by Jenna Scott Therea Toten’s The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B created a lot of conflicting feelings in my heart of hearts.
On the one hand, as someone with anxiety, I related heavily to Adam Spencer Ross (known as Batman to some) and his struggle to cope with his OCD. I noticed a lot of similar feelings of guilt and stress regarding his split-family to which I am known to succumb. And, to a certain extent, I even saw myself in his quest to prove himself worthy of a girl in his support group. But something that stuck out to me, as a gay woman with a library almost exclusively consisting of female and queer protagonists, was the subtle microaggressions against women. Adam infantilizes the women in his life: his girlfriend, his mom, and his stepmother all need to be protected, just like his little brother. If we ascribe these to his OCD symptoms, and look at the rest of the treatment of women, we still find issues. The three girls in his support group are constantly making snide comments behind each other’s backs, which the novel barely even recognizes as a problem. The attribution of meaningless traits to girls really stood out to me. Adam doesn’t sit with his legs crossed, because that’s what girls do, and he doesn’t cry, because he’s a boy. The book never addresses these uncomfortably subconscious issues with women in any way, continuing the harsh cycle of misogynism in a small, yet not inconsequential, way. All in all, I actually enjoyed Room 13B. Its plot, while derivative and not at all original, served its purpose well as a vehicle for its characters. Its portrayal of OCD was not at all demonizing like certain modern media and the characters were likable. But it’s important to notice and critique the subtle ways in which we, as a culture, demean and devalue women.
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