It does a huge service to the story, and shows how simple it is to make a zine. They’re in the book! Jen has made zines before, so she didn’t come as a newbie to this concept (thankfully), and she made the Moxie zines that are within the pages. If you liked 13 Reasons Why but wanted to see more of a resistance or girls fighting back at their abusers and the system – this is what you’ll be looking for. While students are hesitant at first to be marked as rebels, soon others start to take Moxie into their own directions, and suddenly, Viv’s started a feminist revolution at her conservative Texas high school.
She includes calls to action to see if anyone will join her – like in the first zine, she asks people to come to school the next day with hearts and stars drawn on their hands. She wants to be kept secret from the zines – she doesn’t want or need the attention, and she wants girls to pick them up on their own accord. She gets royally pissed off and knows exactly what to do: start a zine that calls out the problems and secretly leave it around the school. Viv expects to live a normal, boring life, but when she sees a series of awful sexist things happen at school, something inside her explodes.
Vivan’s a ‘nice girl’ and keeps to herself but fantasizes about her mom’s riotous past. Moxie is the story of Vivan Carter, whose mom was once a riot grrrl, but any evidence now sleeps in a box in the closet while her mom works extra shifts as a nurse. I’m so happy Moxie is now out in the world, because this book means SO MUCH to me. This was the book I didn’t know I’d been so desperately waiting for. When I heard about Jennifer Mathieu’s book Moxie, I practically fell out of my seat. The riot grrrls of the ’90s are now moms, people! I hadn’t thought much about how they’re being made by teens these days, or if they could fit into YA books, until it happened (so I’m glad someone else was thinking about it).
I am the last person to say that ‘zines are dead,’ but I do think that they mostly exist within certain subcultures and that they ebb and flow through decades. And when we get onto talking about history repeating itself, it’s good to talk about the positive things that are bubbling up, too, like how we can show people how tools like zines and music and power in numbers can pack a punch.
We’ve seen this with Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give most specifically this year. I think this is where we can see change in lit, starting with young people who are fired up or need something to fire them up. It’s been fascinating watching what kinds of YA books are coming out now in tandem to the world’s current political climate. Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu, via Roaring Brook Press, out now.
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