Reviews with content warning for Transphobia - Meddling Kids

The concept of this book really intrigued me. Scooby-Doo with Lovecraftian elements where the monsters might be (and likely are) real? Sign me up!

Except this book was so disappointing in execution. From reading other reviews, I'm so glad I read the audiobook version of this, because the stage direction inserts and made up words weren't as noticeable, so I'll give the narrator mad props for making those things really unnoticeable. I thought the book started off on the right track, but around the halfway point in this book is when I really started noticing all the negatives.

First off, for being set in the 90s (and flashback-esque scenes from the 70s), I personally did not feel much nostalgia around any certain time period. This book could have mostly been reset from the 90s and plopped into modern day (or really, any other time period) with very little change; this is 100% fine, except one of the selling points promised by this book is to be nostalgic for the 90s specifically (which I personally did not find it to be).

Secondly, the ending of this book. Everything that happened in the last ~20% of the book was chaotic, unbelievable, and hard to follow.

People were dying and being resurrected left and right, dogs were getting possessed by demons/angels/random protector beings(still unclear), rituals were being cast, people were living forever; it was all just too much going on and gives the feeling that the author had a bunch of ideas in the draft and didn't edit anything out.

Seriously, so much of the end of this book was just fight scene after fight scene, with little substantial buffer between, which I personally find really boring to read (or listen to) for a significant amount of time, especially when every fight scene is "gang fights creatures, then run, then fight new hoard of same creatures, then run.... repeat".

Lastly, this book has some dangerous discussion of mental health and some questionable representation of queer people. The mental health discussion in this book is unnuanced and the whole introduction scene to the asylum has some problematic descriptions of people with and without mental health issues. The main villain ended up using transness as a device to live forever and be evil, which was super unnecessary. The lesbian character in this book is also very much a caricature of a "typical lesbian" media portrayal.

Overall, I wish I had done more research into this book before picking it up instead of taking the promises given by the author/publisher at face value.

Content Warnings

gbrl's review

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adventurous dark funny mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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e_flah's review against another edition

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dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

Meddling Kids was a mixed experience -- the nostalgic Scooby Doo vibes were great and there were lots of truly bonkers shenanigans that felt true to the source material. On the other hand, the writing style was experimental in a way that I often found a bit frustrating. Meddling Kids is a book where the prose is basically a character itself as it demands to be acknowledged, rather than fading into the background to let the story take center stage. There's nothing wrong with this approach. I just personally didn't care for it and found it at odds with the tone of the plot.

Kerri and Andy were the reason I stuck with Meddling Kids. They were three-dimensional characters that reminded me of characters from the Scooby gang without feeling like cheap reproductions of them. Andy in particular won me over from the beginning. She's the fighter of the group who's also perfectly willing to be honest about when she's afraid.

If you really love Scooby Doo and like books that feel unlike anything else you've read, Meddling Kids may be the book for you.

Content Warnings

courtneyfalling's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Oh boy! This book! Okay. So I listened to the first ~half on audiobook while driving, and it made the slowed down, reflective road trip scenes really resonate. I'm fascinated with how this book reimagined the Scooby Doo gang and used that premise to explore deeper issues of trauma, memory, economic depression and town-level politics, and supernatural horror while still having genuine relationships and banter between the characters. (There's some really good one-liners and similes strewn in.) But even while listening... I felt like a lot of my final take on this book would depend on how it concluded its main mystery. Early on, we get somewhat intrusive comments about Andy's butch lesbian aesthetic, speculating that she may be a young trans man, and these comments sit very differently with this book's actual end than if they had set up a larger exploration of gender and identity for Andy (which I'll get to unpacking more). There's also one really nasty scene early on where (cw: sexual assault)

Carrie dreams that Andy is sexually assaulting her while they're sleeping in Carrie's apartment together, then wakes to realize it was a horrid nightmare. I was thinking of my one friend's argument that vivid sexual assault scenes are never necessary in books, and this really swayed me toward that side. It had no real bearing on the plot and it was awful and jarring

.

Then... Nate. Look. This book doesn't sugarcoat that psychiatric institutions are just incarceration, but rather than just letting that critique exist as part of the book, the author keeps going out of his way to have the characters make saneist and ableist jokes about Nate and the folks he knew in psychiatric institutions. It's like the critique becomes that these places are prisons because of the foul and disruptive strangeness of the people inside... rather than actually thinking about trauma and social factors like the narrative easily could've done!

Now for that frickin' ending.

Other reviewers have also noted this, but to center this book around a *gasp* evil trans woman reveal and use that to contrast the characters' own trauma arcs, especially to contrast Andy as a butch lesbian who's been speculatively labeled trans the entire book, is transphobic and shitty as hell. And even the lesbian representation is sketchy at best. Andy comes off as creepy, exploitative, and harassing toward Carrie, and it makes no sense for them to end up even loosely in the romantic relationship that's alluded to. Also, why did the last page pack in such a weird character reveal for Tim? Not only was it wildly out of left field, like a bad attempt to last minute deal with what the author realized was a slight plot hole, it was also, you guessed it, bad representation, this time of Indigenous folks and folklore in the Pacific Northwest! This book definitely buys into appropriating and misusing Indigenous folklore for its own benefit. Ugh. I wish this book didn’t have so many issues... the concept is genuinely cool then it just took every opportunity possible to fuck it up.

Content Warnings

fakepumpkins's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

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siob___'s review

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challenging dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

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antimony's review against another edition

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Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

2.5

i liked the cover and i liked the concept. the story was fun enough, the writing was back and forth (not bad but annoying. WHY did it keep switching to screenplay mode for like 2 lines?????????) and i did not like the end. (bc of the transphobia and also the whole thing with a native american man's spirit being in the dog??? kind of weird.) also there were a couple menwritingwomen moments which i was not a fan of

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