Review: The Steep & Thorny Way

The Steep & Thorny Way by Cat Winters
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

If you've ever engaged me on this forum or read my review of Catcher in the Rye, you know that I have a special hate/hate relationship with all of the "classic" literature that was required reading in all of my AP English classes. Hamlet is the play that I dislike the least. I don't like the play, I just hate it a little less than most of the others. Don't even get me started on Hamlet's whore/Madonna complex because we'll be here all day; but the reason I hate the play a little less is because - spoiler alert - almost everyone dies. Given everything that happened in that play, it was the ending most fitting.

If this book, a retelling of sorts, had ended that way, I'd have liked it a whole lot more. I could go into all of the reasons why this didn't work for me, and there are plenty, but it was mainly the narrator/main character - because she was just a real piece of work that I could not relate to. As a black woman, I could not relate to this black teenage girl; and that's important to me when the story involves racism. Suffice to say that this just wasn't for me.

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