Book review 2: Weightless by SarahyBannan
Meet Carolyn Lessing, Gemma Davies, Taylor Lyon, Brooke Moore and the unknown, faceless narrator i.e the crowd, the anonymous hord, the bystanders. Sort of a "Mean Girls" but the main difference is that you won't laugh.
The story : Carolyn Lessing and her mother move to Adamsville, a small town where everyone knows everyone since generations. A dead end place most people cannot escape: "It was a place you were from, where you were born, where you were raised, where you stayed." In Adamsville the teen population is quite bored and fills its endless time with trips to the mall, TV shows, celebrities updates and glamourous images of a life that seems out of reach. Images everywhere building up a resonating frustration. Carolyn is new so she attracts the attention of her peers. Carolyn is good-looking, fashionable and smart so she attracts it even more. All eyes and empty brains are on her. At first, she is adopted by the popular crowd but soon the bullying starts.
From the beginning things are clear: there will be no happy ending. The narration is in the past tense as in a report and the tone prophetic and gloomy ("We couldn't be the only ones responsible, the only ones to blame."). And the last sentences of the very first chapter set the mood: "We'd think about this moment later (...). Later, when they showed the pictures of her on TV, we thought she looked older, and not in a good way. And her eyes: we especially noticed her eyes. They looked tired. Tired and sad and bored and fed up and tired."
Dr Dan Olweus, a Norwegian psychologist specialist of the question, defines bullying as : "A person is bullied when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other persons, and he or she has difficulty defending himself or herself." It is a purposeful and repetitive form of aggression. And that is what the story is about: the bullying web.
In this book Sarah Brennan disects the bullying mechanisms and turns the light on all participants i.e. the victim and the aggressors of course but also and this is what makes the book interesting the witnesses, this "we" that page after page depicts the situation and their not-so-passive role in it: "We told a few people what we had found : a letter, birth-control pills, cigarettes, Slim Fast. Pictures of herself. Weeks later, we heard this story repeated back to us (…) only the list had changed and gotten longer. (…) More interesting things, more exciting things. Because what we heard back just wasn’t the same." Didn't hear the same but didn't bother to correct either. Another fact that the author pinpoints is how social media make it easier for the aggressors to bully constantly making the victim safe nowhere. When Carolyn is off school grounds, the attacks continue via sms or Facebook.
I regret though that the author minimizes the strength of her message by depicting Carolyn as frail i.e coping with psychological issues. Yes maybe the protagonist would have handled better if in a healthier state and things wouldn't have escalated so fast, but for any bullied - healthy or sick - the situation described would simply be unbearable. The other negative point would be that the author seems to want to tackle too many topics in the same book thus leaving the reader with the impression that she wanted to tell more about religious hypocrisy or eating disorders for example but somehow did not to manage to do so or to integrate these factors properly to the storyline.
What to make out of this book ?
The book offers a picture of cyber bullying that will make you shiver and wonder what can be done to prevent and solve this issue. Maybe it is time to review the no "tattle" policy taught by many parents and teachers and to focus on building environments where children and teens can feel safe enough to report an issue that will be handled accordingly. On the other hand one fact must be reinforced: there are laws and regulations against harrassement - which is a felony - and everything online can be tracked and found over and over again.
It would be too easy to blame the social media and internet. Internet is maybe a medium (yes that's how you are supposed to say it) that gives more bandwith to this type of actions but the tool is not the culprit. Social media are very new and like for every new product or service there are improvements and user management to tweak and work on. Think just how the Far West days are far gone now. Bang bang.