kyatic's Reviews (974)

I'm opting not to rate this one, because I'm uncomfortable further lowering the rating on an own voices novel by a trans woman of colour, especially as so many of the existing 1 star ratings are from people that haven't read the book. That said, I had a number of issues with this book, and I'm not sure how to articulate them.

The writing and editing, first and foremost, were really, really bad. Just objectively not good. Whole conversations were summarised by 'he told me about x and then I said y and he laughed and he told me more about x'. Why not just use dialogue instead of summaries? It meant that the characters often came off as very distant; I didn't feel like I knew anything about a single one of them. If you were to do a Search for the word 'uhh' in this book, it would break your Kindle. There were five on one page. There were typos aplenty, and whole paragraphs that didn't make sense on a continuity level (characters being specifically summoned away from other characters, then suddenly being in a group with them, etc). On that level alone, this book was not ready to be published. It just wasn't. It clearly needed at least another two rounds of edits and another copy pass.

The characters were also not good. I don't mind unlikable characters, but characters need to be interesting, and no-one here was. The two redeeming characters were Dave and Hen, who both had actual personalities, and everyone else was weirdly obsessed with power and dominance, with leaders and followers. It was super bizarre to read a book from the POV of a teenage boy who is absolutely hyperfocused on power and hierarchy. All he (and a few of his friends) can talk about is whether or not someone is dominant in a conversation, or how much social power they have, or how he can get more social power - it's like reading werewolf fic. None of it rang true. No teenage girl has ever mournfully recalled the previous year and said 'I had so much power,' unless they're secretly an evil fairytale queen in disguise. It's one of the most bizarre dynamics I've ever read in my entire life.

The final trivial point is the main character's questioning rep. Now, a lot of the previous 1 star reviews have focused on how offensive his character is, namely because he's obsessed with being 'normal' and sometimes alludes to his own fear that he only wants to be queer so that he can be popular. I actually didn't mind that. Sure, I don't agree with it, but I don't think we have to agree with characters all the time. A lot of what he said was offensive and he isn't called out on it, but that isn't something that makes me dislike a book. However, there was no continuity in his questioning. He literally goes from wanting to jump a guy's bones on one page to being 'repulsed' by him the next, and he seems equally blasé about both feelings. He hardly questions himself at all, beyond occasionally wondering what his own motives are. He doesn't pay much attention to what his own feelings are; they just flip flop around and he accepts them however they are. That doesn't make for a satisfying narrative; you never get the sense of a journey of acceptance.

The main issue I had with this book, and the main reason I'm not going to rate it low despite the above problems, is that I think this is really a very interesting book about a trans girl, and it isn't presented that way at all. I'll use he/him pronouns for Nandan in this review, because those are his pronouns in the book, but I feel a little uncomfortable with it. The author has said that this is an incredibly personal book, and she's a trans woman (she came out after this book was already in the publishing process) and even without knowing that, this book reminded me of Imogen Binnie's Nevada and Casey Plett's Little Fish (neither of which are YA books!) in the way Nandan's self-identity is presented. He constantly talks about wanting to be part of his ex-girlfriend's group of female friends. She tells him that he always wants to join in with their 'girly activities' like putting on makeup and having sleepovers. When he's having sex, he has to picture himself as his ex-girlfriend so that he can enjoy it. The reason that it never seems like Nandan is actually questioning his sexuality, in my mind, is that he's actually questioning his gender. That's why the questioning rep here doesn't fit; it's presented as though he's questioning something else entirely. It feels like the book was written at the wrong time (by which I mean that the author wrote and published it before coming out; her photo at the back of the book is very outdated and the wrong pronouns are used) and I think the book suffers for it.

I wonder what this book would have been if the author had written it a year later and after another heavy round of edits. I suspect it would have been a lot better. There's a gem of a book in here, and it's a real shame that this isn't it.

This is another book that I don't feel able to ascribe a rating to, and that's not because the book itself is too abysmal or brilliant to fit into the rating metric, but because this is a book that simply doesn't exist outside of its context, and that context can't be squished down and boxed into a rating between 1 and 5.

I watched all of the accusations and the dismantling of the YouTube powers-that-were unfold in 2013-14 from a very odd perspective, having been what I'd charitably call an 'inside-outsider' at the peak of Alex Day's YouTube fame, at the start of YouTube, before it became the media juggernaut that it is today. I wasn't a YouTuber myself and had approximately zero interest in becoming one, but several of my friends were, and many of them were involved with the It Crowd at the time. Essentially, absolutely no-one knew who the fuck I was, which I was very, very happy about, but I knew a fair amount of what was going on behind the scenes. Even with all that knowledge, the accusations that came out about multiple YouTubers came as a complete shock. Like pretty much everyone else at the time, I couldn't stop reading the Tumblr posts with their upsetting details of these famous YouTubers abusing their power to manipulate their fans into sexual acts and parasocial relationships, and it was horrifying to watch as more stories were told, implicating more and more YouTubers, until it became apparent that this was not a problem of a few bad apples; the YouTube model was rotten to the core. I say 'was'. I'd argue that it still is, but that's a rant for another day.

All of this is to say that I knew exactly what I was getting into with this book. I knew that Alex Day was not someone I liked; I'd known, even before the reckoning of 2014, that he wasn't a particularly nice person (his multiple cheating scandals were common knowledge in YouTube circles; the more repugnant accusations were not.) However, I have a weird personal challenge where I try and read at least one book a year by someone I either vehemently dislike or completely disagree with, because I fairly firmly believe that we can't argue our own points if we don't understand the opposition, and so when I saw that I could pick this one up secondhand for £2, thus giving the author no revenue, I decided to give it a go. I fully expected to be faced with 300 pages of someone putting his finger in his ears about all the accusations and denying everything. And you know, I got about 30 pages of that, but the other 244 were something else, and I'm not sure what to make of them.

I think this book does have valuable things to say about cancel culture. I'm not sure that Alex Day is the right person to say them. Some of the valuable things he says are tempered with willful ignorance and a defensive agenda. I think it's unfortunately true that the actual allegations made against Alex Day were bad enough, but nowadays tend to get described as 'Alex Day groomed and assaulted underage fans', which isn't actually what he was accused of doing. I do think it's valid of him to point out that he has a reputation for doing things that he was never accused of, and that whenever he writes a post on Reddit, Facebook or Twitter, he gets bombarded with comments calling him a rapist, which, again, is not what he was accused of in the first place. He's right to point out that our collective memory of the serial accusations against multiple YouTubers have sort of coalesced into one singular accusation of rape, when it was in fact more nuanced than that. I think there's value in pointing it out, not only to exonerate people of things they didn't do, but also so that the victims' stories can be sensitively remembered, and so that the perpetrators and abusers face the correct reckoning.

However, there are moments in this book, particularly with regard to his bandmate Ed (known on YouTube as Eddplant) when it's clear that he also just doesn't get the severity of some of the accusations, even towards other people. He writes about Ed as though he was accused of being a bit handsy and that he couldn't have known that the girl in that situation didn't want to do anything with him. That's just not true. He was credibly accused of - and admitted to - ignoring blatant signs that his actions were unwanted, and doing it anyway. Alex Day also, quite weirdly, talks about Tom Milsom by name throughout the book when he's praising his musical ability, but when he's writing about the accusations made towards Tom, he calls him 'Steve', making it seem like the accusations were about someone else entirely, and that Tom's record was clean. I also found it somewhat uncomfortable and inappropriate that he verbatim copied and pasted the accusations towards Ed and Tom, often to present them as being either not credible or exaggerated, especially as both of them later admitted that the allegations were true. He even writes about fellow YouTuber Mike Lombardo, who was convicted of and jailed for soliciting child pornography from his underage fans, with some sympathy, saying he always seemed nice when he met him. This repeated reductive attitude towards some of the more serious accusations that were made at the time, including accusations which were admitted by the perpetrators and indeed, in one instance, convicted in a court of law, makes it very, very difficult to believe that he's grappled with the severity of his own.

The summation of it, really, is that I just don't think that he deserves a YouTube platform or a fanbase at all. Sure, he didn't groom and abuse underage fans, but he did use his fanbase to manipulate women into doing things they weren't sure they wanted to do, and that's bad enough. He writes in this book about how unfair it was that his book deal to tell this story was cancelled; I think that the cancellation of it was perfectly fair. I agree with him that he has a right to tell his side, but that doesn't mean he deserves a book deal. He was, after all, still able to write the book. I read it. However, he isn't immediately entitled to a platform from which to sell that book. Similarly, I agree with him that he's entitled to keep doing things he loves, like making videos and music. I just disagree that he's entitled to people listening to or watching it. He simply isn't entitled to a platform which gives him an audience of people who might be exploited, even if he says he's learnt from his mistakes; he may have, or he might not have. No-one owes him their time or safety to prove it. He can learn his lessons without an audience to witness them. There are moments here, particularly at the end of the book, where he says he's accepted this. The fact that he tried to get a book deal for this book and, by his own admission, still approaches media outlets to try and push his YouTube videos, makes me doubt it.

And you know, the odd thing is that if I were able to read and rate this book solely on its own merits - say that it was a piece of fiction, for example, or that the allegations had been thoroughly disproven - I would say that it's a pretty decent book. Alex Day is a very good writer. A lot of the nostalgia for the YouTube of yesteryear in here is genuinely quite touching to read, and it also works pretty well as a sort of scandalous celebrity memoir, with anecdotes about famous YouTubers that we've never heard before (such as another disgraced abuser shitting on a piece of sound equipment at VidCon.) He's not afraid to paint himself as a total dickhead in the book, and he does, probably because, by all accounts, he is. It's just that this book can't be separated from its creator, because its creator is in very line, word and syllable. It's a book written for a specific purpose, and although it did succeed in making me consider the nuance of call-out culture, particularly in regard to how accusations can snowball in the collective consciousness and become something else entirely, it didn't make me think that Alex Day is reformed and deserves a platform again. And hey, as of today, he seems to have deleted his Twitter account and removed most of his YouTube videos, so maybe he thinks the same.

So, overall, a well-written book by a total bastard that I can't recommend anyone ever read. I don't regret reading it, per se, but I'm certainly not changed by it, and I'm not going to pick it up again.

Ben North has created something really quite special here. As a testimony from someone terminally ill, it's illuminating; as a collection of poetry, it's extraordinary. Thoroughly recommend this one.