3 out of 4 stars
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Official Review: Make It Stop!, by Florida Ann Town
What would you do to save a friend? In Make It Stop!, a teenager named Christie is determined to save her best friend Sahira from being trapped in an arranged marriage. As the book opens, the girls are wrapping up their high school careers, with the top-notch student Sahira holding the potential for a stellar performance in college followed by a career in veterinary medicine, and Christie thinking that she needs a “gap year” before pursuing her future studies.
As the story unfolds, we see Christie craft a plan to keep Sahira from being forced to move halfway across the world, marry her father’s cousin who is nearly three decades her senior, and give up her dreams of a career. At first, Christie thinks that she may have given her best friend a shot at the life she deserves, but a disturbing turn of events illustrates that sometimes even the best laid plans can go awry.
There are pluses and minuses to having Christie narrate the story, and having her character placed at the center of all of the action. The result of making Christie the most dynamic character in the story is that everybody else seems to pale in comparison, from her friends to the police. The reader feels bad for Sahira for being in a horrible situation, but we rarely really see what Sahira herself is feeling so much as what Christie believes she is feeling. Sahira is quite likeable, but she frequently comes across as a passive character. It’s up to her friend to save her, and as the narrative unfolds, it seems like poor Sahira needs Christie’s help to take any initiative or deal with imminent danger herself.
Furthermore, many of the supporting characters are sadly underdeveloped. The chief villain of the story is mostly described, and only very briefly shown. To produce a truce sense of menace, it would be necessary to see that character yelling and threatening, rather than being told about that character’s bad behavior through the dialogue of another character. There’s a reason why Disney villains often get songs of their own.
There are some very nice touches. The description of Christie’s home life is nicely done, with a loving father who’s horrible with relationships, a loathsome stepmother, and a baby half-sister who may not actually share any DNA with Christie. The relationship between Christie and her father is a nice contrast to Sahira and her dad. The ending pages make it clear that this is an “issue story,” where the book closes with an impassioned message and a call for action. It’s a bit preachy at the end, but one wonders if Town is drawing from real-life experience and heartbreak.
I give this book three out of four stars.
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Make It Stop!
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