’s opinion changes if for example if the victim was under the influence of drugs
or alcohol or if they had sex the same night with someone else, or if they don’t respond
afterwards in the way that people expect them to respond. I felt like this was such an eye
opening but really painful read and I think this just should be mandatory reading in high
schools. It’s a really important book and I think it’ll make people think twice about
what they say and how they think about this topic and also how the justice system works
in a situation where the laws haven’t been properly updated to deal with things such
as social media as evidence. When you read asking for it the only thing that kept going
through my mind is this happens a lot on various scales and the way people respond to it is
shocking. And that’s why I think it’s such an important book and I kind of recommend
that you go and keep it up when it comes out on September 3rd.
So those are my two reviews of two very different but also very similar books by Louise O’Neill.
I hope you enjoyed these reviews, let me know in the comments, if you’ve read only ever
yours and what you think about it and if you’re interested in reading asking for it when it
comes out. I’ll put some information about the books in the description and I will talk
to you guys later. Doei!