Actually Enraging Book
The Lifeguards by Amanda Eyre Ward
Pages: 368 Genre: mystery
Rating: 1 Star
Liza, Whitney, and Annette are three mothers raising their 15-year-old sons in the Barton Hills neighborhood of Austin, Texas. Their friendship is rivaled only by the boys, Charlie, Xavier, and Bobcat (respectively), and they would do anything to give their boys better childhoods than they had. And they're succeeding. This summer, the boys are working as lifeguards. One night when the boys bike home and announce they found a dead body in the Greenbelt. As the police investigate to uncover the truth of what happened, even more of the mothers' secrets are threatened to be exposed.
Normally I try to avoid spoilers in my reviews, but I'm giving that up for this one. I also apologize for this not being a great review, but this book has one main problem that ruins the rest for me. Just don't read this book.
I hated this. It made me genuinely angry, to a point where I'm finding it difficult to write this review. Nothing happens, the mysterious murder is nothing, the writing is atrocious, and the biggest victim of the book is never acknowledged.
The central plot point of this book is the fact that 15-year-old Bobcat is "dating" (mostly just having sex, although they claim to be in love) the 21-year-old murder victim, Lucy. No one in this book ever acknowledges that this is a problem. I do not think that books need to or ought to come out and state "[problem] is going to be depicted and I, the author, do not condone it," but the characters in the book had room to acknowledge the problem with this relationship and failed to do so. I fully had to get a second opinion just to make sure I wasn't going crazy and overexaggerating because every character in the book treats this as if it's just a normal, tragic relationship. They laugh and offhandedly mention that Bobcat is dating an "older woman," but no one is concerned about it. Bobcat has multiple (of his already very limited) scenes where he cries about not knowing how to act properly and just doing what he thinks is right (autistic) and about how he is afraid of his father punishing him so he does whatever he can to not displease him (abused). This woman groomed an autistic, abused teenager and no one cares about it! In fact, they suspect that he is taking advantage of her!
I spent the whole book being outraged about this, because it is pointed out to us immediately in the prologue when Lucy (although we don't know her yet) comments that the "kid" at the entrance to the pool is about the same age as her date. The opening line is how weird it is to be "the older woman." And yet, as the book continues to discuss that relationship, no adult even vaguely comments on the fact that she is a problem here. We are supposed to feel bad for her and, supposedly, are supposed to feel bad for Bobcat that his girlfriend who he loved is dead. I do not feel bad for Bobcat, and I do not care about bad things happening to Lucy.
If you can manage to put this aside, the book was horribly written. There are a million loose ends that never get tied up, from Liza's either racism or homophobia to a suspicious nanny to the literal climax of the book ending before the scene is over. Plus, the mystery itself was awful. The most interesting murder mystery was what happened to Annette's coyote. The titular boys were almost irrelevant to their own story, despite one of them even, in canon, sobbing and begging his mom to care about his life. She never really does, because he is just an avenue for her to experience conflict.
This book is bad, simply put. I read it because I was excited about the idea of it taking place in Austin, but all I got instead was a romanticized groomer, aggressive Boy Mom behavior, and the worst representation of Austin that I have ever seen. She spent the entire book disparaging Slaughter Lane. Let me tell you: it's weird to read a book openly mischaracterizing my own literal neighborhood. Like, my actual neighborhood. Leave Austin and 15 year olds alone.
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