Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Constant Reader December 2024 (YA) The Rumor Game

 

One of the bleakest ironies in The Rumor Game comes when Bryn Colburn mentions how she initially bonded with her boyfriend over discussion of, among other things: ‘the lazy parenting our generation received’. It might be a bit of an exaggeration to cause everything that happens in this novel a direct result of this thing; it’s not one to argue that the three narrators of this book have all been defined by this kind of parenting and that everything in the book flows from it.

The Rumor Game’s primary setting is Foxham Prep, a DC prep school in which all of the teenagers attend. Even before the action in the novel starts, it’s clear this is the kind of institution that is referred to in the local publications with that euphemism ‘embattled’ and where all of the students know of the toxic culture they’re swimming in. We hear stories of releases of revenge porn and cheating rings at an adult function and its clear how horrible this place  but it’s a place ‘where all the former presidents’ kids have gone’ and where the school ‘always caters to important parents and change the rules as needed’. This is DC, after all, and there’s little doubt the faculty knows the importance of ‘changing the narrative’. The sad part about this entire story is that you get the feeling some variation on it happens every semester at least and that nothing that happens will lead to anything changing even short term.

The novel is told by three different teenage girls of privilege: Bryn Colburn, the daughter of a political spin doctor, Georgie Khaira, the daughter of an Indian software developer’s family and Cora Fox, the African-American daughter of a prominent state politician. All of them come from families that are fundamentally broken and have no knowledge of their children’s lives at all; it’s clear they see their children only as extensions of themselves and that their achievements and failures are reflection on them rather than problems that they might have caused. Much of the action begins when Georgie’s mother insists that she go with Bryn to a school party thinking that because they live next door to each other and carpool they are friends. In reality Bryn has never even been in Georgie’s house until the book begins and its not until they have become ‘closer’ that Bryn actually goes in it for the first time. Bryn’s best friend was Cora but an incident that took place during the summer has led to Cora not only cutting her off but Bryn becoming a social pariah at Foxham.

Bryn and Cora, at the start of the novel, live and die by their social status. We constantly see icons of screens almost as punctuation in the novel, showing how many followers they have on their feeds. One of the signs of the kind of parenting that all of them have gotten is that they truly believe these qualify for human contact because they are clearly not receiving it at home.

Georgie lost a lot of weight over the summer – not by choice. Her mother essentially forced to go a weight loss camp and has been essentially starving her ever since.  We don’t get a clear perspective of the Khalra family but its clearly a very conventional Indian one. Mrs. Khalra and the ‘Aunties’ want her to live a life that is very much the structure of an arranged marriage and for her to go to an Ivy League school even though her interests are in art, not business. Georgie has clearly been raised through domestics and relatives; there are barely any conversations between her and her mother during the entire novel.

Bryn has been dealing with the fact that over the summer her father had an affair (not for the first time) and her mother found out and relapsed (not for the first time) and spent the last several months in rehab which her father is covering for (not for the first time). Bryn is also dealing with the horrible fallout from the fact that her boyfriend Jace Cunningham spent so much of the previous semester gaslighting her to the point that she tried to track them down, crashed a car and attacked them. This incident, of course, ended up with no consequences for Bryn: she’s still walking around free but her reputation is completely trashed. She’s desperate to 'change the narrative’ and she wants to get her position at Foxham back.

This leads her to do something that is horrific from the start and eventually does sicken Bryn when the consequences are playing out. At a party that Georgie and Bryn attend, Georgie gets drunk and sick. She ends up hanging out with Baez, Cora’s boyfriend, the son of a Nigerian attaché. Rumors start that Georgie and Baez hooked up and that gets to Cora. There’s also an immense amount of online bullying that becomes toxic. Bryn decides that she wants to run for student council president with Georgie as her secretary on an anti-cyberbullying campaign. Cora is already vice-president and its clear she’s doing this to try and get her best friend back. You get the feeling Bryn was a toxic personality before the incident: one of the comments on the on-line campaign poster is that the bullies are running an anti-bullying campaign. Bryn spends much of the first half of the book trying to manipulate things but quickly finds that while she can start a rumor, she can’t control the ripples.

Here's what I find the most fascinating thing about The Rumor Game. None of the three leads are either heroines or villains in the story that’s being told. Bryn would appear to be the greatest monster but as we quickly learn Jace spent a lot of time gaslighting her and then broke up with her because he told her she was acting crazy. Bryn learned about all of this the same day her mother went back to rehab and the stress was far too much for her. She has no real support system of any kind in her life besides her friends as Foxham and there’s clearly pressure from her father to become ‘the first female president’. He pays no attention to her at home, only taking her to society functions to show he’s a good family man and because his wife is absent again.

Cora would appear to be a victim in this story but we see her do some truly horrific things in her position as head of the cheer squad. At one point Georgie auditions for the squad, not because she wants to as much as she wants to change her own narrative and Cora goes out of her way to make her life hell every moment of it. Part of it is because she does believe Baez is guilty of cheating on her and even when both of them deny there’s a voice in her head that won’t let her accept it. Cora’s parents also hold her to a different standard: she has a twin sister Millie, who is clearly the parents favorite and has no real regard for Cora outside of their image. They don’t really think Baez is a good enough boy for their daughter – and it's worth noting that there’s another part of Cora’s dating life before that she might have been happier with but part of her has to live up to her parent’s image of her.

Georgie would appear to be the biggest victim of all, certainly of the many ways her mother choosing to treat her, first for being too overweight and then when she suddenly becomes beautiful about who her reputation. Georgie’s actions are as much part of her rebellion against her family as anything: they don’t even allow her to eat the delicious food they leave around the house. At the start of the novel she ends up severing relations with a childhood friend who doesn’t like who she’s turning into and who Georgie reacts harshly too. And there’s a far darker subtext to her among all the other characters: there’s talk about why they moved from Delhi to DC in the first place involving an older relative that we only learn the truth about late in the novel – and it’s clear in that case that the mother didn’t take Georgie’s side then either.

People will argue whether genetics or environment make you the person you are and in The Rumor Game, it’s pretty clear that its both, not just for the three narrators but almost certainly almost every character we meet. There are a few good people in this novel – Baez is a decent man and Riley, who ends up part of Georgie’s circle is a good guy – but basically everyone else, male or female seems to the definition of a problem child. Jace is by far the most obvious example of the monster in this book even before we meet him and he becomes even worse by the time book’s half over but he’s just the most blatant example this kind of lazy parenting that he and everyone else this book seems to have gotten. You get the feeling their parents have been leaving them to their own devices and only coming – reluctantly – to rescue them whenever they get in trouble. And there is no sign of any of the three women in this book that their parents care anything more about them than what they mean to do them. I’d argue that they are the real villains of The Rumor Game not just because they offered no support during all of the events that happened but because they don’t see any real correlation between how they raise them. Near the end of the novel one of the parents berates one of the characters on whether they raised them this way and she’s so upset that she doesn’t bother to argue. But in fact all of the events in this novel are part and parcel of the way the parents have been raising all of the children – not just the narrators but all of the students at Foxham – and that they seem to demand that take responsibility without bearing any of it themselves may be the cruelest twist of the knife.

Dhonielle Clayton and Sona Charaipotra co-wrote this novel together. Together they collaborated on Tiny Pretty Things, two novels that have since been turned into a series for Netflix. Both have written solo efforts over their careers. Clayton is the author of several series for middle schoolers, including The Conjureverse and The Belles. Both are series in which women of color involved in learning magic or controlling beauty. Charaipotra has written books that features heroines of Indian-American persuasion, such as Symptoms of a Heartbreak, in which the youngest doctor in America begins to achieve her desire to treat young people with cancer and falls in love with a teenage patient. I’m unfamiliar with either’s work, either separately or collaborative but considering that Clayton grew up in the DC suburbs and Charaipotra is a journalist who contributes to Teen People, it’s very clear this subject is near and dear to both their hearts. Considering that they make it clear in the author’s notes that they had to live with things like this but neither went to high school in the era of social media, they have a very clear picture of how horrible things can be now for teenagers like them.

In the afterward they say: “this book is about the power of words and how the things you say can have real consequences in people’s lives. It’s about how lies can become truth to many if repeated enough times by the right people.

It’s about the lies we sometimes start to believe about ourselves.”

The novel’s ending leaves me to believe that there will be little real consequences for the villains in The Rumor Game – even if the guilty party is punished, his life will go on and I suspect Foxham will remain the same toxic place it was before and after all of this happened. Clayton and Charaipotra are clever enough not to imply that much, simply suggesting in two brief postscripts that things will get better for two of the lead characters in the future.

I’m not so sure about the third one who comes across as enduring the greatest punishment as a result of the actions of this novel. Don’t get me wrong; she absolutely deserves what she gets and one of the characters is right that it will never seem like enough. But the novel also reveals that she’s being trashed by social media the same way she was before all this started and I do feel that all three women are victims of circumstances in some way.

That’s the irony of Rumor Game: though none of the three women want to admit, they are all bonded by being victims of the world they live in. Lazy parenting by parents who don’t think anything of their children except as what they mean in relation to them and who’ve never faced the consequences of their actions until now. At the end of the book all three are facing the consequences of what they do. And I really hope all of them can find a way to climb out of the holes they dug for themselves.

 One of the last things written in the novel is the line: “Too many sides to the same story.” By showing us all three sides to the plot, The Rumor Game tells you that all arguments seem like your on the right side when you’re making them and only wrong after the fact. And by showing all of the group chats that go on during the novel  the authors go out of the way to prove the real reasons why this all happened. Number five  is a universal one and it’s no surprise: “People are gullible. And they crave DRAMA.” It’s sad that’s true. But where would fiction and art be without it?

 

 

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