The Revenge Game by Jordyn Taylor. Delacorte Press, 2023. 9780593563649
Rating: 1-5 (5 is an excellent or a Starred review) 3
Format: Hardcover
Genre: Mystery/realistic fiction
What did you like about the book? It’s the first year of coed education at Sullivan-Stewart, a newly combined but storied boarding school. Junior Alyson Benowitz, brilliant and bookish, has opted for AP English and finds herself paired with a senior: gorgeous BMOC and lacrosse captain Brenton Riggs, Jr. As this epistolary novel opens, he’s gone missing after prom, with his disappearance covered breathlessly on national media. The plot proceeds along two paths: the nightly news stories set in the present and Aylson’s first person narrative relating their evolving romance. Riggs turns out to be the perfect boyfriend: supportive of Alyson’s dreams of becoming a romance novelist, attentive, sweet, and sexy. Then Alyson overhears rumors about the King’s Cup, a year-long contest among the Sullivan boys to bag sexual experiences and report on them in puerile fashion. Riggs couldn’t possibly be one of the competitors, right? As various other boys turn out to be part of the cruel tradition, Alyson and friends launch the Queen’s Cup, which delivers public humiliations to male perpetrators, such as engineering dramatic dissing of promposals. As the parallel narratives converge, readers will begin to doubt Riggs’s integrity long before the main character does. Boarding school novels have their devout fans, and The Revenge Game combines that popular setting with a mystery and some frank and welcome sex positivity about female desire. Most characters cue as White and straight, although one queer girl couple rounds out Alyson’s friend group.
Anything you didn’t like about it? For someone so brilliant, Alyson remains woefully naive about Briggs’s shortcomings, despite the repeated warnings of her BFF and the odd behavior changes in Briggs’s former girlfriend. All the boy characters in the book are absolutely awful, which was probably a decision Taylor made in order to justify the girls’ responses, but also made the toxic school and corrupt staff unbelievable. The boys’ transgressions were so cruel that it’s hard to see how the girls would believe that their succession of mean tricks could constitute an effective solution.
To whom would you recommend this book? Despite its feminist messaging, this book was a miss for me but may be a possible read alike recommendation to teen readers who enjoyed Clique Bait by Ann Valett or the Girls with Sharp Sticks series by Suzanne Young. Older teens may want to move right on over to adult novels set in boarding schools with feminist themes, such as The Swallows by Lisa Lutz or the now classic Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld.
Who should buy this book? Public libraries
Where would you shelve it? Mystery
Should we (librarians/readers) put this on the top of our “to read” piles? No
Reviewer: Susan Harari, Keefe Library, Boston Latin School, Boston, MA
Date of review: January 20, 2024
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