I’m really impressed with how much Winnie M Li was trying to accomplish with this book. For the most part, I think she pulled it off.
Because I had it in my head how this was going to go when I read it: unassuming young female on a movie set gets assaulted by a Harvey Weinstein clone. But it’s really more than that. In living up to its title, Winnie M Li shows how the whole system is wretched, including Sarah, nominally the protagonist, who has a hand in things.
Thus what I expected to happen (and likely the reader did too) happened but in a way that was thoughtful and measured. Li is able to allow Sarah’s love of film to shine through and how she so desperately wants to be a part of the industry that ruins young women like her.
I also appreciated how Sarah is an incredibly flawed protagonist. Something a lot of people can’t seem to understand both during and post-#MeToo is that there is no such thing as a perfect survivor. Certainly not Sarah, who sneers at certain women for being too beautiful, dismissing them as empty headed ignoramuses who don’t care about film. And the tension between her and her boss on the film set as Sarah tries to find her power, realizing there’s no clean way in Hollywood to do so.
My only real beef is a scene near the end that takes away from the situation. I can’t say without spoilers, I just found it annoying.
At any rate, this is a good fictional examination of 2017 culture, how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go.