Showing posts with label Tonya Duncan Ellis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tonya Duncan Ellis. Show all posts

Sunday, March 1, 2020

Sophie Washington the Snitch by Tonya Duncan Ellis


Rating: WARTY!

This is a really short book (seventy screens on my phone) and even then I could not finish it. I read only the first chapter. It was in first person which I can't usually stand, and worse than that, it was about bullying and the lack of a response to it. That's where the snitch comes in - apparently no one wants to be tarred by that brush, so when the school bully, a girl named Lanie, robs school-friends Sophie and Chloe of their money right after they arrive at school, nothing gets done.

Now you can argue "well isn't that the point of the story?" - revealing how something will change and something will get done? But I don't buy that, because this story has been done so many times before and this one offers nothing new, nothing different. A better story would have been to have a school where snitching isn't a crime - because it should not be. You report crimes. You report bullying. You report robbery. It's bad to have children feel they should not, and it doesn't matter if the story eventually gets there. The problem is that it's not there to begin with. A better story-teller would have started from that point and found some other issue to address, or some other way to tell her story instead of stamping a 'wrong' firmly onto the brains of juvenile and impressionable readers right from the off.

Because this story was going nowhere new and started from very tired trope, I can't commend it as a worthy read. I couldn't stand to read it. Maybe the readers it's aimed at might find it more readable, but that still wouldn't make it right.