Pride or Die / CL Montblanc / Book Review

PRIDE OR DIE

Eleanora Finkel just wants to finish her senior year in peace. Establishing her legacy—i.e. securing the future of her Texas high school's LGBTQ+ club after her graduation—would be nice as well. But even just getting the bullies to back down would be a positive.

So of course all of those plans are dashed when a club meeting inconveniently coincides with a vicious attack on the school's head cheerleader, making Eleanora and all of her friends prime suspects.

With the future of her club in jeopardy and a would-be killer on the loose, Eleanora knows it's only right to track down who actually tried to kill Kenley. For everbody's safety. Especially for the safety of her friends and fellow LGBTQ+ Club members, who make such easy scapegoats. But nobody seems to want to help with the investigation. Nobody except for Kenley herself, the only one who seems to think the club is innocent...

THOUGHTS

I wanted to like this book, to have fun reading it, and I just didn't. And that makes me sad. I don't know. I had to suspend more disbelief than I was able to, and I just couldn't get invested enough in the characters to root for them. I didn't ever know the plan, and so I couldn't really have fun just following along. I was lost, uninterested, and exasperated by this read.

PROS

Easy Scapegoat	Though this book was more of a miss for me than I would have preferred, I did like the commentary it provides about scapegoats. Minorities make easy scapegoats, and the sole queer club in this small Texas town is an easy fall-guy when things go wrong. While I wish the follow-up with the police and the larger systemic forces at play had been more impactful, I did like where we started (even if, you know, I don't like the fact that this happens). If a school's looking to brush something under the rug, well, the queer club can easily vanish without anybody batting an eye (and maybe even with a few people celebrating in the process).
In the Closet	CL Montblanc manages to make a wonderful cast of queer characters in this book, all my reservations aside, and most of all, I loved Kenley, the would-be victim of this thriller. She's a small town Texas cheerleader, and she's one of her school's golden girls. And she's also queer. She's living in the closet, but she's wanting to, thinking about, hoping she can come out. She's existing right on the fringes of the LGBTQ+ club, so when they get in hot water (at her expense, no less), she's happy to help clear their name. And I love that.
Queer Adults	A lot of books, a lot of media in general, center young queer characters and neglect to include queer adults. Some of this is because, well, there's a whole generation of missing queer adults, due to the AIDS epidemic. But this book does feature a full-grown queer woman in the form of the school's guidance counsellor, and I loved that inclusion. I loved that inclusion because of its novelty and also because, well, she's a queer woman (with a wife, I should add) living her life in a hyper-conservative area. Which is even rarer in media representation. And this is important representation. It's important, I think, to remember that not all LGBTQ+ people living in the South, in conservative and anti-LGBTQ+ areas, are children. Not all adults move out to safer, bluer, more liberal areas as adults, for a myriad of reasons. And these adults are important, too, especially for the LGBTQ+ kids who are trapped, by age and circumstance, in the areas where they're not welcome. It's important to have older people who are safe, who can give kids like those in this queer club hope that they can have a future, even a future in small town Texas. regardless of the social pressures they're facing now (and will continue to face into the future).

CONS

As much as I loved some of the elements building up this book, I just couldn't suspend my disbelief when it came to, you know, the actual plot. There's just no world in which the police are this uninvolved (especially when they're not implied to be corrupt). There's no world where these minors are being questioned without their parents. There's no world. Even if this were presented in a meta way, an ultimate social commentary, I'd have problems with just the pure incompetence and lack of protocol. But it's not presented as some sort of commentary. Which is, well... Eh.	Not Right, Not Real
On top of the police just not being, well, police, Principal Ballard was an over-the-top, big-bad boogeyman in a way that didn't help the plot. In fact, I think it hurt the plot. By making this bad guy such a hyperbolic figure, so pointedly out to get these kids and ruin their club, it felt like it undermined the otherwise important conversation this book was having toward systemic homophobia and scapegoating of vulnerable minorities. There's something much more insidious about casual homophobia, about more subtle powers working against these kids, than just having a figure take on that Big Bad persona. It just didn't work for me. Hyperbole undermines the message, making an evil villain of someone that could otherwise have felt so real. Making a boogeyman to fight against instead of fighting something much more concrete is the direction this book took, and I didn't like that.	Big, Bad Boogeyman
These other elements made this book hard to read. What made it hard for me to invest in the story was just, you know, not knowing what was happening at any given time. Was there a plan? It felt like it, but I was never let in on the plan. I just got to watch characters Do Stuff until things happened, and that's not really very fun. Especially in an investigation, readers should get to be a part of the plan, encouraged to deduce and to scheme. But this book doesn't present a plan so much as a series of things that happen, and that's just not very fun to read. Reader participation necessary, but here unfortunately not required.	What's Going On?

Rating

⭐⭐⭐
3/10

Those who enjoyed Faith Gardner's If You Can Hear This will like this crew of misfits forced to investigate a crime they didn't commit. Fans of Adam Sass's Your Lonely Nights Are Over will love following a thriller that centers the local LGBTQ+ club.

Details Publisher: Wednesday Books Date: April 15, 2025 Series: N/A Add to Goodreads Buy it HERE

Note: I was provided with an ARC by the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions here are my own.