Girl, Unframed (2020)

 

By: Deb Caletti

Genre: Young Adult, Drama, Suspense

As fifteen-year-old Sydney Riley prepares to spend the summer with her starlet mother, Lila, in San Francisco, she has an uneasy feeling about what the months ahead will hold. Chalking it up to nerves due to the strained mother/daughter relationship as well as the anticipation of meeting Lila’s new boyfriend, Sydney makes the trip anyway. What lies before her in the coming months will be life-changing, making Sydney realize just how important listening to one’s instincts can be.

This novel was a bit rough for me and I had to take several breaks while reading it due to how triggering it was in some areas. It is basically the novelized version of this meme:

I was thirteen; sixteen the first time it got really scary. See the Everyday Sexism Project for real life examples.

From the outset Sydney is objectified by several men including Jake (Lila’s boyfriend), a young actor in his twenties named Jay, and Shane, a man of about thirty working construction on the house next door. There are also several instances where she has uncomfortable interactions with strange men in public, such as a flasher, a douche bag at a gas station and a creep in the park. The book, while documenting the events of Sydney’s summer overall, is a commentary on the sexual objectification of young girls and women. It is not comfortable, but it is very necessary and done considerably well.

Sydney navigates through these experiences as she goes about her summer, the events she encounters causing a dramatic coming-of-age by the final chapter. She juggles the toxic relationship with her mother, turning sixteen, first love, coming to terms with society’s bullshit standards of purity versus sexuality, and witnessing a violent death all in the span of a couple months. The fact that she is handling life as well as she is in the last couple chapters is incredible, to be honest. This is an eye-opening trip for her that leaves her much wiser at the expense of her girlhood and innocence.

“Give me back my girlhood

It was mine first”

- “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” by Taylor Swift

I really liked the characterization in this novel even if some of the characters are complete garbage. I loved Sydney and found her very relatable. I remember being the age she is during this narrative and learning the same hard lessons she does – older men can be really gross, the magazines geared toward young women do more to tear us down than build us up, and other media we consume has not-so-great messages regarding those assigned female at birth. The reader follows her as she matures, not just in age, but in wisdom as she learns these lessons and finds the strength to deal with the events that unfold over the course of the summer. Sydney is a smart girl and handles things surprisingly well considering everything that happens throughout the story.

One lesson I’m thankful she doesn’t have to learn is how awful first love can turn out to be. She meets Nicco, a cute, intelligent and sweet seventeen-year-old boy, and they hit it off fairly quickly. Nicco is probably the healthiest young adult love interest I’ve read about in recent memory – hell, maybe the healthiest love interest in general that I’ve read recently. He is responsible and treats Sydney with respect, never pushing her for more than she is ready for and even cautioning her that they should take it slow because ‘sex changes everything.’ He truly adores her and they have a cute game they use to communicate unique to only them. At seventeen he is the only male figure in her life that treats her well, which is sad, but also maybe a commentary on how the younger generations of teenage boys and men are trying to be better than those before them. I love them as a couple and was rooting for them to last throughout the novel.

Sydney’s mother, Lila Shore, is a Hollywood actress and fairly narcissistic. She puts everything before her daughter, especially her career, status and any man she is presently involved with, while simultaneously accusing Syd of being selfish and difficult. The fact that Lila has shipped Syd off to a boarding school in Seattle where her only guardian is her grandmother, Edwina (consequently, the only family member who seems to actually care about Syd’s well-being), and only sees her on the holidays shows how little she cares for her daughter. If that isn’t enough, their frequently strained interactions throughout the summer and her actions in the final weeks of Sydney’s visit prove it. Caletti does a great job of portraying the complicated nature of this kind of toxic relationship between a parent and child – depicting Syd’s conflicting feelings toward her mother, the love, the anger, the pity, the urge to protect and the yearning for a normal relationship between them. Sydney’s navigation through this relationship and ultimate decision regarding it at the end of the story is relatable, understandable and heart breaking. Sydney is the daughter of a narcissistic diva and a womanizing absentee piece of crap. She deserved better than either of her parents could/would ever give her.

The last major character to examine is Jake, Lila’s current beaux and an abusive, lecherous dumpster of a person. 

Jake poses as a real estate mogul and art collector, but it is pretty clear early on that he is into shady dealings. From the minute he meets Sydney he’s touching her and making her uncomfortable. He pressures her for a hug when she’s never met him before, grabs her knee while they’re driving in his car, and makes comments like, “you look a lot older,” while appraising her in a way that makes her feel he’s staring at her breasts. (As someone who has had a large bust since age twelve and has heard this comment and experienced this look many times, he was DEFINITELY looking at her chest.)

Jake’s behavior toward Sydney only gets progressively creepier as the story moves forward. He alternates between trying to be the “cool adult” to gain her affections (taking her out driving at high speed in his Lamborghini, pretending to respect her opinion on art, siding with her in arguments with her mother) verging on grooming behavior, to trying to control her sexuality (getting upset about her dating Nicco, getting furious over her getting a hickey, calling her a slut and roughly manhandling her after catching her being intimate with Nicco). He claims he is looking out for her but he’s obviously got ulterior motives and it’s disgusting.

“Jake and me and sex – he didn’t care about me taking a big step, or getting STDs, or using contraception. He was guarding my virtue, like my body and spirit would spoil if I were touched. Like my body was his. To leer at and to control.” (pg. 309)

This man rants about how Sydney needs to respect herself and acts like Nicco is a danger to her yet disregards her actual safety around those far more dangerous. He tells her “you can’t let that stuff get to you” regarding Sydney being flashed by some pervert on the street, to which she rightfully thinks, “He didn’t have to let that stuff get to him, because it would never happen to him.” (pg. 208) Jake also takes Sydney along on one of his shady deals and leaves her alone in a vehicle with one of his creepy associates that has been clearly leering at her. This is immediately after he went off about the hickey Nicco gave her. 

“’Jesus,’ His voice was full of disgust. ‘Is that a fucking monkey bite? Have you and that kid been fooling around?’” (No… a ‘monkey bite’ is whatever that weird knee grab was you did to her in the car when you first met. That mark on her neck is a hickey, also known as a love bite, and is a perfectly normal thing. Stop being weird about it, you sound jealous of a teenage boy.)

Heaven forbid a teenage girl makes out with her teenage boyfriend! The horror!

I hate this character, but he’s well written and exemplifies the insidious attitudes patriarchal society has toward young women. The interactions between Jake and Sydney depict how confusing, twisted and dangerous these attitudes truly are. They make men feel like they are entitled to women and make women feel either like a silenced object to be looked at and preyed upon or like they have to conform in order to protect themselves and be accepted. The effect they have on women is heavily felt by Sydney:

“… I felt pissed. The world hadn’t changed and this made me so angry. It was the same as it had been for hundreds and hundreds of years, and this filled me with fury. I was angry at the paintings of women who were only bodies, who had faces with blank eyes and no mouths. I was angry at R. W. Wright, and his sexy, punished girls, and men who leered, and boys who grabbed, and the gaze, the gaze, the gaze. I was furious at the dick flashers and violent men, the frauds, the thieves. I was pissed at how beauty was some highly prized commodity – sold and sought and viciously envied, made to feel shameful. Pissed at the guardians of your virginity who were as much creepers and controllers as creepers and controllers.

“And I was furious at the mothers who encouraged you to be sexy but not have sex, and ladies’ man fathers, who flirted with waitresses and treated you like another unseen girl, because who were you supposed to be, then? The you in the middle of all of this. The hopeful you, the wanting you, the you with dreams, the unsteady you, the you that wants to feel everything but isn’t allowed to, who doesn’t know what to make of this mess, and how could you?

“… I made a decision, because our eyes do see, our mouths do speak, and we are not objects. I am not.

“The women of my family, going back generations – we’d been told lies about ourselves that we believed, and we’d even gone on to tell each other those same lies. I could maybe put an end to that particular plotline.” (pg. 353)

“This would be an ending where I listened to myself and used my voice, no matter what the world said back.” (pg. 349)

I found this book powerful and enthralling, if a bit triggering at times. The heroine is relatable and sympathetic. She becomes stronger despite all she has to deal with and learns how to stand up for herself despite her fears. Her romantic relationship is healthy and adorable. The plot even takes a few turns I wasn’t quite expecting. The social commentary regarding lecherous attitudes towards girls and young women is heavily woven throughout and will make many uncomfortable, but it is a discussion we need to be having.

8/10

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