Veronica Mars meets Moxie in this hilarious and biting YA contemporary novel following Margot Mertz, a girl who runs an internet cleanup business and embarks on a quest to take down a revenge-porn site targeting the girls in her school.
For the right price, high school junior Margot Mertz will go to the ends of the internet to remove your nip-slip, dick pic, or embarrassing DM. At least that’s what it says on her business card. Margot founded a now notorious company that helps students, teachers, even a local weatherman, discreetly clean up their digital shame. And since her parents lost her college fund, Margot is happy to work for anyone…if they can pay, she can clean.
But when a fellow student hires her to take down some leaked nudes, Margot discovers a secret revenge porn site featuring Roosevelt High girls. And hell hath no fury like Margot when she sees girls’ butts shared without their consent. With the help of an unwitting ally, the popular and uncomfortably handsome Avery Green, Margot will gain access to the far flung cliques of Roosevelt High. Anything to find the mastermind (read: asshole) behind the site. But the more she digs, the deeper and darker the case becomes until Margot realizes that some jobs are so dirty, no one can come away clean. Even her. Gross.
This is the closest I've come to finding a YA book that's really funny in a while! This book is all from Margot's point of view, and she has a wry tone that's really funny to listen to.
It also deals with a very serious subject, and it doesn't shy away from showing the damage it can wreck on (mostly) girls' lives. Revenge porn is not treated with anything like the seriousness it deserves and I can't blame Margot at all for her reactions to it. The perpetrators are absolutely pigs.
I also liked, although I know that some readers won't, that the ending is kind of open ended. Lives don't end neatly, so it felt weirdly right that, although a huge portion of her life has come to an end, the rest of it is uncertain and uneven, and that's weirdly great. More books should end that way.
The characters are great; no one is completely one thing or another (with a spoilery exception I won't mention, because, er, spoilers) they all have ups and downs and different character traits. It's a great change from the one note characters that can fill other stories.
A great read, one I heartily recommend and hope that plenty of people read.
BE AWARE: slut shaming, mentions of rape, sexual harrassment.
Margot Mertz Takes it Down publishes on the 9th of November. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.
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