Girls with Sharp Sticks is a young adult novel written by Suzanne Young, author of The Program.
Philomena "Mena" Rhodes is a student at Innovations Academy, a private and exclusive boarding school nestled deep in the Colorado mountains that teaches girls to be proper ladies and perfect marriage material. Instead of math, science, and history, they learn etiquette, cooking, and botany. They are all perfectly happy... until one day, while on a field trip off campus, an incident with another student causes Mena to realize that not everything is as it seems.
Digging deeper, Mena realizes that the school has far more sinister intentions than it lets on. That there's a reason why all of the girls are so obedient, so conditioned to always accept the orders of their male superiors. And when a classmate goes missing, she realizes that she could be next.
The series has three books:
- Girls with Sharp Sticks (2019)
- Girls with Razor Hearts (2020)
- Girls with Rebel Souls (2021)
Tropes:
- Ambiguously Brown:
- Sydney and Quentin are referred to as having dark skin, the former as having artificially straightened hair on top of it. Sydney's race comes up for the first time in Razor Hearts, where it's noted that she's the only black girl who goes to Ridgeview Prep, an elite private school that had faced racial discrimination lawsuits in the recent past. For her, it's the first time she's ever encountered racism.
- Guardian Bose's race is never specified, but his last name is of Bengali origin and is shared with a national hero
in India. - Marcella's skin is also described as light brown.
- Artificial Human:
- The girls at the academy were created to serve as submissive personal servants. The school environment is there to "raise" them as human, as the first prototypes, who lacked real life experience outside their programming, proved to be too vapid to make for good companions.
- In Razor Hearts, Raven also turns out to be one, specially created by Winston with far more free will than the girls from Innovations Academy.
- Attempted Rape: Mr. Wolfe tries to do this to Rebecca at the open house. Since preserving the girls' purity for their sponsors is paramount, the school punishes both of them, Mr. Wolfe for "theft" and Rebecca for "inviting" his advances.
- Big Jerk on Campus: Jonah in Razor Hearts, the captain of the rugby team who puts on a Lovable Jock image and is regarded as the coolest guy in school, but also has a reputation as a rapist.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted with Annalise, who is left seriously scarred on the left side of her face after the fight with Guardian Bose, including having to have one of her eyes replaced with one that's the wrong color.
- Boarding School of Horrors:
- Innovations Academy. Because creating submissive women ain't easy.
- Ridgeview Prep in Razor Hearts isn't a boarding school, but it's barely better than Innovations Academy.
- Brainwashed: Impulse control therapy is the medical procedure that the academy uses to discipline students who have been acting out. The way it's described, it strongly resembles a lobotomy. It's how the girls' artificial brains are reprogrammed when they start going haywire.
- Broken Bird: Imogene in Razor Hearts, a graduate of the academy whose husband turned out to be abusive before she killed him. When Mena and her friends are introduced to her, she's a disheveled Lady Drunk living alone in a mansion who's just murdered her husband, and is trying to dispose of his body and all his stuff before Brynn discovers what happened. Leandra kills her because of how erratic her behavior has gotten, as it could risk ruining things for everyone.
- Cuckold: Of a sort. Winston Weeks turned against the Innovations Corporation because Anton Petrov stole his robot wife Leandra.
- Dances and Balls: The open house, where the girls are presented to their parents and sponsors.
- Defector from Decadence: Winston Weeks, an investor in Innovations Academy who turned against the school because Anton Petrov took his Robot Girl Leandra for himself on spurious grounds. This experience caused him to decide that men who treat women like property would eventually see no issue with trying to steal them from other men like they would other forms of property. That said, his motivations are nakedly self-serving, and he himself admits that he has ambitions to run for President.
- Defiled Forever: The school draws the line at letting the investors "try out" the girls before they've been paired off with husbands. It's not to protect the girls' safety, however, but because they're considered to be worth less if they're not virgins.
- Dystopia Is Hard: Turns out, trying to destroy women’s rights and drive millions of women out of the workforce and back into the kitchen is a swift road to economic ruin, hence why the government that tried it was quickly run out of power and their entire anti-feminist social program dismantled. They’re still bitter about it.
- Dystopian Edict: The Essential Women’s Act is a failed example, an attempt to outlaw all forms of birth control, viciously police the lifestyles of pregnant women, and push women out of the workforce and into domestic roles. Presented as an attempt to reverse a declining birthrate, it caused an economic meltdown and widespread civil unrest such that the administration that introduced it by executive order lost the next election, and the subsequent President immediately reversed it. That said, there are still a great many anti-feminists who defend it.
- Engineered Public Confession: Two of 'em in rapid succession in Razor Hearts. First, Mena records Jonah trying to rape her. Second, after Jonah grabs her phone and throws it out the window, Sydney records him attempting to intimidate Mena into silence. Ridgeview Prep is scandalized as things snowball into a massive sexual assault scandal, and heads roll as a result.
- Everyone Is a Tomato: The girls are all Artificial Humans.
- Evil Phone: The phone that the students use to contact their families is actually connected to a computer at the school, where an AI system poses as their parents' housekeeper while relaying information about the calls to the administration. All other calls go straight to voicemail, which lets the school know that a student is trying to contact the outside world. Mena eventually steals Guardian Bose's Cell Phone in order to get around this.
- Eye Scream:
- Impulse control therapy involves sticking a long rod resembling an ice pick into the eye socket.
- During the fight with Guardian Bose, Annalise is left badly injured with a piece of glass sticking out of her left eye. Given that she's an Artificial Human, though, it's easy to replace the damaged eye with a new one, even if it's the wrong color.
- Femme Fatale: In Razor Hearts, Lennon Rose returns acting like this, with a sexy, dolled-up appearance and a lot of ambiguity as to her motives and whose side she's really on. She's working with Leandra and Winston.
- Government Drug Enforcement: Or at least, Academy Drug Enforcement. The school gives each of the girls pills before they go to bed, which turn out to contain nanomachines that control their minds.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Innovations Corporation, the tech company behind the academy.
- He-Man Woman Hater: The founders of the school were this, seeing women's rights as a threat to their power. Having failed to stop the feminist movement, they created a boarding school where wealthy families could send their daughters to embrace more traditional gender roles, hoping to at least hold onto a slice of the next generation. Jackson's father was one such investor, a men's rights activist who is strongly implied to have killed his mother when she found out what was actually going on. It's later revealed that the above is the cover story; in truth, they simply decided to cut human women out of the equation altogether, using the academy to create Artificial Humans to serve as their perfect, docile, submissive wives who, as robots, had no legal rights.
- Hollywood New England: Razor Hearts takes place at an elite private school in Connecticut, whose student body is dominated by upper-crust Yankee prep stereotypes.
- Ice Queen: The headmaster's wife Leandra Petrov. Even after The Reveal that she's a mole trying to help the students, she has no problem doing what she thinks is necessary for her goal.
- The Infiltration: The plot of Razor Hearts concerns Mena and Sydney infiltrating Ridgeview Prep, where one of the students is the child of one of the investors behind Innovations Academy, and figuring out who it is.
- Jerk Jock: The rugby team in Razor Hearts, particularly Garrett. They are depicted as running the school, and have been accused of raping numerous girls, such that Mena and her friends quickly learn to be wary of them.
- Large and in Charge: Guardian Bose, the very large and muscular man who the academy has hired to keep watch over the girls. It's stated that he could utterly break them with ease, and even when behaving normally, he regularly pushes the students around and inadvertently injures them. Towards the end, he holds his own against five students at once. It takes Sydney stabbing him in the neck with a pair of scissors to take him down, and he still goes down swinging.
- Lobotomy: Impulse control therapy is presented as a sci-fi version of this. It involves sticking a long metal rod that resembles an ice pick into the eye socket in order to reprogram the brain, and people subjected to the procedure are left dazed and pliable afterwards.
- Lodged-Blade Recycling: Guardian Bose with the pair of scissors stuck in his neck. It does not end well for him.
- Meat-Sack Robot: The girls' brains are mechanical, but the rest is a human body grown in a lab, because their sponsors felt that synthetic flesh fell into the Uncanny Valley.
- The Mole: Leandra is secretly conspiring to help the students escape and to take down Innovations Corporation.
- Next Sunday A.D.: The setting resembles the time period of when the books were written (2019-21) beyond a backstory featuring the rise and fall of an anti-feminist government and the development of experimental AI and Robot Girls.
- Nice Guy:
- Jackson, the boy who Mena meets at the gas station. He and his friend Quentin have long suspected that something strange is happening at Innovations Academy, and he has good reason to, as his father was a former investor in the school who likely killed his wife, an employee at Innovations Academy who found out what was really going on and tried to speak out against it. His interest in the academy is that he realizes it's connected to his mother's death.
- Demarcus in Razor Hearts is the Token Good Teammate on the rugby team. While he plays the part of an aggressive Jerk Jock on the field, he's far more mellow when he's not playing rugby, and he quickly turns against Jonah when he finds out he's a rapist.
- No Medication for Me: Mena initially goes off her meds by accident, when the alcohol she drank at the open house reacts with the pills that the school gives her every night to take before bed (which, as it turns out, contain nanomachines that are controlling her mind), causing her to throw them up. She quickly starts to realize just how wrong Innovations Academy really is, and stops taking her pills on a permanent basis the next day.
- Not Like Other Girls: Used as the subject of a pun. The girls at Innovations Academy are programmed with one of six personality types for their buyers. In Razor Hearts, after Jackson finds out that Raven is also a Robot Girl who was programmed to have far more free will and intelligence than the Innovations girls, he jokes that she must be the "not like other girls" model.
- Parental Abandonment: Mena's parents are extremely distant and cold, failing to show up for the open house and leaving their housekeeper Eva to take all of Mena's calls home. That's because they don't exist. Part of Mena's impulse control therapy is Anton implanting happy memories of her family in her mind, to replace the points where she let her mind fill in the gaps in her backstory and assume that they didn't care about her.
- Playful Hacker: Raven in Razor Hearts, a hacker and AI enthusiast who is ecstatic when she learns the truth about the girls from Innovations Academy being Robot Girls. That said, Mena is suspicious of her true intentions, suspecting that she might be in league with the villains. She's working with Winston and, unbeknownst to her, is actually a Robot Girl just like Mena.
- Proper Lady: Innovations Academy is a finishing school, meant to turn young girls into this.
- Sex Sells: The girls are all given slinky and revealing dresses to wear to the open house, all the better to show off the "merchandise" to the investors. When Rebecca gets sexually assaulted by Mr. Wolfe, they then proceed to use her "impropriety" to tell her that she deserves some of the blame.
- Significant Green-Eyed Redhead: Annalise. She used to be blonde, but her last sponsor didn't like her and sent her back, during which time they changed her to a redhead. At the end, she loses one of her eyes and gets it replaced with a brown one.
- Slut-Shaming: Rebecca is blamed for leading on Mr. Wolfe at the open house, where he drunkenly tried to rape her.
- The Sociopath: In Razor Hearts, it's revealed that Lennon Rose underwent a procedure to remove the emotional impulses that make her feel guilty about hurting people. The book ends with her revealing that she'd locked Garrett in the trunk of her car with clearly nefarious intent.
- Stay in the Kitchen: The girls at the school are educated in full accordance with this trope, the curriculum written to make them proper domestic servants to their future husbands.
- Tarnishing Their Own Beauty: A minor example with Rebecca, who tries to mess up her makeup and hair after being told that she was to blame for Mr. Wolfe's advances on her by being too enticing. This gets her sent to impulse control therapy.
- Token Good Teammate: Demarcus Dozer is the only rugby player who seems to be a genuinely nice guy, reserving his tough guy antics for the playing field. After Jonah's Engineered Public Confession, he's the first person to refuse to take his side.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Mena and the remaining girls learn that they are all Artificial Humans when they enter the lab beneath the school and find Valentine's corpse, her robotic brain exposed.
- Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Lennon Rose, with her Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold, her sunny disposition, and her flowery name. So of course she's the first one to disappear. It's subverted in Razor Hearts, however, when she returns with a brand-new Femme Fatale personality and questionable motives, ultimately being revealed to be in league with Leandra and Winston.
