Blog Tour: The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis – Review + Giveaway

Hi guys! Welcome to my stop on The Female of the Species blog tour, hosted by Irish Banana Tours. I am excited to share my thoughts about this book with you, so that you can run and grab it on release day. This is my favorite McGinnis book, to date. Don’t forget to enter the giveaway at the bottom, before you go!

ABOUT THE BOOK

Publication: September 20th 2016

Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books

Genres: YA, Contemporary, Mystery

Format: eARC Source: Blog Tour

My Rating: 

Alex Craft knows how to kill someone. And she doesn’t feel bad about it. When her older sister, Anna, was murdered three years ago and the killer walked free, Alex uncaged the language she knows best. The language of violence.

While her crime goes unpunished, Alex knows she can’t be trusted among other people, even in her small hometown. She relegates herself to the shadows, a girl who goes unseen in plain sight, unremarkable in the high school hallways.

But Jack Fisher sees her. He’s the guy all other guys want to be: the star athlete gunning for valedictorian with the prom queen on his arm. Guilt over the role he played the night Anna’s body was discovered hasn’t let him forget Alex over the years, and now her green eyes amid a constellation of freckles have his attention. He doesn’t want to only see Alex Craft; he wants to know her.

So does Peekay, the preacher’s kid, a girl whose identity is entangled with her dad’s job, though that does not stop her from knowing the taste of beer or missing the touch of her ex-boyfriend. When Peekay and Alex start working together at the animal shelter, a friendship forms and Alex’s protective nature extends to more than just the dogs and cats they care for.

Circumstances bring Alex, Jack, and Peekay together as their senior year unfolds. While partying one night, Alex’s darker nature breaks out, setting the teens on a collision course that will change their lives forever.

Add To Goodreads

 

Purchase: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

~REVIEW~

And it has happened…….Mindy McGinnis has finally made me a true fan. I love this book! This may be a trigger for some, as it deals with issues such as: rape,sex, fanaticism, drugs/alcohol abuse, and violence. It took me mere hours to devour this book. I cringed through it. Not because I didn’t like it, but because this is a dark and gritty story that involves teens. I can’t get over how McGinnis just…..went there. I’ll just say it; this book needs to be passed around to teenagers everywhere. It’s not just about how “poverty breeds desperation”- as the preacher said in this book, that makes people do violent things. I’m not going to excuse someone’s actions just because they have had it bad. We are all human beings, and accountable for our actions. Females are always being slammed with criticism for dressing and acting a certain way. And here we have not only those issues, but 3 teens who become forever entwined by their experiences. 

Alex: She once had a sister, Anna. Anna was murdered years ago, and her killer walked free. Alex has always appeared to be quiet. McGinnis takes what happened to Anna and gives us an example of how females have the instincts to be dangerous. To put it lightly, Alex let loose. She did it in such a way that it’s hard to swallow that this smart, kind girl can get violent. People see this girl going for runs, volunteering at the animal shelter, and is at the top of her class. But Alex knows herself. I’m not justifying anything that she did in this book, but I do like how the author portrays her. I’m all for the feminist movement, but I don’t condone retaliation for wrong-doing. Still, this is a damn good story! 

Claire a.k.a Peekay (PK-Preacher’s Kid): The preacher’s kid who drinks and has sex. She doesn’t want her father’s profession to be her identity. I can’t even imagine being in her shoes. Society expects her to be this perfect girl, and she is far from it. When she starts volunteering at the animal shelter, she learns that there is more to Alex Craft than people realize. Alex tries to make Peekay understand that she is adding to the debasing of females by her words and actions against her ex’s girlfriend. Or to stop adhering to a nickname that you clearly don’t like. I like when they were getting to know each other. You know, girl power and all that jazz. Society is always slut-shaming girls about the clothes they wear, and if the girl is drunk then she is accountable for anything negative that happens to her. The obscene gestures that no one thinks are meant to be sexual, but are. We live in a world where it has only gotten worse as the decades roll by.

Jack: You can find him in any high school across the world. He’s the good looking guy that all the girls want to be seen with, and he is all too happy to oblige. When the search for Anna was underway 3 years ago, he was getting his freak on, only mere yards from where her body was found. To this day, he has felt guilty. He and Alex are both in the running for Valedictorian, but Alex is all too happy to give the title to him since she doesn’t have any desire to even leave town. He sees her now, and he wants to know more about her. 

Alex starts forming relationships and is very protective. She is also very perceptive, and doing or saying the wrong thing to her has major consequences. Do all girls need to be more like her, in the ways of awareness and not standing for slut-shaming and inequality in the culture of rape? Yes, yes they do. This book will be detracting for some readers. It is dark and gritty and I couldn’t put it down until the last page. But I hope that this story gets read by all because it is so important to understand everything I mentioned above. This may be the best book McGinnis has written.

I highly recommend reading this book if you aren’t adverse to heavy topics. Once you start, you won’t want to put it down until the end; and then you will wonder what it is that you just read. In a good way, of course.

---

 

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mindy McGinnis is a YA author who has worked in a high school library for thirteen years. Her debut, NOT A DROP TO DRINK, a post-apocalyptic survival story set in a world with very little freshwater, has been optioned for film my Stephanie Meyer’s Fickle Fish Films. The companion novel, IN A HANDFUL OF DUST was released in 2014. Look for her Gothic historical thriller, A MADNESS SO DISCREET in October of 2015 from Katherine Tegen Books. Mindy is represented by Adriann Ranta of Wolf Literary.

Website | Twitter | Facebook

 

 

Tour Schedule

Week 1:

9/12: Swoony Boys Podcast – Review

9/13: A Reader Under the Sea – Q&A

9/14: Pretty Deadly Reviews – Review

9/15: Brittany’s Book Rambles – Guest Post

9/16: Lekeisha the Booknerd – Review

 

Week 2:

9/19: The Irish Banana Review – Q&A

9/20: Fiction Fare – Review

9/21: Fiery Reads – Playlist

9/22: Ex Libris – Review

9/23: A Glass of Wine – Top 10

 

GIVEAWAY

3 finished copies of The Female of the Species (US only)

a Rafflecopter giveaway