I love a good book that has abundant, smart use of literary allusion, especially of titles like To Kill a Mockingbird that aren’t your traditional white man titles. The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney had a lot to like for me, despite some of the issues I had primarily with the main character, Alex. But if you’re looking for your readalong to titles like The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks, Chris Lynch’s Inexcusable, or Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, this might be your winner.

We begin with a bang: Alex wakes up and doesn’t know where she is, but she knows she’s lying in bed with a boy she doesn’t know well. She’ll just sneak away quietly, since she doesn’t WANT to know why she is where she is. That’s when she notices the two condom wrappers in the garbage and the can of coke that wasn’t recycled. Then it hits her — she did something last night she didn’t want to do.

When she returns to her room after hearing Carter, the mystery boy, tell her what fun he had last night, her roommates immediately tell her she’s been raped and needs to get justice. The Themis Academy doesn’t believe any of their students would ever do anything bad, so they don’t really tackle things like rape cases (all their students are perfect, don’t you know). Instead, her roommates urge her to seek justice from The Mockingbirds, a student-run group that tries student cases that would otherwise go unnoticed by school administration.

In the meanwhile and during the preparation and trial, Alex begins spending more and more time with Martin, a science geek who was also around the night of the incident. He makes her feel safe and secure, particularly as she continues experiencing flashbacks from her night with Carter. Is she sure it was rape, or was she a consenting participant?

The Mockingbirds had a great premise and I think hits on some important issues in a way that makes Alex a character who is more than her issue. However, I found Alex a bit of an irritating character: throughout the end of the book, she is heralded as a hero for standing up and speaking out. Unfortunately, I don’t buy it. Alex never seemed convinced she was raped, and when she mentions it (somewhat off-handedly, I think) to her roommates, they jump to get her to act. I think they’re in it for selfish gains — T. S. does it to spend more time with Alex’s older sister (and get herself a good word with the board of the Mockingbirds) and Maia does it because it’ll give her experience for law school. And Alex just rode the wave. She never quite came together for me and as such, it was hard for me to feel much sympathy for her.

I had a hard time buying that there was not a single adult around who would help out. When Alex confesses what happened to a teacher she trusted (and whom I felt she used her because of her connections to Juliard), the teacher doesn’t even offer to help. In a story set in contemporary times, especially at a private, coed high school, this was impossible for me to wrap my head around. With over 320 pages, too, we only ever got one mention of a mother and father. While I understand they’re not there, I couldn’t quite buy that they’d never check in on their daughter or their daughter, who was clearly traumatized from the rape, never once sought their help. I get she didn’t want to have to leave the school, but, it didn’t gel for me.

That brings me to the real issue I had, I suppose, which was that this was never a high school story. This is a college story but written down for the young adult reader. Whitney provides us a great author’s note about her own experiences, and I felt that that was the reason I couldn’t buy this as a high school story. Her experiences happened in college, prior to today’s overprotective college campus environments that have multitudes of student resources for helping victims of things like rape; for a modern story set at a private boarding high school, it was harder to buy. I also want to know how all of these high school kids were getting all the alcohol and why no one was ever performing room checks for these things.

But I digress.

I found Alex’s role as a victim quite refreshing. Where Speak and Inexcusable are heavily issue-driven, I felt that Whitney’s book was much more about the justice group, The Mockingbirds. I found the organization intriguing and I wanted to know more and more, much in the way Alex did. I loved that they sought justice and the punishment they placed upon the wrongdoer involved giving up something they loved. These were savvy kids.

Likewise, Alex’s interest were wide and varied. I found her fully fleshed in this manner, as she was driven academically and musically. She had goals, and she didn’t let what happened to her railroad her from achieving them. Her budding romance with Martin was sweet, and I found her perspective about how it’s okay to be a geek also enjoyable.

This is a title worth reading and discussing. I think that it’d be an interesting read post-classic, too, to talk about how a classic can inform and develop a whole new story, changing the entire premise but still retaining a clear connection to the original. The Mockingbirds will have pretty good appeal, particularly for older high school readers and those who are fans of the previously mentioned titles. Although I had some qualms, I’d still rate this pretty high in the world of young adult lit because it is refreshing and it is important.

Daisy Whitney’s debut hits stores in November.