Review: Voices from the Wreckage: Young Adult Voices in the #MeToo Movement

Abstract

The #MeToo movement sparked a global reckoning with sexual violence, through which victims and survivors were given a conduit to speak and relate to the stories of millions of people. The dominant, mainstream #MeToo discourse since 2017 has focused most heavily on adult women; however, when Tarana Burke founded the me too movement in 2006 she was relating to the experiences of black and brown girls who had experienced a wide variety of sexual abuse, including incest.1 Her work in the years since have taken Burke to places like Vietnam and India, where she met with people who do work around sexual violence across cultures and communities, and what she shared was that the human condition lands us in the same places. In 2022, in You Are Your Best Thing, she wrote: “We often carry our trauma in similar ways, but the roads that led us to the trauma are all so different […] That road is our humanity […] A lot of times, we’re happy and relieved to find similarities: ‘Oh, you too? You too? Me too’” (Burke and Brown xxii). It is in that spirit that Kimberly Karshner brings forth Voices from the Wreckage: Young Adult Voices in the #MeToo Movement, a compilation of essays by a diverse group of international scholars who are examining YA literature as a “safe space for teens to realize that they’re not alone”, and as a crucial tool to connect “the young reader and adults and educators who can provide avenues toward healing and getting help” (xiv).

Keywords

• ya
• ya studies
• #metoo
• sexual violence in ya
• trauma in ya