Book Talk Review; Scandalous

I have feels about this 

Tanner Browning’s life is turned upside down when a classmate sneaks a photo of him kissing his boyfriend after school and then posts it on Snapchat, instantly “outing” them both and exposing their secret gay affair.

The photo goes viral, creating a local scandal and setting up the battle of Tanner’s life. Tanner’s staunchly religious school bans all gay relationships, and Tanner’s mother is vehemently against homosexuality.

As his school threatens expulsion, his mother hits the roof, his boyfriend goes into hiding, and the local media circles like vultures, Tanner must make the biggest decision of his life:

After eighteen years of hiding, will he finally find the strength to speak his truth and step into the light, no matter the consequences? And even if he does, are his relationships with his mother and his boyfriend already beyond repair?

* 

Scandalous is devastating, but not in the way you think. It's a book about a mother and a son, about bigotry, about religion, about a small-minded town, about unconditional love. 

Let's be real here I read it because it's a Seth King book and I will read anything and everything he writes. I knew that it was going to be a difficult read and would make me mad, what I didn't expect was it to make me feel empathy for the bitch main character. 

Cathy Browning is a rich, white, single mother who is flawed but doesn't fully understand that in the beginning. When the news breaks that her son was caught kissing another boy she immediately goes into self-defense mode and worries about how her son's "choices" will affect her and her reputation. That, of course, gets my hackles up because what kind of mother thinks like that when their child is hurting? But as the story moves along we get to see the whys and the hows and begin to understand things a little bit better. 

Cathy is not the best mom. She's not a bad mom but she will never win mother of the year. It's easy to just say that she should have loved her son no matter what and shouldn't have tried to shame him into changing etc. But after reading this book I can't just say that. Because Seth King made me understand where she was coming from. At her core, Cathy is not a bad person. She has been conditioned, by her parents, by her religion, by her peers, by society, to believe that anything "different" isn't "good." I want to blame her, I do, but I can also see where she's coming from. 

For a good portion of the book, I wanted to slap the shit out of her. But as horrible as she was in the beginning she tried. And that is the important thing. She might have swept everything else under the rug, she may have tried to change her son, she may have played the victim at first, but she tried in the end. While there are many real-life scenarios in which people don't get that, Cathy showed that a mother's love is unconditional, even if she didn't understand what that really meant at first. Does that make everything she's ever said to Tanner okay? No, of course not. You can't change the past and you can't have one epiphany and all of a sudden be forgiven for everything. But what you can have is forgiveness for not knowing, for not trying, only if you are willing to make changes now. 

A lot of mistakes were made by the main character in this book. In the name of her reputation, in the name of her religion, in the name of her fear. There are a lot of people who use religion as an excuse to spread their bigotry. While we got some of that in this book, thanks to the Christian school that Tanner attended, there wasn't so much that it was suffocating. As part of her character development, Cathy is forced to reconcile what her belief in God looks like to her. For me, being raised Catholic and believing in my own version of God, it's always difficult how people find themselves justified in their hated because of what they believe in. There's a reason I stay away from books that face those kinds of issues, it pisses me off and takes away from the story. Luckily that didn't happen here. I was able to see Cathy's transformation and her want to change and instead of it alienating her further for me, it helped me understand her. Because she was able to understand what it means to really believe in God and how it's not as clear cut as the Bible and the church bigots want us to believe. 

What Scandalous does is help the reader understand where a parent is coming from. Cathy doesn't understand her bigotry in the beginning, and the journey she takes to make amends with her son is heartwarming. There's a lot of character development in this book and I loved watching the transformation. Some might not agree with the way Tanner accepted her and how easy he seemed to forgive her, but what you really have to understand is that it wasn't easy. He was eighteen, a legal adult but not. A young man who still needed his mother. Don't we all still need our mothers, no matter what age we are? The relationship between them is not magically fixed, but by the end, they are both trying to mend the bridge between them. That is what unconditional love is. That is what Scandalous is about. The precarious relationship between a mother and a son. And it devastated me in the best of ways. 

*Quote- 

"All my life I'd thought this moment would doom me to hell, but why did it feel like heaven? To have a beating, make heart against mine, and realize in real time that I wasn't being struck down by lightning over it, that I wasn't repulsed or disgusted or dismayed by it -- it changed everything. It showed me, all at once, that no matter what my pastor said, humans were the same inside, and this joy I felt with him -- this could never be dirty, this could never be wrong. It was just...joy, unprecedented." 

"God means exactly what you decide it means." 

"Opinions stop being 'opinions' when they dehumanize another person. Then they become weaponized." 

"Because pain is pain. You're either on someone's side, or you're not. And I know that now. And it's not just about accepting sexuality. All of us go through life like ghosts sometimes, acting like our loved ones aren't even there. All of us could walk up to a family member and hug them for no reason sometimes. All of us could text their mother "I love you" for no occasion at all. All you have to do is give love, honestly and freely -- the rest will fall into place. It's never too late to unlearn the lessons of your past and open your heart to something new. Not that any of the "new" stuff matters in the scheme of things, anyway. Humans are humans. Casual homophobia is still homophobia. Bigotry pasted over with a smile is still bigotry. Unconditional love is unconditional love. Everything else is bullshit."