Review: Moxie

Moxie

By Jennifer Mathieu

Published: September 19, 2017

An unlikely teenager starts a feminist revolution at a small-town Texas high school in this novel from Jennifer Mathieu, author of The Truth About Alice.

MOXIE GIRLS FIGHT BACK!

Vivian Carter is fed up. Fed up with an administration at her high school that thinks the football team can do no wrong. Fed up with sexist dress codes, hallway harassment, and gross comments from guys during class. But most of all, Viv Carter is fed up with always following the rules.

Viv's mom was a tough-as-nails, punk rock Riot Grrrl in the '90s, and now Viv takes a page from her mother's past and creates a feminist zine that she distributes anonymously to her classmates. She's just blowing off steam, but other girls respond. As Viv forges friendships with other young women across the divides of cliques and popularity rankings, she realizes that what she has started is nothing short of a girl revolution.

Moxie is a book about high school life that will make you wanna riot!

My review:

Vivian starts out hesitant to rock the boat but she decides to act when no one does anything about the unfair rules and harassment towards girls at her school. Inspired by her mom's collection of Riot Grrl zines, Vivian makes one of her own and secretly distributes them in the girls' bathrooms. The zines gradually inspire the other girls at her school to make a stand of their own and the movement grows beyond anything she could have imagined.

I really liked the girl power and focus on friendships and empowerment. Not all of Vivian's friends were onboard with the Moxie movement at first and Vivian also had to figure out what she believed about feminism and how far she was willing to go to change things at her school. She also kept her involvement with Moxie a secret from her mom. She kind of wanted it to be her own thing and she also had a reputation for being a "good girl" and not a "troublemaker" the way her mom was so it was hard for her to break that mold. Although there is a romance (and a decent love interest), Vivian wasn't all about trying to impress a guy. 

Overall I thought this book was fantastic and so timely! Although I was a teen in the 90s I didn't really know anything about the Riot Grrl movement but now I wish I had. I didn't really think much about feminism till I got to college. I think during my high school years I sort of viewed feminism as this historical movement and not something that applied to my life and there was also this undeserved negative reputation that feminists were "man haters" or that you couldn't be a Christian and be a feminist. Thankfully those false ideas were debunked when I got to college! Hopefully Moxie will inspire today's young women to take a stand for themselves and cause them to view feminism as something important and relevant to their lives.

Note: I received an ARC for review purposes courtesy of the publisher and Edelweiss