emma's Reviews > The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer

Well, this book didn’t exactly age like a fine wine!!!!

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This is the wearing-eyeliner-on-your-bottom-lid-but-not-your-top of books. The I Heart Justin Bieber graphic tee of series start-offs. The Twilight of YA fantasy paranormal romance. Wait. Twilight is the Twilight of that.

Anyway.

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer has all those fresh fresh 2011 tropes we knew and loved back in the day, and they...do not look clean as a whistle in the harsh light of modernity.

Young adult fantasy isn’t exactly a utopia in 2018, but man, reading this book really made me wonder how we survived for so many years! This was like a grocery list of lightly offensive tropes. YA typically has at least one of them, but to have so many! It’s almost impressive.

Except no.

There’s a certain je ne sais quoi about YA fantasy of this type that is immediately evident. Maybe it’s the mildly sh*tty writing; maybe it’s the intense self-ostracization of the inevitably brunette protagonist; or maybe it’s the INSTANT APPEARANCE OF THE HOTTEST BOY IN SCHOOL, WHO NEVER TALKS TO ANY GIRLS but ohmygod wait is he coming to talk to you??? Ohmygod Mara!!!

It’s probably the latter.

So I knew from the get-go that this was going to be a Twilightian tale, but I didn’t know just how bad it would get. Until I was straight up informed, with the following quote, delivered straight into the eyes of our protagonist by the hottest British mouth ever to grace the Florida coast:

“You’re not like other girls.”

The subtext was screaming those five words so hard I didn’t think that they needed to be said outright!!! But I guess I forgot that the writing of this book is Not Good.

But even before that, I was given a warning. The quintessential good-looking blonde rich mean teens that rule this high school are named Anna and Aiden. Aiden is gay. His nickname is “The Mean Queen.”

When the lovely Mara, our unique brunette protagonist, asks her token gay friend - who is actually a token bi friend in this book for flair (but still professes his lack of attraction to Mara in order to be the sexless fixture so required by all early 2010s teens) - why Aiden has this nickname, Jamie (said lack-of-sex object) says because it’s obvious, and because he’s mean.

Are they...are they calling him a “queen” because he’s gay?

Uhhh. Pretty sure that sh*t wasn’t exactly enthusiastically approved even a whopping seven years ago.

There is also, in another totally predictable twist of horribleness, so much slut shaming based on clothes. Every mean character (meaning every single female who isn’t Mara, her love interest’s sister, or her brother’s girlfriend) is described for the absolute horrors of their, like, showing a shoulder or whatever.

Gasp!

One little tidbit that I forgot even happened in this type of book was that a natural branching off from the not like other girls trope was the you-don’t-need-makeup cliché???? So classic. So good. That’s another one that’s just outright said:

“You don’t need makeup.”

Soooo romanticcccc. What a dreamboat. Question mark. Is that the desired response???

Furthermore.

The girl hate in this is like none I’ve ever seen, or at least like none I can remember and haven’t repressed due to my having read it in middle school.

EVERY SINGLE GIRL IN THE BOOK EXCLUDING THE AFOREMENTIONED TWO HATES MARA SIMPLY BASED ON THE FACT THAT SHE HAS GOTTEN INTO THE PANTS, AND APPARENTLY HEART, OF ONE NOAH SHAW.

But I should talk about Noah Shaw before I talk about the girl hate.

Noah is another amaaaaazing cliché who has somehow developed the ability to walk and talk and whatnot. I was excited to get into Noah, because I remembered everyone lusting after him in 2011.

I should have realized what that would mean.

Noah is the hot inexplicably British resident of Miami, whose house is twenty-five thousand square feet but you would never know it because he’s just so down to earth. His hair is always a mess! He doesn’t tie his tie right! He wears T-shirts underneath his uniform button-down, for some reason!

Plus talk about toxic masculinity!!! He punches a guy in the face for saying he’d f*ck Mara so hard that whoever pulled him out would be crowned King of England. (Which, disgusting, but like...also kind of funny. Almost. If it weren’t a rape joke.) Then he gets in another fight like two days later, but it might have been longer because sometimes they just say “weeks passed” in this book. ANOTHER AWESOME TROPE.

Noah checks the tragic backstory box in a big way (his mom was murdered in front of him at a protest and his dad is, like, so rich but so distant) and he’s SUCH a bad boy. He’s really promiscuous, but we won’t shame him for it like we shame all the girls in this book because I could, like, totally fix him.

It’s, in a word, amazing. No satire could ever lock onto male love interest tropes like this book manages to.

Also at one point Noah literally says (always outright with this book!) that he’s going to “fix” Mara. So. Just to let you know that the mental illness rep is sh*t, alongside the gay and bi rep being awful. And also Mara’s half-Indian, which comes into play only alongside a mention of the saris her mom buries in her closet in order to “be American.”

Make up your own mind on that one?

Anyway. When Mara gives into the ~true love~ between Noah and herself, girls she doesn’t know elbow her. They shove her books out of her arms. They hate her so much that when the Spanish teacher fails her on the exam out of spite, none of them stand up for her.

Gasp!

The plot of this is also so confusing. Time passes in jumps. Every day follows the same structure so it’s impossible to tell what’s happening.

But it all boils down beautifully to the not-so-happy-but-like-happy-in-an-edgy-emo-way ending: It turns out Mara and Noah are meant to be because their chosen-one style magic powers match up. (Aw!)

Bottom line: This book is truly a better, more obvious encapsulation of every YA fantasy trope I can think of than any satire could ever possibly hope to be. Which is, in a way, strangely entertaining.

I might have to continue the series just because of that.