REVIEW: All the Rage by Courtney Summers

All the Rage by Courtney Summers was such a powerful, emotional novel.  I knew that it would be based on the author and based on the subject matter.  Everything that I've read by Courtney Summers previous to this has felt very brutally honest and I think Courtney Summers has an amazing talent of writing emotion into every word of her stories and All the Rage is no exception.

I went through such a gamut of emotions reading All the Rage ... sadness, anger, heaviness, hope, but most of all I felt rage. Rage at the situations in this book and rage that there are still communities in which the events of All the Rage would be all too familiar. All the Rage is an amazing story, one that shines a light on rape culture and its consequences and I feel like this is a very important novel.

All the Rage tells the story not only of our main character, Romy Grey, but also the story of a community and the importance of gender, privilege and reputation are and the way in which these differences mean that young women like Romy who don't have family connections or a respectable reputation are subject to abuse and shame and struggle amongst a community that will not protect or support them.

This book plunges the reader into a very dark place right at the start of the novel and at times throughout the book this book gets darker and bleaker.  Because Romy is a girl who speaks a difficult truth about the sheriff's son and it is overlooked by people in a position to help her.  Her truth is overlooked and that causes so many other consequences in this community especially when another girl goes missing after a party.

This book can be so difficult to read at times as the reader witnesses all of the injustices big and small that Romy faces from other students, from adults, from the sheriff.  This whole book made my stomach clench at the horrible things Romy faces and absolute fury that things like this can and do happen but I also felt hope, especially in relation to Romy's friendship with someone she works with at the diner at the edge of town.

All the Rage by Courtney Summers is an honest, unflinching, emotional story and it reinforces Courtney Summers' place on my list of all-time favourite authors.