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Summer Skin by Kirsty Eagar

hot pink cover with author's name and title appearaing as cutouts showing a girl's face laughing (I think - she could be screaming but I think she's laughing).Why I read it:  I have been waiting for ages for my library hold of this book to come in because books are too expensive in Australia.

Summer Skin is not available to US readers unless they get the paperback from the Book Depository but the good news is that Ms. Eagar has recently announced it will be published in the US so that will change – but not until 2018 unfortunately.

What it’s about: (from Goodreads)  Jess Gordon is out for revenge. Last year the jocks from Knights College tried to shame her best friend. This year she and a hand-picked college girl gang are going to get even.

The lesson: don’t mess with Unity girls.

The target: Blondie, a typical Knights stud, arrogant, cold . . . and smart enough to keep up with Jess.

A neo-riot grrl with a penchant for fanning the flames meets a rugby-playing sexist pig – sworn enemies or two people who happen to find each other when they’re at their most vulnerable?

It’s all Girl meets Boy, Girl steals from Boy, seduces Boy, ties Boy to a chair and burns Boy’s stuff. Just your typical love story.

What worked for me (and what didn’t):  Summer Skin is a book which worked for me on a visceral level. There was something about the… vibe of it which bypassed my brain in some ways and got me straight in the feels. That’s not to say this is an entirely id vortex book. I don’t think it is. I’m just saying that if I were to examine the text and pull it apart, I could come up with all these things to say about how there wasn’t much to the relationship between Jess and Mitch. Summer Skin evokes that suffocating feeling of desperate want overlaid with the scary uncertainty of navigating a relationship where the ground under your feet is liable to shift at any time. It’s all there in between the words (h/t CS Pacat). So much of it was subtext and feel. I’m a reader who often doesn’t get subtle so I guess Kirsty Eagar is able to tap into the part of me which does.

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