A review by courtneyfalling
Meddling Kids, by Edgar Cantero

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)
SpoilerCarrie 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.
SpoilerOther 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.
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