Review: The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney

Some schools have honor codes.
Others have handbooks.
Themis Academy has the Mockingbirds.

Themis Academy is a quiet boarding school with an exceptional student body that the administration trusts to always behave the honorable way--the Themis Way. So when Alex is date raped during her junior year, she has two options: stay silent and hope someone helps her, or enlist the Mockingbirds--a secret society of students dedicated to righting the wrongs of their fellow peers.

In this honest, page-turning account of a teen girl's struggle to stand up for herself, debut author Daisy Whitney reminds readers that if you love something or someone--especially yourself--you fight for it.

My Review:

The Mockingbirds was a book that I sped through quickly since I completely loved the story and the characters.  I couldn't put the book down since I had to know what would happen to Alex and how the trial would turn out.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD

Alex was a great main character.  The book starts off with her waking up in a stranger's bed and it shows the confusion that she feels.  It shows how she really doesn't remember her night with this guy, Carter.   Her friend TS, and sister Casey, help her realize that this may mean he date-raped her.  As more memories of the night come back to her, she realizes they are right.  They tell her she can go to the Mockingbirds, an organization that Casey had founded when she was a Themis student.  The book also shows how Alex plays the piano, and how the incident has an effect on her piano playing as well.

The secondary characters are well done.  Alex's two roommates, TS and Maia, are great friends to her.  She's closest to TS, but she has a good friendship with Maia as well.  In fact, Maia becomes her student advocate (lawyer) when she has her Mockingbird trial.  Then, there are the Mockingbird board who play rules in the story as well.  One member of the board is Martin, who was already friends with Alex before.  As the story progresses, a relationship between Alex and Martin begins to grow, and Mockingbird rules would forbid this relationship.  The other Mockingbirds, Amy and Ilana, play important rules in the story as well, especially Amy.  Then, there's Carter, a character I did not like, but he is a character that readers are also not supposed to like.  He dug himself into a hole in the trial by making a huge mistake in what he said.

The Mockingbird organization itself is rather fascinating.  The Mockingbirds have a leader, and there is one specific qualification necessary to be this leader.  Then there are the two other board members.  Then there are the New Nine (the jury).  Three of the New Nine will serve on the jury for each case.  Below them are the runners.  They do jobs around the school like attendance, and they can change the attendance so it says someone was absent when they weren't.

If you like YA contemporary, read this book.

Katie