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This searing and intimate novel in verse follows a sixteen-year-old girl coping with sexual abuse as she grapples with how to reclaim her story, her anger, and her body in a world that seems determined to punish her for the sin of surviving.
Sixteen-year-old Alicia Rivers has a reputation that precedes her. But there’s more to her story than the whispers that follow her throughout the hallways at school—whispers that splinter into a million different insults that really mean: a girl who has had sex. But what her classmates don’t know is that Alicia was sexually abused by a popular teacher, and that trauma has rewritten every cell in her body into someone she doesn’t recognize. To the world around her, she’s been cast, like the mythical Medusa, as not the victim but the monster of her own story: the slut who asked for it.
Alicia was abandoned by her best friend, quit the track team, and now spends her days in detention feeling isolated and invisible. When mysterious letters left in her locker hint at another victim, Alicia struggles to keep up the walls she’s built around her trauma. At the same time, her growing attraction to a new girl in school makes her question what those walls are really keeping out.
(Summary provided by the author)
Olivia A. Cole is a writer from Louisville, KY. She is the author of many novels, which include National Book Award longlist title Ariel Crashes a Train, as well as Dear Medusa, Where the Lockwood Grows, and others. Olivia’s essays have been published at Bitch Media, Real Simple, the LA Times, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, Gay Mag, and others.
Olivia A. Cole is an author, blogger, and poet. Her work has been published in such publications as The Oregon Literary Review, The Comstock Review, The Huffington Post, The Daily Dot, xoJane, and others. She was a semi-finalist in the 2014 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards. She published her first novel, Panther in the Hive, in April 2014 and its sequel, The Rooster's Garden, in February 2016.
Olivia grew up in Louisville, KY and lived there until she moved to Chicago in 2007, where she attended Columbia College Chicago, earning a B.A. in Cultural Studies with a minor in Poetry. She fell in love with the city of Chicago–it later became the setting for Panther in the Hive.
On social media, Olivia is @RantingOwl, where she is often as thrilled with the existence of the Internet and as she is annoyed by it. She is currently writing a YA sci-fi series, and a literary novel whose plot is a secret.
(Biography provided by the author)
