The List - Siobhan Vivian
Book Synopsis: An intense look at the rules of high school attraction - and the price that's paid for them.
It happens every year. A list is posted, and one girl from each grade is chosen as the prettiest, and another is chosen as the ugliest. Nobody knows who makes the list. It almost doesn't matter. The damage is done the minute it goes up.
This is the story of eight girls, freshman to senior, "pretty" and "ugly." And it's also the story of how we see ourselves, and how other people see us, and the tangled connection of the two.
As if high school wasn't hard enough, add in "the list" and suddenly your whole social standing changes. The list takes two girls from each grade and gives each a different title, one would be known as the prettiest girl in the class, and the other would be the ugliest. For these eight girls, their lives changed the second the list was put up.
I've never considered myself as being pretty or ugly, I'm somewhere in between - a happy medium. If this list was a real thing in high school, I could only imagine how much of an effect it would have on the people who made the list. We've all heard of the movie Mean Girls, in my middle school, someone actually made a burn book, which was later confiscated, destroyed, and left two girls in a whole lot of trouble.
This was probably my favorite book of Siobhan Vivian's. I liked that she divided each chapter into different perspectives, one for each of the eight girls on the list. You could tell that she put a lot of thought into the whole concept and plot of the novel. Siobhan Vivian gave each girl a different voice and it was nice to read a book about self-esteem and self-worth. She wrote about the tough issues that girls face: relationships, eating disorders, friendships, and finding where you belong.
What other people say about us, shouldn't define who we are.
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt.
Read this book! I believe it can teach an important lesson to everyone about how the words we use can impact those around us. The words that come out of our mouths should build others up, not tear them down.
Rating: ★★★★★