Incredibly refreshing and timely. Wonderfully diverse representation of both sexuality and race. Bold reflection of the internalized trauma that goes along with sexual assault and honest outward response, proving that coping can take many forms. Five stars!

I love a good book in verse. Dear Medusa by Olivia A. Cole is excellent. This is the type of book that lends itself to discussion and really makes you think. Told from the point of view of Alicia, this book follows Alicia as she receives mysterious notes in her locker and tries to cope with some terrible things that have happened to her. Part of her coping is by sleeping with strange boys and men. However, Alicia is bisexual. Anyways, she gets sent to in school suspension where she makes a new friend. She also ends up in this group of girls who discuss with a researcher the things they are concerned about and explore their place in patriarchal society. The notes, by the way, are from a mysterious person who has also been through the same thing as Alicia - preyed upon and groomed by a popular teacher. The notes inquire if Alicia will come forward too - kind of a MeToo sort of thing.

Really I feel like I am failing to adequately describe the excellence of Olivia A. Cole's Dear Medusa. I found this book so engaging. Alicia has been dealt a tough hand. Her brother has terrible incel friends. Alicia's parents divorced. She is bullied at school and known as the school slut. So, I really was rooting for her to come out on top. We also see that she's just not dealing with everything in her life well. I liked that this book also touched on intersectionality and Alicia makes mistakes, yes, but she learns from them and does better. The verse is well done and makes sense in the context of the plot and story. I could not recommend this book highly enough. Get your hands on it if you want something that will make you think.

This book was so beautifully written and it utterly destroyed me. As someone who went thru SA the writer accurately described the emotions and how your brain processes the trauma and the fear and how cruel the world really is and auto blame the victim. This book defn needs to be read and deserves all the praise

Big thanks for the opportunity to read and review this title.

I had such high hopes for this, after reading the blurb and jumping into something semi-new for me. Sadly, it just wasn’t for me. The writing style didn’t flow, and the characters were not ones I could connect to. I do imagine many will love this however… the target audience will find it brilliant. I think I’m just too oldy-moldy and set in my tried and true styles.

Again, many thanks.

Absolutely loved this coming of age story! I loved the journey that Alicia's character took in finding herself, her tribe, and her voice. This book touched on some difficult topics with grace and in a way that seems fitting to the age and maturity level of the students. While I am glad that Alicia found acceptance and friendship in her relationship with Deja, I felt that Deja's character harped a little too much on the "Black' girl struggle topics. I would have preferred if it had come up once or twice but the excessiveness of it felt unnatural and forced. I was happy to see an lgbtq+ characters positively represented and given the opportunity to explore those relationships in the purity found in Alicia's relationship with Geneva. Very pleased with this read. So much so that I was bummed when and how it ended. I wanted more but we understood why it ended that way. I think I wanted to see more of Alicia's beautiful transformation and reclaiming of her identity.

An arresting story with a protagonist you will burn the world down for, not that she needs any help. Alicia’s horrific sexual trauma has caused her to become a pariah amongst her high school peers. Misunderstood and targeted, Alicia walks through life trying to distance herself from the abuse by engaging in a slew of impulsive and dangerous sexual encounters, all in the name of proving to herself that it truly is ALL men. Add that to being faced with her abuser and his classroom entrance every damn day, Alicia is becoming a shadow of herself. It is not until an opportunity to speak alongside other struggling girls that Alicia begins to understand she is fortunately, and unfortunately, not alone.

In addition to loving her prose and character building, Cole excelled at protecting this story as Alicia’s and not her abuser’s fall from grace. Too often stories of abuse center on the perpetrator, covering their assaults and ultimately when they are caught like that is the whole story. Case shut. Everyone go home. Thanks for coming. What Cole is able to do and give all the Alicias in the world is a book centered on their story of hurt, relearning how to trust, and the first steps of healing.

Shout out to Deja, Alcia’s brother and mother, the track team, and Geneva for not giving up on Alicia and letting her go through the motions - May us all be whoever we need to be for the Alicia’s in our life.

Thank you to NetGalley, Olivia A. Cole, Random House Children's, and Labyrinth Road for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Usually I'm a fan of stories told in prose, but this one I just couldn't really enjoy as much as I hoped. Sometimes the prose was really good and sometimes it was a miss. The subject matter though is heavy and timely.

I think this book & others like it is super important - however this book is in verse. While that may work for most people, I always come out feeling a little bit disjointed and having had a hard time following the storyline.

This book was beautiful. Dear Medusa is one that is going to stick with me for a long time.

Dear Medusa is written in verse and it captivated me from the beginning. This is about a 16 year old girl who is sexually assaulted by one of her teachers, and then ends up losing her friends, her family, and herself. It's also a story about finding your community, your strength and discovering your sexuality.

This was a heavy YA book - trigger warnings for rape, sexual assault, grooming, slut shaming, homophobia, and racism. Many parts of this book made me uncomfortable. I was also so invested in the story that I had to keep going and I think this is an important one for people to read. It feels like it was a personal story revolving around the 'me too' movement.

Thank you to @netgalley for the e-arc of this book for my honest review.

This novel in verse was both sensitive in terms of subject matter and also liberating at times as well. We follow a sixteen year old girl named Alicia who is coming to terms with the falling out of a dear friendship and overcoming her own personal trauma of sexual assault at the hands of a popular teacher. A lot of this was like poetry in terms of prose. We watch as Alicia grapples with being known as "the girl that gets around" in her high school. She's a strong character and beats to her own drum, which I liked. Some parts fell flat for me as it tended to feel like the story wasn't really moving forward and just in a runaround cycle of thoughts and day to day diary-like entries.

This was a beautiful look at how one girl copes with her sexual abuse. Alicia doesn’t have the best reputation, but that reputation is made without anyone understanding her story and where she came from. They don’t know that she’s not sleeping around, but has been abused a figure of authority.

I really loved so many messages that were put into this book. It was a beautiful look at reclaiming your body, story, and the narrative. Highly recommend if these are topics that you can handle.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for my early e-arc copy.

Dear Medusa is a novel about a high school girl, Alicia, who is sexually abused by a popular teacher, and who remains at the same school after the abuse occurs - a highly traumatic situation. Following the abuse, rumors begin to circulate that Alicia is easy, and her social standing plummets. As she attempts to deal with the abuse and the bullying and derision that follows it, Alicia begins to change, becoming isolated and withdrawn, pulling away from the activities that she once enjoyed, such as track, avoiding her schoolwork and some of her classes, particularly Art, which requires her to walk past the classroom of the teacher who abused her. In addition to that, Alicia is discovering that she is bisexual, and what it means to be attracted to females as well as males.

This is a novel that deals with difficult themes - sexual abuse by a person in a position of power, PTSD, bullying, loss of acceptance, racism, and sexuality, among others. It is written in blank verse, which shows how scattered and fractured Alicia's thoughts have become, but which can make the text hard to follow at times. For teens and adults dealing with such issues, this could be a valuable book to read, because it demonstrates that such issues are more common than most people think; others may dismiss the events in the novel as unlikely and close their minds to the issues experienced by victims of abuse.

Due to mature themes, this novel is recommended for ages 16 and older. I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

It’s so powerful & moving, telling a story that needs told. I normally love novels in verse but i found this story to be very disjointed

Alicia Rivers is navigating how to deal with her sexual trauma from a popular teacher. It has altered everything about her and her life to the point where she isn't sure that she recognizes herself. When she starts getting notes that allude to another victim, Alicia really starts to question if she's coping in a way that is helping.

Written in verse, did allow for the author to have some moments were everything hit really hard. The shortness of the novel pushed for creativity in words to nail the point home and I believe Cole did really well with that.

I did like how Medusa was brought into this and tied into it. It wasn't what I expected, but I did enjoy it. I loved how she found so much strength in Medusa. It was easy to see how much finding Medusa and her story helped Alicia with her own.

Cole also talks about a number of issues and nothing ever really felt overshadow by one issue or another. They were all mentioned and talked about within their own right. All the topics mentioned, I know will be important to a number of people, especially those this is geared towards, as they try and navigate the world.

While there were moments that I thought were incredibly powerful and overall this is a great story, I do feel like I missed some depth to it. There was just something missing for me that would have really made this a hard hitting piece that I would end up thinking about again and again.

Overall, this is a powerful story. With it written in verse, I think that does have moments were it makes it more powerful. It's one that I do think, if you are in a position where you can read it, that this should be read.

I’ve been sitting on the review because it is hard to put into words what I feel about Dear Medusa. Books like these are so important. It was beautifully written, and as expected with books written in verse, the emotions jump off the page. The story is told through the POV of Alicia who is sexually assaulted by a teacher. Following the assault Alicia quits track and becomes a shell of herself, losing her friends and the connection to her family. There is LGBTQ+ representation throughout not only with the MC but also the SC Deja and Geneva, who befriend Alicia despite everything proving to she is still worthy of love. Medusa was not a huge part of Alicia’s story, but there was some mentions as Alicia related to the story of Medusa - assaulted by a male in a position of power.

It's got a lot of power in the voice that at the end you understand as a reader comes from Olivia A Cole's own experiencing in sharing (based on her acknowledgements and who she thanks). She wants to share the story of Alicia to be able to help get out the grief, frustration, anger, annoyances, etc. etc. because it all started with shaming and took off from there.

A girl cannot be sexual. Then she becomes a victim that no one believes. And at the hands of a teacher. Until there are more. It's got a lot going for it because of the verse but it borders on constant anger which was exhausting (but necessary) to the story and making connections to mythology and particularly Medusa was a connector, though not unique as more YA is bringing in mythology to either parallel the main character or show an understanding (like Julie Berry's [book:Lovely War|44107480]). The device channels the frustrations when other things seem to just be pushed forward without any thought or consideration for the sake of the story because she's certainly in need of help (reminds me of [book:The Way I Used to Be|23546634]).

This is one of the most powerful and searing novels I've ever read. It's almost painful to read, but at the same time, it's incredibly necessary.

It's ultimately empowering and I think it'll change a lot of lives.

Highly recommended.

Stunning.
Beautiful.
Powerful.
Restorative.

I was terrified to begin Dear Medusa. The subject matter stirs up plenty of things from my own past that I'm not prepared to handle (and I'm well into adulthood), but I love Olivia's other work (I miss Tasha!!! lol), so I bought the audio and the ebook.

I started with the ebook, and I latched on immediately. Too often, the "novel in verse" makes for stunted reading for me (yes my inner voice wants to read it like bad spoken word from the 90s). This wasn't the case here! The language just flows and (main character) Alicia is just talking to you. You're reading her diary, reading her texts, and halfway through, I switched to the audiobook. Olivia's got a deep voice, which makes the words reverberate more (even at 1.2x speed), and as Alicia's passions unfold, and she begins to shed her red riding hood (there be wolves here!), Olivia's reading intensifies. You're left wondering just how much of this is autobiography (and I swear lemme at the Colonel! I don't just wanna talk...) and how much is fiction.

Highly recommend. You will reread sections, screenshot others and send them to friends at 2am and 10am and 8pm, and wonder why they haven't started reading it yet so you can talk to them about it...

**Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Childrens/Labyrinth Road for this ARC in exchange for an honest review**

*All quotes mentioned are from the published version of the book.*

First thing's first: this book had very diverse representation. The main character is bisexual, and side characters are asexual, Black, lesbian, Muslim, and Pakistani.

Alicia Rivers is a 16 year-old girl about to start her junior year at Marshall High School, but something happened last year that haunts her, especially when she must go back to the scene of the crime: her school. Cole reminds us that sometimes it is the ones we trust the most to be good people are the ones who strike: "They all blur together eventually: actors, singers, priests, presidents, teachers, mentors, respected members of society. Everyone is always so surprised when the fleece comes off, when the wolf is unsheathed..."

She is also dealing with the loss of her best friend, Sarah. One day at the bus stop before leaving her alone there, she said: "We are two different people and I think it's better if I pray for you from a distance. Right now I need to unburden my soul before I can help you." She now goes to a Christian school and thinks she is better than Alicia for many reasons, including the fact that she is still a "pure" virgin. However, Sarah had no problem stealing or smoking cigarettes. As soon as Alicia started having sex, she knew it was a matter of time until their friendship would be over. There are multiple instances where Alicia tells us what she believes Sarah would say about certain situations, without knowing the whole story of course. Even Alicia's mother comments that, "Sarah was always a judgy little bitch." Despite this, she does miss her because she was the only friend she had for the longest time, and she is quite lonely. She even says, "There should be a special word for the kind of heartbreak that comes not from a lover but from a friend." Sarah's judgment follows Alicia all throughout the story.

Alicia has worked at Meat Palace for two years. Her manager just got replaced by Terry because the last manager, Joey, got caught setting up a fake robbery. Terry is described as "creepy" and "pervy," and she can already see him coming after her one day: "I know it will come - it always does when men like Terry take your silence for consent or better yet total ignorance. They know if you can claim not to know that they can too." Later on in the book, Terry walks in on her in the storage closet after Sarah and her mom show up in the drive thru: "The door opens behind me, and I turn expecting to see Debbie. It's Terry. He's wearing the face that I've seen on other snouts: the concern mask. The one that pretends to be serious, but behind the serious is something sparkling." Among her other Meat Palace co-workers are Mariah [the misanthrope], Stephanie (shift manager), Debbie, Rodney, and Forrest. The only one we hear anything about is Debbie though. Debbie has worked at Meat Palace since she was 16, and has even lost a finger there while slicing the beef. She is so kind. When she and Alicia take out the trash one day, she leaves the food stacked outside the dumpster so homeless people can have something to eat if they need it. "...Terry has never been hungry and I don't know what heaven he thinks he's getting into by dumping bread into mud but me and him must think about different gods when we pray." While out there, she also gives Alicia some advice that basically translates to 'don't end up like me.' : "Also, do me a favor, honey: quit this job and do something else with your precious time."

We never learn the actual name of her biology teacher that sexually abused her, only that he is referred to as "The Colonel" by everyone, and "The Devil" by her a couple of times. At first, even she had fallen under his spell:
"With the Colonel I walked into his classroom hating science, but wooed by the way he made everything a joke, always teasing, the cool teacher."
"...he made me feel safe..."
And then the spell was broken...
"I came to him as a student and he came to me as a teacher until one day he came to me as a wolf."
"I understand what happened. My biology teacher hurt me."
"...the simplest way to say it is that I was a student but he saw a rabbit and no one will believe me because he's the most beloved wolf in school."
"He is a well-hidden wolf."
The incident caused her to stop running track, and throughout the book, other students keep asking her why she stopped running track and if she would consider doing it again to help them out.

Cole uses the metaphor of the wolf to describe men who are predatory, and rabbits for the victims. Since the incident, Alicia really notices which men are wolves and what they're doing, whether it's a guy on the bus whipping out his penis and waving it close to her face, or the guy at Taco Bell eyeing her legs under the high top table she's sitting at, men catcalling her on the street, or even her optometrist touching her inappropriately in public for all to see. She is used to men not caring about her age, not even asking about it.

My favorite character in the book was Deja Duvall. She is always calling out racism, and also talks about being asexual in a world that is obsessed with sex:
"...they banned unaccompanied minors from shopping. It's code for Black teenagers. They think we steal."
"The only reason they haven't kicked my as out is because I'm with you. How does it feel, for your whiteness to be a shelter, a chaperone?"

She also mentions how she and Alicia are treated differently in regards to their hair, and when she wears an AIDS awareness bracelet, the school tells her she can't because those are gang colors in the handbook.

"I write about love but it's hard sometimes. I think my ideas about love are different than everybody else's."
"People seem to think so much about skin. I don't want anyone to touch me and it's not because anyone hurt me - it's just because sex isn't something I'm interested in. But I could write poems about love forever."
"People have sex without love all the time. You should be able to have love without sex."
"My friends always say I just haven't met the right person, and when I do I'll feel different about sex and attraction. But I really don't think so."
"My sister said, 'Just wait, you feel like this now, but one day you'll bloom like a sunflower.' But I already feel like a sunflower. I'm open, golden, glowing."
"Why do people find a way to think something is wrong with a girl no matter what? One minute we're not supposed to be having sex, but as soon as a girl doesn't want to have sex with ANYBODY, something's wrong with that too?"
"...you know what's some bullshit? Imaging how people are going to act if I tell them I'm asexual. Like, as a Black girl I REALLY can't win because on one tip, people make out Black girls to be TOO sexy, like everything we do is sex, even when we're just living life..."
"So, like, me being asexual, people will say YOU CAN'T BE ASEXUAL, YOU'RE TOO SEXY or whatever. But on the other tip, books and movies always cast the Black girl as the "friend" who never has boyfriend and shit, like nobody wants us, so if I say I'm asexual, people will be like OH YOU'RE PLAYING INTO A STEROTYPE OF BLACK GIRLS AS UNDESIRABLE. Like, I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't, and I just want to live my life..."
"It pisses me off because this all acts like sex is inevitable? Um, not for me! And it's not because the Virgin Mary is my bestie but because, like, this is who I am. It's not about being pure. I just wanna do what I wanna do."

Throughout the book there are two girls that Alicia focuses on: Blake and Geneva. Geneva is the new lesbian Pakastani girl that she has a crush on, and Blake is the girl she envies and thinks has a perfect life. This is yet another lesson we learn: things are not always as they seem. Blake doesn't have it all. She only keeps Devin around because he makes her feel safer. She was also a victim of The Colonel.

Dr. Kareem shows up to the school to do research on teenage girls. Alicia ends up being part of the group, and the girls all talk about what they're going through in their lives. Alicia mentions her loneliness and is tired of being call a slut. Deja talks about her asexuality, but still ends up feeling pretty invisible even when they talk about virginity and sluts. Prya Farooqi has to deal with the way the school treats Muslims vs Christians. Lena and Annika discuss the trans experience.

I wish we could have gotten to know if Alicia and Geneva ever officially get together or if Blake actually ended up reporting The Colonel and what the outcome of that was.


A list of teachers/school staff:

Mr. Warren - principal
Ms. Benton - dean of 11th grade
Mr. Upton - one of the two security guards (we never meet the other one)
Dr. Kareem - here to do research for her university (some kind of research about teenage girls, the challenges they face, and how they get inspired)
Mr. [Ricky] West - runs in-school adjustment program (ISAP)
Mrs. Gladstone - English
Ms. Gupta - art
Mrs. Fisher - algebra II
Mr. Hudson - history
Mr. Mattson - physics
Coach Tinsley - track coach

I’m a huge fan of novels in verse, it amazes me how vivid a picture a couple of carefully selected words can create. This novel does just that time and time again.

In the last year everything about Alicia’s life has changed, her best friend stopped talking to her, her parents split up, she no longer cares about school, and she’s started sleeping around since everyone sees her as a slut anyway. Alicia is a victim of sexual assault by a popular teacher but to others she’s the monster in her story. After making a new friend in detention, she starts to see the power she and other women hold to fight back against the “wolves” in their lives.

I really enjoyed the contrast between how Alicia and the other girl she finds out has been sexually assaulted handle things. It shows that there’s many different ways to try and cope with trauma. Despite many brilliant stanzas, when you put it all together I found the story to be a bit too repetitive. Obviously, repetition is important for a story like this but I don’t think Cole has managed to find the perfect balance. I was also a little disappointed by the ending. The story tells us over and over how many bad men there are out there, but it ends with most of them never facing any consequences and for those who do it’s only implied.

Overall, this is an excellent story and my critiques are relatively minor.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC!