I read the first book and didn’t love it. That’s mostly because I can’t stand books written in first person present tense. I also find that most YA dystopias don’t really work because the authors seem stuck on themes that made classic dystopian novels work decades ago. The biggest threats facing our world now are…

Not gonna lie - it’s rough.

I still need to read both of those! The earliest gothic I’ve read is The Mysteries of Udolpho and not gonna lie....that was hard to get through.

What DNA would they have to compare it to?

Right? It’s NYC - I’m sure there are other coffee shops just steps away. Just go to one of those....why complain?

I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not...

Released 2007. It’s not really like Christopher Pike (that’d be more interesting?) It’s not really horror-ish at all. It’s more of a melodramatic teen “issues” book. I think actual teens might find it moving, but to an adult (well, I was 24 when I read it, so meh) it was very eye roll-worthy.

Before Hannah kills herself, she records a bunch of tapes where she explains why she killed herself and lists what 13 people did to wrong her. She says they have to listen to them all and then pass the tapes on to the next person on the list. If they don’t, she has a way to release all of the tapes publicly and…

Haha. Your description reminds me of Scream Queens (which I’m actually weirdly liking right now?)

I remember having to record using cassette tapes back in 2005 for a high school French project (I think?) But yeah, they’re not something I was using much!

I guess I’d hope that someone in the writer’s room would realize how fucking weird & toxic some of it is and try to change it around, but who knows.

Haha. The book was released in 2007. Even though that wasn’t that long ago, I feel like cassette tapes were still one of the easiest ways to record yourself at that time.

You can read the synopsis on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_…

My biggest problem with the book (erm, spoiler alert!) is the part where Hannah sends the tapes to her ex-friend, then reveals that this ex-friend was raped at a party. The ex-friend was either drugged or blackout drunk (I forget) and probably didn’t remember this occurring. So now not only does she know (thanks to…

Yeah, I agree. It seemed like the author just wanted to write a shocking “issues” book. None of the topics were handled very sensitively (rape, in particular)

It’s definitely a weird subject to have a tv show be about. It’s one thing to do with a book - yet I feel like the author undermined his message about bullying victims by essentially making the victim a creepy sociopath (I don’t think she’s supposed to come off that way, but I left the book with that vibe).

I thought that book was dumb. But I might watch the series.

Fair enough. Whenever I see the covers of self-published M/M romance on Goodreads, it basically screams “porn” to me, but that could just be bad graphic choices.

Over time, I think a lot of tropes from earlier romances go out of favor. Audiences today are looking for something different than audiences of decades ago (for example, rape - perpetrated by the “Hero” - was extremely common in romance novels until about the 1980s). I’m not sure why you think there would be more…

That makes sense. I guess I tend to think of a lot of modern romance as being pretty smutty (basically porn for women) without a ton of literary merit. Especially when it comes to M/M or F/F romance, which are often self-published and of dubious quality. Which is why I’d question why straight women were consuming F/F…