Narrated by Emily Durante
Uses for Boys, a YA story, isn’t really a romance. There is a romantic thread near the end, but mainly it is (or tries to be) the story of Anna coming to value herself.
Anna is very lonely. She’s left alone by her mother, who (at least in Anna’s version of the story) basically abandons her in the search for boyfriends/husbands for fulfilment. The storytelling is very stylized and there are many very short chapters, separately headed, giving the book an episodic feel, full of little vignettes, which show glimpses of Anna’s life.
To be honest I thought Anna was going to be more sexually active. Apart from an incident with a grubby dickbag boy on the bus (which I would view as assault more than anything else quite frankly), her consensual sex partners are almost always boyfriends and there are only three boyfriends over the course of about three years so even though, yes, she is very young to be having sex at all, she wasn’t the town bike either.
Warning: Anna is sexually assaulted by the brother of a friend while on holiday – it isn’t violent but if you have triggers, beware. Unfortunately, it’s never really dealt with in the story.
Approximately 15% into the book, my heart was breaking for Anna. She was so desperate for someone to love her; she was willing to give up parts of herself to get any kind of affection. But after she had moved out of home at age of 16, I began (unfairly) to find myself impatient with her. I wanted her to take charge of her life, to insist on good treatment.
When Anna met Sam, about two-thirds of the way through the book, I had hopes that she would learn from him to respect herself more. I’m not sure that she did. I’m not sure her actions were more about seeking approval from Sam and his family as opposed to her taking a stand for herself. I’m not sure where she goes from here.
Emily Durante does a good job with the narration but I found it difficult to hear her as a 13-16 year-old girl. Her voice for Toy, Anna’s friend, was more like what I would have expected while Anna sounded much older than she was. Perhaps that was a deliberate choice as Anna’s language was often older sounding even though the actual words used revealed her extreme youth. What Durante did do particularly well here was to allow the listener to hear the distance with which Anna tells her own stories. The pain is under the surface, the delivery often in a kind of monotone, which is reflected by the text. Some of the parts of the story (those which were the most heartbreaking) were rendered more powerful by this.
I wanted more detail and a more hopeful ending. In the end, the spare style frustrated me more than charmed. But, don’t be fooled into thinking this is a story about a slutty girl who deserves what’s happening to her and who merely makes bad choice after bad choice. It’s a story about a lonely fragile girl who is so emotionally abandoned, she imprints (over and again) on the first person who shows her some affection – and about boys who should be taught to respect women and girls better than they do.
Kaetrin
Narration: B-
Book Content: C
Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in (also a scene of non-consensual sex)
Violence: Domestic Violence (non-violent sexual assault)
Genre: General Fiction – Young Adult
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Uses for Boys was provided to AudioGals for review by Brilliance Audio.
