Exit, Pursued by a Bear by E.K. Johnston

 

**TW: Sexual assault**

I bought E.K. Johnston's Exit, Pursued by a Bear so long ago that I do not remotely remember the circumstances under which I acquired it. What I do know is that it has been sitting on my shelf for years, so I decided to put it in my 22 in 2022 Challenge. I finally got around to picking it up last week.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear is a young adult contemporary fiction novel following high school senior Hermione Winters. As the novel begins, she is on her way to cheer camp with the rest of her cheerleading team. She's feeling a mixture of excitement and sadness over it, because she will be graduating this year, so this will be her last camp experience. Cheerleading is a big deal at her small town high school, and her team is very competitive at cheer competitions. Cheer is her whole life, and she can't wait to spend the next few weeks bonding with her team and working on their skills.

Her plans go awry, however, when someone drugs her at a a camp dance and sexually assaults her. When she wakes up the next morning, she is in a hospital with no memory of what happened to her. She goes through the process of being examined by doctors and speaking with police officers, but the DNA they manage to pull from her body is unusable. Without her memory of what happened, the investigation can't go anywhere. She has to return to school without any closure and try to process what happened to her. Throughout the course of the story, Hermione works on healing from this horrific event and moving on with her life.  She has to deal with awkward conversations with her parents, rumors spreading at her school, and the flashes of dread she feels around men. Throughout it all, she is certain about one thing--she does not want her rape to define her. With her own determination, and the support of her friends and family, she starts making her way back towards normalcy.  

I thought this novel was okay. Good, but not great. On the positive side, I thought that Johnston handled the difficult subject matter with respect and sensitivity. She didn't shy too much away from describing the ugliness of what happened to Hermione, but she kept things appropriate for a young adult audience. Her writing was also easy to read and flowed nicely. The story was consistently interesting and I never found myself being bored or disengaged. Sexual assault happens to teenagers all too often, and I think it is important to read stories like this, to show the struggles survivors go through and shed light on this social issue. The book was very readable and there was nothing glaringly wrong with it.

What I did struggle with though, was the feeling that something was consistently off about the whole thing. Hermione's character, for example, was a little too perfect and well-adjusted. She is never thinking the wrong thing, never too upset, never too mad or scared or...anything really. She's so leve-headed that she lacked a personality entirely. Throughout the novel, she talks about feeling disconnected from the assault because she doesn't remember it--almost like it happened to someone else. I don't doubt that this is true for some survivors, but I think this affected the emotional impact of the story, because she was so calm and logical about everything all the time. She's a teenager that was violently raped and abandoned in a lake at her summer camp. Her demeanor just felt so...unaffected, like maybe Johnston was afraid to upset her readers too much by making Hermione sad or scared about it. This is a tricky element to comment on, however, because of course, there is no one correct way to feel about being raped. What I can say though, is that if this was the genuine response Hermione would feel in this situation, Johnston's writing did not carry it off believably.     

In addition to this, everything that happens to her afterward felt too perfect as well. Her friends unfailingly support her, the police and her parents always say the right things, the rumors that start up at her school blow over almost immediately, and the ending of the novel is unrealistically convenient for her. It's the best possible version of the aftermath of a rape. I guess that does happen sometimes, but again, it all felt too neat and tidy. Her therapist, in particular, deserves special mention as being unbelievably perfect. He has an amazing sense of humor, makes house calls, is available 24/7, and even tutors Hermione in calculus during their sessions. Hermione later comments that he has taken her on as a patient purely because is about to retire and didn't want a younger therapist to step in and try to "use her case to make their career" by writing papers and such about her. Maybe this is just my cynicism showing, but I don't believe Hermione's case is all that special or different (sadly), so I thought this reasoning was ridiculous. It was weird. 

There were a few other small things that irked me too. One of the running plot elements during the novel was the idea that every year, one student at Hermione's school dies from a drunk driving accident and one other student ends up pregnant. They keep returning to this idea at various points throughout the plot and it felt weird, forced, and completely unrealistic. Another issue was the numerous lines from Star Wars peppered throughout the text. I love Star Wars, but there was absolutely no indication that Hermione did, so seeing the lines come out of her mouth randomly was weird. It wasn't a situation where the lines were meant to be Easter eggs for the reader either--some of the lines had specific words like "Wookie" in them, so it was intentional on the part of the characters. There was just no characterization present to support them loving the franchise so much that it has invaded their daily language, so it didn't feel genuine.

So ultimately, I thought this novel was okay. It was engaging, handled a difficult topic with respect, and shed light on an issue that we clearly need to think about more. What frustrated me the most with it was how much better it could have been. There were so many little elements that felt strange--the odd dialogue choices, the forced plot elements, and the too-perfect nature of Hermione and those around her--and all of these things combined together pulled the overall reading experience down. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either.

Challenge Tally

22 in 2022: 8/22

Total Books Read in 2022: 37