Reading Update (Anna Karenina | Those Who Wait | Help At Any Cost)

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

TL;DR this meme lmfao

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Those Who Wait by Haley Cass

I...probably would’ve given up on this romance novel halfway through, between the prose, characterization, and handling of politics, if it weren’t for a friend enlightening me that it was actually a Sansa/Margaery fic with the numbers filed off for publication. A ship that I am deeply neutral on, but did make the whole experience more entertaining, as I went “oh my god, her dad is the senator, and her grandma was the president!”

Unfortunately when you have the Margaery expy - Charlotte - being a Deputy Mayor in NYC who is running for an open House Representative seat, you have me judging the political stuff. On the one level, the words “Democrat” or “Republican” or “primary” are never uttered. On a different level, I don’t think Charlotte is as competent a politician as the book wants me to believe she is? She is closested publicly for political career reasons, but we’re told she’s been hooking up with so many women (rarely the same one twice) right till her campaign starts. When she discusses attack openings with her strategist at no point does she mention the possibility of any of those women outing her (even accidentally! Like “oh lmao I think I hooked up with that lady running for congress”), she has no concerns about being followed while running around with Sutton, she has to be talked into using a political opportunity.

The Sansa expy - Sutton - was a bit too much of a blushing ingenue for my taste. Found it funny that while discussing the book with friends I had to go look for details to confirm that she was a grad student getting a master’s and not a grad student getting a PhD because the book never explicitly states that, just leaves little clues.

Final note: I understand what the author was going for with the Renly/Loras expies, but it is absolutely insane to have the NYC mayor be secretly dating a NYPD cop, given uh, everything. The press should notice how much they hang out given that they literally pop into offices together, and should be having a field day over even a friendship. You could’ve just made Loras personal security! That’s so easy!

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Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids by Maia Szalavitz

This is a good book from 2006 on the US troubled teen industry and the numerous abuses, deaths, and repeat offenders it has gotten away with it. I read Joe vs Elan, which wrapped up last year, and wanted to read a broader overview of the industry.

The Synanon cult of the 60s is a huge inspiration for many of these “behavioural therapy” or “drug rehabilitation” programs that get forced on unwilling teenagers. The Seed in the 70s and Straight in the 80s are two examples hugely popular with politicians and parents as the War on Drugs kicks into high gear and parents are easily convinced that a single whiff of marijuana will leave their kid a doomed addict on the streets. Those spawn many of their own spinoffs, including the terrible combo of “wilderness boot camps”, where kids get marched through hot deserts, injuries and medical emergencies are assumed to be faked, and even the staff that aren’t cruel shits lack any training to be looking after kids in the outdoors.

As I predicted, this book left me in a low level of constant rage for the past week. I found it harder to read than some of my roughest non-fiction reads, and I think that stems from the fact of how much goddamn active effort went into hurting these kids while people on the outside pretended these were normal and fine institutions to pack kids off too. Just. Furious. At the founders and institutions and employees, of course, but also the parents, who accept things like

• Yeah, we have to kidnap your kid with no warning from their bed in the middle of the night with two dudes that’ll threaten violence for any disobedience, this is completely fucking normal
• Oh, if you want us to keep treating your kid who is an addict/problem child, you have to let us imprison their perfectly normal sibling who is right here and who we’ve coerced into admitting all sorts of things when we isolated them in a different room. (It’s bad that this stuff happened to any kids at all, but thinking of this specific trade as an acceptable one as a parent....)
• You will not physically see your kid or have phone calls with your kids for months, and if your kid sends you any letters saying they are being abused or starved, that means your kid is trying to manipulate you.

Again, the ultimate villains are the institutions but the above drove me insane because, I dunno, I kind of think you have one (1) job as a parent, and even some of the sympathetic parents made me think they just wanted to drop a teenager off somewhere like a dented car at the mechanic.

As the book points out, this is a consequence of a larger cultural belief in the idea of “tough love”, and a cultural obsession with the faults of adolescence even as the adolescents of today are continually safer than the adolescents of yesterday. Most teenagers grow into pretty functional adults without any need for inpatient treatment, and these institutions tends to produced very troubled adults, who struggle with getting past the betrayal and powerlessness of their experiences.

I skimmed the wikipedia article for the troubled teen industry today - the most recent death in one of those wilderness teen camps was in February 2024. So, yeah. Still happening. No one’s really checking on these kids. Even in cases where successful civil or criminal charges were brought, many of the people involved were allowed to continue opening new schools elsewhere without even a slap on the wrist.

To end on a slightly less depressing note, I found heartening how hard people fought for some of the victims:

• Richard Bradbury’s childhood friend, who when he finds out where Richard has been and that he’s now working there, keeps talking to him till he realizes how fucked up Straight is
• Fred Collins’ fraternity brothers, who house and hide him when he escapes from Seed
• Paul Richards’ neighbours, who keep asking after him when his parents send him to a school in Samoa, and when his parents disown him for leaving the program, adopt him.