A review by scoobyramone
Be More Chill by Ned Vizzini
2.0
I really loved It’s Kind of a Funny Story back in high school and always wanted to check out this earlier novel from Ned Vizzini but never did. I finally stumbled upon it the other day so I decided to give it a read.
Right out of the gate the book is hampered because it’s so dated. It came out in 2004 and the notions of teenage “coolness” at the time are all things that any teenager from the past ten years would find extremely lame. So the entire foundation of the book doesn’t really work anymore.
But on top of that, it’s not actually a very good book. It’s extremely readable, often pretty funny, and uncommonly explicit for a YA novel (something I would have thought was refreshing and awesome when I was 15), but it’s pretty lousy.
It’s really misogynistic and filled with toxic masculinity, and for the whole book I thought the whole point was going to be that the protagonist was going to learn his lesson and ditch all those toxic notions but that never really happens? He doesn’t realize any of this behaviour is wrong, he just sort of decides not to do it because something else is more important. And the women characters in the book are so wildly underwritten, all walking cliches who are only there to service the plot.
And for a book about a dork who takes a pill to become cool, you’d think the whole moral of the story would be that he realizes he doesn’t need the pill to be cool and that coolness is a fallacy and that all that matters is you are yourself and all that crap, but none of that really happens either!
The book does not challenge the notions of high school popularity and toxic masculinity the way you’d hope it would, and logically the way it really should if it was a good book. Vizzini deals with these important themes passively and ends up kind of perpetuating these notions instead.
I’d give it 2.5 if I could because as disappointing and problematic as it was, it’s a fun concept for a YA book and at times it really works.
Right out of the gate the book is hampered because it’s so dated. It came out in 2004 and the notions of teenage “coolness” at the time are all things that any teenager from the past ten years would find extremely lame. So the entire foundation of the book doesn’t really work anymore.
But on top of that, it’s not actually a very good book. It’s extremely readable, often pretty funny, and uncommonly explicit for a YA novel (something I would have thought was refreshing and awesome when I was 15), but it’s pretty lousy.
It’s really misogynistic and filled with toxic masculinity, and for the whole book I thought the whole point was going to be that the protagonist was going to learn his lesson and ditch all those toxic notions but that never really happens? He doesn’t realize any of this behaviour is wrong, he just sort of decides not to do it because something else is more important. And the women characters in the book are so wildly underwritten, all walking cliches who are only there to service the plot.
And for a book about a dork who takes a pill to become cool, you’d think the whole moral of the story would be that he realizes he doesn’t need the pill to be cool and that coolness is a fallacy and that all that matters is you are yourself and all that crap, but none of that really happens either!
The book does not challenge the notions of high school popularity and toxic masculinity the way you’d hope it would, and logically the way it really should if it was a good book. Vizzini deals with these important themes passively and ends up kind of perpetuating these notions instead.
I’d give it 2.5 if I could because as disappointing and problematic as it was, it’s a fun concept for a YA book and at times it really works.