Book Review: XVI by Julia Karr

Subtitle: Lazy Writing and Victim Blaming, Together at Last!

Normally I don’t post negative book reviews. It’s bad karma for a writer. But while I can let bad writing go, when something gets my feminist rage up, all bets are off–including those made on the resiliency of my sense of self-preservation.

XVI does a huge disservice to a potentially interesting and thought-provoking premise. One of the main themes is the hyper-sexualization of young girls, and the threat of being tattooed with ‘XVI’ – the sign that our protagonist Nina is sixteen and legal for anyone to have sex with, her consent be damned – looms throughout the book. Unfortunately this and other threats to Nina’s safety are met with responses like (and I’m paraphrasing here): ‘It’s OK, it’s my fault he kidnapped me and beat me, I should have been more careful.’ ‘I, your angry boyfriend, will protect you Nina!’ ‘My dad will be home soon, he’ll know how to fix everything.’ ‘Damn my libido! If I hadn’t wanted to be alone with you so bad, hot boyfriend, my sister never would have been kidnapped! I hate these hormones, I’m such a silly girl!’ There’s also a subplot where our hero Nina wonders why her mom stays with her abusive boyfriend. Yes Nina, let’s examine your mother’s failings, and not those of the man who’s beating her. An additional subplot has Nina finding out what’s really going on in the mysterious ‘FeLS’ program. Does she feel any motivation to stop it, to let people know this awful truth, to punish those perpetrating it when she finds out? No. She thinks about how to protect herself, and her friend, from being chosen to enter it.

Where is the blame for the rapists, the batterers, and all the rest who inflict the physical and emotional damage on our female protagonist and her friends? Where is ANY discussion of how Media and society corrupt men’s worldview, and how to correct men’s thoughts and men’s actions? Because there’s a hell of a lot about how Media/society ruins women. This book continues the toxic blame game and victimization of women because of the actions of men. I’d hoped XVI would have something positive to say about how society sexualizes women and girls, but it’s just the same old BS: Don’t dress like that, don’t go out alone, don’t be stupid, because if anything happens it’ll be your fault.

Overall Nina is just too passive a heroine to convey any sort of useful message, let alone carry the book. In the last 50 pages a chapter starts out with her saying to herself (again, paraphrasing), ‘hmm, it’s been three weeks since I last talked to that mysterious person about this vitally important plot point, and my sixteenth birthday and the impending doom that comes with it is getting close.. maybe I should do something!’ Gee, Nina, ya think? If your protagonist is just getting agency in the last 50 pages of a 300 page novel, you have some serious momentum issues.

What little ‘suspense’ the book does have is completely arbitrary, and the forced delays are so blatant even our passive protagonist should point them out. Her mom gives her a secret book that she has to use in an important mission – but she doesn’t even look at the book for weeks, because she’s ‘busy,’ with highschool and drawing things at the museum. Nina meets countless adults who have the answers she’s supposedly desperately searching for, but does she pump them for information or protest when, after five minutes, they say ‘It’s time for you to go!’ for no apparent reason? Nope. She just goes along with it, and though we as readers avoid the infodump of all the secrets that countless characters could give us, we also languish in this artificial delay of progress and resolution. Does it make sense for the author to do this? Sure! She’s got 300 pages to fill. Does it make sense for any of her characters to act the way they do to stretch things out to 300 pages? Not so much.

Lastly, the icing on the sad, ignorant cake: There is a family in the book with some Japanese ancestry. Occasional mention is made of the mom going to Tokyo to see her brother and ancestors going back to the Heian period. The mom is named Jade. The daughter is named Wei. (If it was just the brother in Tokyo thing I’d let it go, because yes, ethnic Chinese live in Japan. But 794 to 1185 in Japan is a bit of a reach if the author really meant to write a Chinese family.) The mom practices Secret Eastern Healing Arts ™. The daughter practices martial arts. Way to go, culturally inappropriate naming + stereotypes. My reading experience wouldn’t have been complete without you.

SPOILER ALERT: Okay, the real icing to the worst cake ever comes in the last 10 pages. Nina’s best friend is raped and killed by the same man who abused and murdered Nina’s mother. Nina doesn’t dwell much on how much she hates this man, how he took her mother and BFF away from her, how sick a mind he must have had to perpetrate this level of abuse on two of the people Nina loved most in her life. Rather, Nina’s thoughts, upon seeing her friend’s body at the funeral: “For all her sex-teen ways, she’d been so naive and trusting.”

That’s right ladies, even in horrific dystopias where the world is out to get you, it’s still all your fault. END SPOILER ALERT.

If I may close without sarcasm, and state my feminist rage clearly: This is a horrible book. I won’t tell you not to read it, because that’s up to you. But don’t expect anything resembling empowerment or an interesting examination of society’s treatment of women. Don’t expect lessons you want to share with women you care about, who hear this damaging victim-blaming all the time. And for those who can put a book’s philosophy aside, don’t expect anything but mediocre writing and inexplicably thumb-twiddling characters whose actions only make sense if they’re aware they’re trying to fill up a book.

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