Debut author Maggie Horne has created a compelling, funny, original protagonist in seventh-grader Hazel Hill, and built around her an unashamedly feminist story of confronting sexual harassment. Hazel is a loner, focused on winning the school speech competition against her rival Ella Quinn. Her loner status makes her the favorite confidante of golden boy Tyler—she’s not someone he’d ever be interested in romantically, so he unburdens himself to her about his many other crushes and relationships. She somewhat grudgingly tolerates this, until she finds out that he’s been sexually harassing Ella online.
Hazel’s outrage at this leads her to partner with Ella and with Riley Beckett, Ella’s best friend, in order to prove Tyler’s wrongdoing and have him stopped. None of the grown-ups they talk with believes that Tyler would do what he did, however, and there’s a good deal of victim blaming. The three girls must therefore figure out how to make themselves heard and believed about what turns out to be Tyler’s widespread history of harassment.
It’s a grim topic, but Horne keeps it from feeling preachy by making Hazel a confident, amusing, and perceptive first-person narrator. Hazel’s observations of the people around her, particularly her well-meaning but sometimes clueless parents, are hilarious and insightful. And while she also grows over the course of the story, she starts from a fairly secure place of knowing who she is.
She’s also gay, and is clear and unconflicted about this. She hasn’t told her parents yet only because there hasn’t been anyone specific she’s had a crush on yet, but plans to do so when/if there is. The book doesn’t center her queerness, but also doesn’t ignore it; it’s part of the plot in ways that would be spoilers, but that feel authentic.
Readers will likely be just as frustrated as I was about the repeated ways in which the girls’ allegations and evidence are ignored, although many will recognize that these are patterns that play out all too often in the real world. Seeing Hazel and her friends take on the system that keeps sexual harassers in place, however, feels like cathartic and informative modeling.
The book hits it out of the park both in terms of its message and in simply creating a wonderfully readable tale with a hugely likeable heroine. I hope this isn’t the last we hear of Hazel.
Hazel, her family, Ella, Riley, and Tyler are all cued as White. A secondary character has two dads.
