Sharp Edges by Leah Mol is a gut wrenching story of fifteen year old Katie. We watch as she navigates friendships and relationships, all while needing to fit in and feel wanted.

I've never read a book like this before, and the only thing I can think to compare it to is the movie Trainspotting. This novel had me holding my breath, shaking my head and left me with an understanding of just how easy it could be to fall in with the wrong crowd.

Mol transports the reader so effectively back to a time of MSN messenger, chat rooms, flip phones, Myspace and early sexual relationships. Having been a teenage girl when the interest was becoming mainstream, I was instantly put back into the newness and excitement it held.

This book is being compared to My Dark Vanessa, and I can appreciate the similarities in tone; think stale cigarettes, old beer cans and the gritty blur that comes from a wildly unsupervised adolescence. The comparison is also in an adolescent thinking they're more mature than they are; thinking that they can handle events that they shouldn't even know about.

Although the narrator is a fifteen year old, the topics discussed are not ones I would want our daughter reading at that age. Please know it is a book for adults, with a focus on very dark subjects.

Overall, this is a novel that is spiraling in atmosphere, darkly disturbing and left me unsettled and questioning my own experiences.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the complimentary copy to read and review.

3.5 Stars

This book focuses on the difficulty of being a teenaged girl, especially if she has no support or supervision.

Katie, the narrator, is fifteen. Her father is absent and her mother is a hypochondriac who focuses on herself, so provides her daughter no support or supervision. When Katie’s friend Lil becomes pre-occupied with a boyfriend, Katie feels totally alone. She mentions more than once how she feels invisible and wants to be seen. Typically for her age, she is curious about sex. She ends up joining an online group where she sells her underwear and takes part in virtual sexual acts. Just as she explores the dark side of the internet, she increasingly turns to drug usage

The portrayal of a teenaged girl is very accurate. Katie’s concern about fitting in is typical of most girls her age. Because she has low self-esteem, she will do anything to be accepted. Unfortunately, she starts hanging around people who regularly use drugs, so her life soon spirals out of control. Naturally, she is also curious about sex. Though she has some sexual experiences in real life, they are largely unsatisfactory because the boys are the ones who are in charge of such encounters: “I know the sex is good because he always comes, and he always kisses me on the forehead before he pulls out. He’s never given me an orgasm – I don’t know if he’s tried.” On the online site, she feels she has control since she can express her desires and can set parameters for what is acceptable to her.

The reader will certainly feel sympathy for Katie; she talks about “wanting someone to hold [her] and keep [her] from falling apart.” She thinks she is alone in her feelings, not realizing that she’s “exactly the same as other people . . . [needing] the same things as everyone else.” Katie’s behaviour takes her down some dark paths which cannot but leave the reader feeling uncomfortable. I did find that some of her choices were extreme. Katie herself thinks she is crazy.

As expected in a coming-of-age novel, Katie does eventually experience growth. Unfortunately, her change comes quickly at the end. One conversation changes everything? There is a comment about everything not being okay immediately, but since the novel concludes a page later, the ending seems abrupt.

To be honest, I found the novel a tedious read. Katie goes from one party to another and from one online encounter to another. At each party she attended, I knew to expect more extreme drug usage; during each online exchange, I knew to expect more extreme sexual behaviour. The repetitive nature of events becomes tiresome.

I’m not certain about the target audience. Is the book intended for teenaged girls? Some might be able to relate to Katie, but I wonder whether it would actually positively influence troubled girls. As a former teacher who taught teenagers for 30 years, I found much of the depiction of Katie to be realistic; however, the book became monotonous for this adult reader.

Note: I received a digital galley of the book from the publisher via NetGalley.

I really enjoyed this book. It was right up my alley. It isn't for the faint of heart, but for readers who like gritty, dark stories featuring women who seem eerily (and sometimes inexplicably) familiar. Even as a grown woman, Sharp Edges planted seeds in my mind about how I relate to others and how I see others struggling with their identity and their need to acknowledge and please others. It dives deeply into some really tough topics especially when considering Katie's very young age. Sixteen feels so grown up in the moment, but as all of us who survived it know, there is so little we understand until later. For people who don't mind the uncomfortable reminders of how quickly and easily we can go astray (even if we never did in our own lives) this book comes highly recommended.

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada for a digital egalley in exchange for my honest review.

Content warning: self harm, eating disorders, drug abuse, BDSM, sexual assault, minors in sexual situations, and brief mentions of homophobia and racism

I enjoyed Sharp Edges more than it’s popular counterparts like Perks of Being a Wallflower, Go Ask Alice, or Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.

The narrator is kind of a lost girl, smart but her curiosity for sexual things and lack of parental supervision leads her down an interesting path selling used panties on the internet. She inevitably falls into a rabbit hole to darker things. Her story is told using a deadpan delivery and wistfulness beyond her years, which was my favourite part of the story.

From the beginning, it’s clear that Katie will do anything to feel like she is fitting in. Even if she does fit in, her anxiety combined with sidelong glances and whispers behind her back convince her she is an outlier. She turns to drugs because it is the only time she feels like part of the group.

We see Katie slip from a young, self conscious girl with some worrisome quirks to a drug addict with a very bleak future. It gets very dark.

I feel like this is a realistic depiction of how quickly drugs can overtake your life, but I can’t say I would recommend it to a teenager. I feel like this is for an adult audience. When I was a teen, I read Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson and it did not deter me from developing an eating disorder, even though the main character recovers in the end. I can’t say Wintergirls made things worse, but it did not help. I don’t think this novel is any more of a deterrent from drug abuse, and may make it worse for a struggling teen. I hope that a lot of care is taken when selling this novel to it’s target audiences.

Overall, I enjoyed the book but the hard topics it covers are not to be taken lightly.

I didn’t really get on with this book as I found it read like YA. I was initially attracted to it by the cover but, while it had a punchy narrative and was well written, it wasn’t as I expected and didn’t grab me. Thanks to Netgalley for the arc.

Sharp Edges is a book about the brutality and loneliness of being a teenage girl and the lengths it can take to erase the emptiness. As far as I can tell, it takes place in 2000s Toronto, which was where I grew up as a young child. I could relate a lot to Katie — I never did anything as extreme as she did, but I remember the desolation of being a teenager well. Mol’s writing style is very direct — and despite the protagonist being a teenager this book reads a lot like Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan and similar literary fiction.

Rating 5 stars out of fairness but the eARC sent to me was in PDF file, which I can only read on my phone or the NetGalley app by manually zooming into every sentence. I reached out to the publisher several times for a kindle-friendly copy, but never heard back. I will certainly pick this up after publication.