"It's used as the cheapest, easiest test of crap, isn't it? If teenage girls love a movie, a book, a band, then it's immediately classified as mediocre shit. Well, I'm not going to stand for that. Someone needs to treat them like they're precious, and if nobody else is ready to step up, I guess it's up to us to put them on the path to recognizing that about themselves.” - Mary Borsellini, The Devil's Mixtape
I don't know where to start with this book, honestly. Whether to talk about its content or its style or its characters.
Its content puts wonderful twists on pop culture references, questions spirituality, ponders the debate of nature versus nurture and whether fate exists.
Its style is reminiscent of writers you'd find on the internet (which is totally unexpected since it was originally published as an ebook), which is where I've been doing most of my reading for the past few months. This made staying involved easier than if I'd been jumping back into the saddle with A Clockwork Orange (which I tried).
The relationships between its characters are so freaking intricate that I had to reread the book a second time and make a chart of how characters were connected. Keep in mind, this book is set in mostly 1951, 1999, and 2011, so the fact that aside from one character, every single character in the book has some type of relation to at least two other characters.
The main characters of the book are, arguably, Ella, Sally, Amy and Charlotte.
In 1999, Ella is writing letters from hell to her baby sister after she helps orchestrate a school shooting which is basically Columbine but with three perpetrators instead of two.
In 1951, Sally and Amy are homeless teens travelling across Australia.
In 2011, Charlotte is a music journalist following a world-renowned rock band, HUSH.
I just sat back for a moment and realized it is completely impossible to explain the absolute brilliance of this book without giving away the plot. I can say the things that I did because of it (I started rereading it within the hour I finished, this time with two different colored highlighters and a pen with me because it's my copy and I can live with knowing I graffitied its pages in the name of highlighting every amazing quotable line and every foreshadowing hint in yellow, underlining in red every piece of information I'd like to look up such as people/books/movies/events/etc, writing in the margins every time a name was changed with the true ones, and highlighting in pink every quote, phrase or I idea I would consider inking my skin with) but my personal reaction is only mine. I can't claim anyone else would have the same connection with this book that I did.
I can only recommend it to the highest degree, hint that in ebook form it's only 3.99, and offer my now extremely marked physical copy to anyone that wouldn't mind the ink.
Sidenote: The language is also quite vulgar, so I suppose that wouldn't make it suitable to some audiences, but in the end it's that disregard for the fact that if people find something uncomfortable, they won't talk about it and bully others into doing the same. "Sometimes the only way you can talk about serious things is with dumb fantasy stuff and things that are horrible and funny. Just being serious about it isn't serious enough." (Borsellini, 38). Mary Borsellini isn't afraid to make some people uncomfortable and discuss serious topics, like what happens after we die, and I admire that.
Borsellini, Mary. The Devil's Mixtape. Los Angeles: Omnium Gatherum,
2011.
