Name: Not My Ruckus
ISBN: 9781953971005

Chad Musick

14-year-old Clare fights through her parents' lies and her epilepsy to save herself and best friend from secrets that have already led to one murder.

Not My Ruckus

Eliana Mor

To start, this book was amazing. We follow 14-year-old Clare (who also goes by Lilac) and her friendship with her neighbor Esther. The book starts off when Esther kisses Clare but things get extremely complicated when Esther's mother is killed at the same time. It was extremely interesting to see how Clare worked through things, like Esther's mother's death and her father's abuse, and Clare's religious upbringing at its flaws. The "twist" was well planned out and made sense, the characters that we trusted and didn't at the end made sense, I felt uncomfortable with the characters that were bad people. I also appreciated the content warnings being included in the book, I think it's incredibly important for the author to include that.

A list of the content most commonly mentioned as potentially distressing that appears in this book, with a note about how explicit the content is: childhood sexual assault (implied, except one explicit paragraph describing groping); child abuse, physical (explicit and frequent); gun violence (mentioned); blood; food deprivation; self-harm (intentional triggering of seizures, no other self-harm); animal death (described: birds; mentioned: other); teen pregnancy; miscarriage (implied); physical violence (explicit); exploitation of children (mentioned, implied); domestic violence (explicit); gaslighting (implied); forced prostitution (implied); arson (explicit); mutilation and maiming (explicit); incest (implied); ableism (explicit); medical neglect (explicit); murder (described).

anderson elizabeth

This was possibly the most well-written book I've ever read in my life but it was also the hardest book to get through. Those content warnings are not messing around at all. There's a content warning for a whole lot of very heavy content ranging from religious trauma to a whole slew of forms of abuse, so tread lightly when going into reading this book. I think it is a book that is super important and that everyone should read but I also think it's a book that I can only handle reading once in my life. This is despite the fact that I have thought about Clare and her story almost every single day since I finished reading it.

These characters are so painfully human. I was horrified by a lot of things that happened in this book but knowing that the author was drawing from events in their life was a whole other trip for this reading experience. Not my Ruckus tackles many of the horrors that I’m aware of in people's lives but seeing it, or rather hearing it in my case, added a whole other level of mindfuckery. Every time I thought I knew where the book was going Chad Musick said “sike!” and went in a different direction. 

One of the things that I think made the book so incredibly impactful was the fact that it was from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old and it genuinely felt like you were in the mind of a fourteen-year-old. Clare was so used to her abuse that she had been experiencing it her entire childhood that she talked about it in a nonchalant way. This made it even more painful for me as a 22-year-old adult to read because I could tell that she thought that this was just the norm.

Thank you Netgalley and Cinnabar Moth Publishing LLC for giving me access to an ARC of the audiobook. I enjoyed the narrator that was selected for this novel.

Not My Ruckus

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