Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)
Let me cut right to the chase: Madeline is some straight-up misandrist Feminazi SJW bullshit.
It starts off right away talking about twelve little girls in two straight lines. Seriously? Twelve characters introduced in a single page and we’re supposed to believe they all just happen to be girls? Not one of them is a boy? Last time I checked half the human race was male. So what are the odds that twelve people in a row—or two rows—will be female?
Listen, I’ve studied statistics. The odds that one character will be a female are 50%, no matter what any SJW wants to tell you. Science doesn’t come any harder than numbers. That’s why SJWs hate dealing with them. Numbers are not susceptible to feelings. You cannot “transgenderqueer” a number away just because you don’t like it.
50% is not very high, but high enough that if there’s occasionally a female character somewhere we can allow that it’s still a bit realistic. Take Black Widow in the Avengers movies. There are six main characters, so if you want to say that okay, well, there’s a 50% chance that one of them will be a female, so we can go ahead and make one of them a female to placate the SJWs, that’s fine. Not that they’ll actually be placated. To hear them go on, it seems they won’t be satisfied until half the characters on the screen are females!
So if the author wanted to make one of those twelve characters a girl, so be it. But two in a row? The odds drop to 25%. Three? 12.5%. Four? 6.25%. Five? 3.125%. Six? 1.5625%. By the time we get to the second line of girls, the odds of what we’re seeing have dropped to less than one percent.
You know what the odds of all twelve being girls are? Less than one in four thousand. That’s how unlikely this little fantasy scenario the author has concocted is.
I don’t know if the SJWs really don’t understand math or just think that we don’t, but this cannot be a coincidence. The author deliberately chose to make this whole boarding school female on purpose and no one said a word. No one stood up to say it was wrong. The editor didn’t stop it. The publisher didn’t stop it. The corrupt journos who reviewed the book didn’t say boo against it. Meanwhile no one has ever published a book set at an all-boy’s school. The powers that be would never allow it. They’d call it “sexism” and “patriarchy”.
Also, SJWs are such hypocrites. If anybody outside of their little protected circle tried to write this book they would be eaten alive for saying the lines are straight and not “LGBTQ” or whatever the PC term is these days.
I’ll be honest, I had a hard time engaging with this book after the opening lines. My suspension of disbelief was shattered. There was no one for me to identify with. It was like the author had written across every page “JOHN Z. UPJOHN, THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR YOU. PEOPLE LIKE YOU DON’T GET BOOKS. PEOPLE LIKE YOU ARE THE BAD GUY, IF YOU EXIST AT ALL.”
I read books to enjoy good stories, not to be hit over the head with messages even if it is a message I agree with. I should pay my own money and spend my time reading a book that spreads a message that is against me? No, thank you!
In the interest of a fair review, I made myself flip through the rest anyway. What I picked up is that the character of Madeline is everything that Feminazis say they want in a “strong female character”, as we are told from the beginning that she’s not afraid of anything, including mice and a tiger in the zoo.
Are we supposed to impressed? Mice aren’t scary and the tiger is clearly in a cage. Does anyone think this precious little snowflake would have lasted five seconds against that tiger in a real fight? Hell no! She wouldn’t have. Not even five seconds and that’s the truth this book takes such pains to conceal from you.
SJWs want us to believe that women are just as strong as any man but then they stage this kind of ridiculous pantomime where we’re supposed to be impressed that they aren’t frightened of zoo animals. But it is the SJWs who are sexist against women by suggesting women should be afraid of caged animals and tiny rodents.
Anyway, it seems like Madeline isn’t such a “strong female character” when her appendix gets inflamed! She cries like a little girl, and guess what? That’s right, a MAN comes to her rescue. The doctor makes the diagnosis but the book still carries on like men don’t matter as he doesn’t appear once she’s at the hospital, even though two different nurses do (again, that’s only a 25% chance).
So who took out her appendix? No one important enough to mention, I guess! In the hands of a competent author, the doctor would have been the hero of this book. But I guess that would be ~*misogyny*~ and the SJWs at the American Library Association would never have made this a Caldecott Honor Book.
Caldecott Honor, what a joke! As long as the SJW clique is in charge there will be no honor in the Caldecotts.
Then ten days pass and suddenly out of nowhere Madeline has all these toys and candy. Some of it came from “Papa”. Between that and the swanky private school I think we can say that Madeline is another privileged trust fund baby typical of the SJW set. Her hair’s probably dyed, too. They all dye their hair these ridiculous sherbet colors for no reason, with no regard for how much less attractive it is to me.
She probably set up up a Patreon account for the rest of the swag we see, crying about how victimized she was by the tiger and the evil doctor man who dared to touch her. She clearly loves the attention, as the first thing she does when her friends visit is to show off her belly scar like a total tramp.
I only respect scars forged in battle. Surgical scars are like the caged tigers of battle wounds.
And what do you suppose happens in the end? Why, suddenly all her friends claim to have appendicitis, too! Why wouldn’t they when they saw all the sweet hand-outs Madeline got just for fluttering her eyelashes and shedding a lot of crocodile tears and showing off her belly?
If you ask me, the whole thing calls into question whether Madeline really needed or even had an appendectomy to begin with, or if she was just angling for some of those sweet victim bucks from the word go. Once someone starts accepting toys and candy and flowers for being sick, they have a fiduciary duty to disclose certain details to make sure things are on the level. That’s why real charities have oversight and accountability.
If I had contributed to Madeline’s hospital room, I would want to see the chart. I would be curious why we never saw her with a doctor after she arrived. I would demand an accounting of exactly what happened during the ten days that passed between when she was dropped off and when her friends visited.
This book teaches women to see themselves as victims. Even if Madeline’s so-called bravery at the beginning of the book is a hollow lie, it’s only when she starts bawling that she has anything to show for it. Nobody brings her a dollhouse for pooh-poohing a tiger. Nobody gives her candy for taking risks.
No, she plays the victim card and is rewarded and her friends all learn the lesson: here is the easy money. Be careful your kids don’t learn the same lesson. This book is basically an Alinsky-style rulebook for the rainbow-haired she-twinks of Twitter and Tumblr.
Two stars.
Editor’s Note: Madeline does not, to my knowledge, have a Patreon account, but I do: https://www.patreon.com/alexandraerin
If you’d like to support my fiction, poetry, and—yes—humor writings, please do so. As these reviews have attracted more attention, I’ve had to upgrade my webhosting.
Thank you for reading!
<3 AE