Book ReviewOnly Ever Yours & Asking For It by Louise O'Neill

Hoi
Today Ill be doing a Louise ONeill themed double review video, in which Ill be talking
about Only Ever Yours and Asking For It. Just so you know in this video Ill be discussing
things like sexual assault, anorexia and eating disorders, because those are the topics that
these books sort of center around. This one has been out for about a year, this
one isnt out until September. So were going to start with Only Ever Yours.

I found
out about Only Ever Yours through the Bookseller YA prize, which it won. Some of my
friends had read it and highly recommended it so I figured I would give it a go.
This is actually Rosiannas old copy which I will send over to the U.S. To her once I
film this review. So this book is about a group of sixteen year old girls in a dystopian
world where women are basically created for the very specific purpose of satisfying men.
And they have to live in the same building their whole lives, which is sort of a school.
And there are these women called chastities who look after them which in my head I sort
of imagined them as nuns.

And all the characters in this book have the
names of famous supermodels cause thats who they are modeled after. The main character
is a girl called Freida and her best friend is called Isabel. And theyve been friends
for forever but when the book sort of begins their friendship slowly starts to unwind.
And in this book you sort of follow all the girls going to their daily classes and going
through their daily lives just waiting for the moment that theyll be selected as companions
although they can also become a concubine or a chastity, but the ultimate goal is to
be a companion. They have to be on this sort of very specific
target weight so the only thing they worry about is how thin they are and how pretty
they look.

They are ranked on a sort of daily or weekly basis they have to sort of take
a picture every morning and send it in and then people will rank it depending on how
pretty they look. And that rank is everything to them and theyre also encouraged to constantly
criticize each other and call out the things that they dont like about the persons
appearance. Reading this was really confronting from the first page.
In between there are these pages with these giant quotes from the rules for proper female
behavior by the original father. In the beginning the man created the new women, the Eves.

You
think its really horrid when you start off and as you keep reading it, it just gets
worse and worse and worse. And then the boys arrive to pick their companions and it just
completely flips out of control. Only ever yours reminded me of Pretties by Scott Westerfeld.
Dont know if you guys remember, it was like one of those like first dystopian books
I ever read and a lot of the mindset that the girls and in pretties the boys get taught
is fairly similar although not as extreme. So the setup of the sort of world where everyone
is waiting for a certain point where everything will be perfect.

Whats probably one of
the most disturbing things about this book is while youre reading it its a dystopian
setting and you think this is so far away and ridiculous but all the little things in
there are things that are happening every single day and that are already in our society.
Its like beauty and lifestyle magazines on steroids. The bullying that happens on
social media, the little cliques in high school, the way that girls are sometimes encouraged
to look down on other girls for however they choose to behave. All they want to do is just
get out of the school and start their real life. And so because of that there is such
a toxic environment and as a reader you dont really have a good idea of what goes on outside
of that world.

So all these girls are named after models and look like models and I wasnt
quite convinced by that I think it would have been fine with them just having normal names.
In the beginning it bothered me a little bit but as the book went on there were more serious
things to worry about, so I didnt really focus in on that too much. I did find it quite
interesting that all their names start with lower case letters, if to just indicate that
theyre all sort of the same and that they dont have a lot of value. There is this
really interesting thing that happens when the boys get brought in and that is that they
get to play 70 minutes in heaven. So the boys get to select a girl and like
one boy gets to spend 70 minutes in a cupboard with a girl.

And the whole thing is that if
youre a companion you dont want to have sex with them beforehand cause thats not
what companions do, but it is what concubines do. And so again there is this whole thing
that happens everywhere all around you where its the girl trying to figure out how her
decision on what she wants to do sexually will influence her reputation and her future.
I thought the ending was perfect, I dont want to give anything away about it but you
know its my kind of ending. I could definitely recommend this book to everyone but have a
think about sort of the topic before you start reading it and make sure that youre comfortable
with reading about it cause this book is pretty intense.
So next I have Asking For It, it is out in September and it is set in a small Irish town.
The main character is called Emma O'Donovan, one night she goes to a party, she gets drunk,
she takes some drugs, and the next morning she wakes up on her front porch and she doesnt
remember whats happened to her. And then she discovers a Facebook page that is filled
with pictures that document what happened the night before and basically she was raped
and sort of sexually assaulted in a variety of ways and these pictures are just all over
the place.

Shes piecing together the story of what
happened though these pictures and this book is sort of about what happens to her and everyone
around her after this event. So you might be familiar with the Steubenville case in
the U.S. Where something very very similar happened. This book is a really really quick
read but obviously its a very difficult topic to read about.

It deals with consent
and with victim blaming. I think its very interesting that Emma is not a very likeable
character. It also very much goes into the thing that
people think that rape is something that happens in a dark alley when youre being attacked
by a stranger. And it also discusses sort of how peoples opinion changes if for example
if the victim was under the influence of drugs or alcohol or if they had sex the same night
with someone else, or if they dont respond afterwards in the way that people expect them
to respond.

I felt like this was such an eye opening but really painful read and I think
this just should be mandatory reading in high schools. Its a really important book and
I think itll make people think twice about what they say and how they think about this
topic and also how the justice system works in a situation where the laws havent been
properly updated to deal with things such as social media as evidence. When you read
asking for it the only thing that kept going through my mind is this happens a lot on various
scales and the way people respond to it is shocking. And thats why I think its
such an important book and I kind of recommend that you go and keep it up when it comes out
on September 3rd.

So those are my two reviews of two very different
but also very similar books by Louise ONeill. I hope you enjoyed these reviews, let me know
in the comments, if youve read only ever yours and what you think about it and if youre
interested in reading asking for it when it comes out. Ill put some information about
the books in the description and I will talk to you guys later. Doei!.