Previously, Jake sits in silence for two chapters’ worth of flashbacks in front of the head of campus police (presumably) about not getting into any more fights, and then he immediately gets into more fights with secret liberal assassins (or something). And he’s been SEEN.
Also, I made the bold declaration that I didn’t think the authors of a book so small-minded were actually worth doing any background research on, and was then proven wrong in the wildest way possible when I learned that William W. Johnstone died fifteen years ago and he now exists as a brand ghostwritten by his niece. Which I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess will be a better plot twist than anything that’ll actually happen in the book.
Trigger Warning: Chapter 7
The book does my favorite thing where it wants to turn the most obvious thing about a new character into a big reveal, so it bends over backwards describing how Jake “took in several details about the person who had just spoken to him” before letting us know they’re a woman.
After all, women could be dangerous, too.
Even women as attractive as this one. Maybe especially women as attractive as this one.
Everything about this old man yelling at clouds-ass novel is extra wild now that we know that this book had a female author. The patriarchy is one hell of a drug, y’all.
She just stood there with her hands in the hip pockets of the jeans she wore and looked at him.
This isn’t an important sentence, but there was no way in hell I wasn’t going to let you guys know that her hands were specifically in the jeans she wore, as opposed to the jeans she didn’t wear that day, that were lying on the ground, or had draped around her like a shawl.
Jake and this mysterious (and dangerous???) woman start talking, and it’s boringly mostly an infodump. She tells him that she saw the fight that had just broken out, that Antifa has been “patrolling the campus for any signs of extremist, right-wing aggression and oppression”. She even tells him about the two kids whose lovers’ quarrel he broke up in the first chapter, for some goddamn reason.
“I know those two—Craig and Annie—and their relationship is fraught with drama, as the literature professors might say.”
I like how the implications are that this is a world where professors are only capable of using figurative language that corresponds to their discipline. The chemistry professors would say their relationship is unstable! The philosophy professors would say their on-again-off-again relationship speaks to the absurdity of existence! NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO SAY DRAMA OUTSIDE OF THE ARTS.
Worst of all, all of this is flirtatious.
“You’re a professor?”
“Criminal justice. Dr. Natalie Burke.”
“I’d say that you don’t look like a criminal justice professor—”
“But that would be sexist, exclusionary, patriarchal, and oppressive,” she said sternly. […]
“I surrender, Doctor. What can I say, I’m an evil cisnormative heterosexual. I can’t help myself.” He smiled. “Say, does that mean I’m mentally ill? That cuts me some slack. I’m a disadvantaged, oppressed minority. On this campus, for damn sure.”
Dr. Burke laughed. She looked a little ashamed of herself for doing so but couldn’t seem to help it.
I mean, this isn’t our first bad book rodeo. No way we get through these book without these crazy kids going to pound town. Even if their chemistry is utterly inexplicable, given, you know, everything about this book.
“[The Antifa patrols] must not stay very busy. How many people on this campus aren’t progressive idiots? A dozen? Two dozen? I’d say we’re all outnumbered.” He paused. “And I apologize if you’re a progressive idiot.”
“You’re an obnoxious young man, aren’t you? In addition to being a violent one.”
“I speak my mind too bluntly sometimes, I suppose. Free speech,” Jake added dryly.
Dr. Burke tells Jake that she’ll call 911 because she found the injured men, but not mention Jake. And I guess at some point before all this is over she’ll fall for his free-thinking, unapologetically cisnormative allure. …somehow?
Trigger Warning: Chapter 8
Day one with our hero Jake Rivers is finally over (hashtag blessed) and we move ahead, learning that the confrontation between Jake and the Antifa patrol (which I have to reiterate is an actual summary of this book) was the big news story for a few days until it wasn’t.
In almost all the news stories, Jake was referred to as “alt-right,” “far right-wing,” “extremist,” “white supremacist,” “Nazi,” or accused of being a member of the KKK—even though the trouble had had no racial component whatsoever.
Does Trigger Warning have a point about how, in our modern world, everything is pulled out of context as it gains traction in the outrage cycle? Are we as a society too quick to turn our attention towards the new thing to get angry about that day without anything deeper than a surface-level analysis?
A point equally worth considering: Trigger Warning and “surface-level analysis” have more chemistry than Jake and Natalie do.
“Am I allowed to say you look nice?” Jake asked. “Or is that a microaggression?”
“Coming from someone as big as you, I’m not sure a microaggression is possible.”
That’s right, Jake and Natalie are flirting again, and this dialogue is GEM AFTER GEM AFTER GEM.
“You look different this morning,” Dr. Natalie Burke said.
“Why?” Jake said. “Because I’m wearing a suit?”
“You look like a professional wrestler pretending to be a businessman before a match.”
“Babyface or heel?”
“Oh, you are definitely a babyface, Mr. Rivers.”
That made him laugh. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as the sort to watch rasslin’.”
“My dad loved it. I watched it with him. It’s silly, but entertaining. At its best, almost existential.”
I like how Jake was like “babyface or heel?” before he was like “wait, this lady professor at a liberal arts college likes wrestling?????”
They talk about how surprisingly no news has gotten out about the other fight that Jake got into on the fateful day they met. They wonder why. Sparks are flying.
“Why didn’t the press make a big deal out of it?”
“Because the school wants it kept quiet for some reason?”
“That’s the only thing that makes sense, but why would they do that? Liberals never hush up anything that might make a conservative look bad.”
“Not everything in life breaks down into terms of liberals and conservatives, you know,” she said. […]
“One person’s forward is another person’s backward.”
She smiled. “That’s almost perceptive.”
Jake then goes to a meeting with the school president. Despite being told he could bring legal council (which Jake does not, for some reason, because Jake is one of our “just knows what’s best” heroes, I see), Jake finds to his surprise that the president is also waiting for him alone in his office. This is apparently suspenseful.
“No, I just wanted to have a talk with you, man to man.”
Jake felt a stirring of concern inside. Maybe he had underestimated this man.
Maybe Pelletier was more dangerous than he had thought.
And with that, literally nothing about the last two chapters of this book makes sense to me.
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