Gypsy Reviews

Originally posted at Gypsy ReviewsI received an eARC from HarperTeen via Edelweiss. Thank you!Congratulations September Girls, you have gotten my first 1 star rating ever. I don’t give these out to any old book, I give these even more rarely than I give 5 star reviews. Just fantastic with your portrayal in women as hos, lots of descriptions about women mainly pertaining to their chest area and including lots of naked women because naked women are everywhere! With a dash of horny boys and characters who cannot think of nothing else to say but lots of expletives. Great job September Girls! *thumbs up* You absolutely did not have my inner feminism raging at this book Sam has got to be one of the most boring and unbelievable characters I have ever read about. He supposedly goes through this ‘transformation’ throughout the book but I really didn’t see anything because he was so incredibly boring. You can see the attempt to make Sam this really deep guy who goes through a journey of self-discovery and make him seem like a good guy and always the victim. I can’t really take it seriously if he suddenly has a revelation drunk and at a club dancing around. Who has revelations like that? If anything at all, Sam is a jerk and a mindless drone. His actions in the past seem mainly dictated by his best friend, Sebastian who actually got him to dump a girl because she was a ‘starter’ and after he had groped her breast then after she started to shun him, he then felt guilty. …………… Am I supposed to sympathise with a guy like this?Now onto the portrayal of women, Sam and other male characters in the book see women as mostly hos. It’s not only the male characters, even the girls. Every single time a women is mentioned, without a doubt when it comes to their description, their breasts have to be mentioned because yes, a women is defined by her breasts. Sure, women have breasts and you can distinguish a women from a man by their breasts so do we define men by their penises? Why didn’t I see whenever a man came into a scene, their penis wasn’t mentioned? There were also lots of naked women, why are the women naked? Why? Either that or they’re scantily clad. Did everyone just lose their clothes or something?Not every book needs to have the empowerment of women but at least respect women. I didn’t see this at all. Rather women were treated more like objects – walking sticks with breasts if you will. There for the pleasure of men and to be used for sex because that is what they are here for. It bothered me so much that the Girls were blonde, thin and so on because this was how they got what they wanted. It speaks so much about the portrayal of men too in this book, that the only thing that matters to them about a women is their breasts and they’re thin and beautiful. It was absolutely disgusting to read about it. This basically embodies everything that is wrong with society and we shouldn’t be encouraging this in any sort of media at all. If it was purposely to highlight what we shouldn’t be doing, I would be okay with that but September Girls gave me no indication as to the fact that all of this was wrong at all.The whole book made absolutely no sense to me at all. I have no idea what was going on because it seemed pointless. At the 50% mark, I just stopped reading it carefully and started skimming because I wasn’t going to waste more time reading this when I could have been reading other books. It’s mainly Sam’s inner thoughts and attempts to be deep and find the meaning of life. Whining a little that he didn’t understand Dee Dee because she was avoiding him and then he loves her when he hardly even knows her at all. Apparently, he thinks that making out with her can constitute as getting to know her and knowing her enough to be in love with her. I never got the indication throughout the book that Sam was a nice guy, he didn’t seem to have his own personality.The inclusion of the paranormal and fantasy element was so poorly done, why was it even included? It seemed absolutely redundant. Why did the Girls have to go through this? Was there some sort of hidden meaning or purpose behind it? Also, why was it only girls? There are male mermaids you know. Also the way to break the curse? Made to put men on a peddle stone for women to worship at is it? So the Girls would throw themselves at virgin boys? *rolls eyes*The use of expletives was astounding. No idea how Madison got away with this, particularly for a Young Adult book but do you really have to use them in nearly every single sentence? Do the characters honestly have no other words they can use? Someone needs to buy them some dictionaries because boy, if these was the olden days, their mouths would have been scrubbed clean with soap. Plus the negative influences of smoking, drinking and even drugs. It’s not a book you want a Young Adult audience to read because really, what good are they gonna get out of this? There are no role models here, there’s nothing to learn from September Girls.September Girls is a good example of what not to do in a book. It’s misogynist to the core and so incredibly sexist. If this was what a guy’s mind looks like, well I pity the human race. Stay away from this book, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone even if you begged me to. I would probably grab this book out of your hands and run away screaming, “THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD!”. Now I’m going to try and find an awesome epic book to read and regenerate all the brain cells I lost while reading this. I salute everyone else who has read this book as well, you have done a great service to the book community *salutes*