Review: The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney

The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney

Series: The Mockingbirds (#1)
Pages: 332
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: November 2nd, 2010
IBSN: 9780316090537

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.

You know what's cool in books? Boarding schools. But what's cooler than books involving boarding schools? Books involving secret societies in boarding schools. And cooler than that? Books involving secret societies that do positive things for the boarding school they're in. So The Mockingbirds was an automatic must-read for me.

Alex wakes up in a stranger's dorm room, hungover, naked, and finds two used condoms. After slowly remembering the night, she finds that what she at first thought was a poor decision on her part wasn't actually a decision of hers at all. With the support of her friends, she seeks the help of the Mockingbirds - a secret society that punishes students for offences that the school turns a blind eye towards.

The Mockingbirds was written beautifully. It was smooth and had a nice flowing quality to it that made the story easy to read. Each word felt like it was pain-painstakingly chosen and ordered, and the effect was gorgeous prose that felt natural to a teenaged narrator.

Alex was a dynamic character. She's realistically affected by her ordeal initially, but she also grows a lot as a result of it, and later, with help from The Mockingbirds, learns to stop it from holding her back. Her journey was inspiring (a word I'm going to use a lot in describing this novel!).

The Mockingbirds were such an interesting and amazing group. Their mission for retribution and the peaceful and professional way they carried it out was awe-inspiring and just lovely. The world needs more people like those in The Mockingbirds.

The plot was fairly straight-forward, but I wasn't too concerned about that. I knew when I started The Mockingbirds that it was intended to be more of an issues, character-driven book. But, I was raising my eyebrows at a small complication that rises in the end that was solved as quickly as it came up. It took away from the smoothly-paced chain of events.

Overall, The Mockingbirds was a wonderfully told story that I'm sure many people can relate to and that I hope many people will be inspired by.

I give The Mockingbirds a 4 out of 5.