The Abuse of Ashley Collins – Jon Athan

3 stars

Ashley is your typical rebellious teenager. She acts out, argues with her parents, has a fake ID she uses to buy alcohol for her friends, and has sex with her boyfriend (but, hey! At least she has condoms!)  Her parents, Logan and Jane, take extreme exception to her behaviour and set out to correct her with the proper…….discipline.

I’ll start by saying that Athan does have a way of making his readers feel real emotion towards his characters. However, none of my emotions were particularly great. The parents are meant to be these poor, fed up people dealing with a difficult kid but they go from 0 to 100 for no discernible reason. Preteen brother, Calvin, is a scared kid who doesn’t understand what’s happening but trusts his parents….did I mention he’s a perv who half molests his tied up and beaten sister? And Ashley: an obnoxious teenager you can’t stand but wait, she actually has a traumatic experience in her past that completely excuses everything. Eh.

Athan also has a way with writing creatively brutal scenes, but they didn’t always make sense here. Logan and Jane want to discipline Ashley but realistically, she’s just an annoying teenager testing her boundaries. They don’t even know half of the things that she’s been doing when all this starts, so it makes their extreme reaction to her feel unrealistic. Maybe if there were more scenes of Ashley and her doing actual terrible things, but as it is, the punishment really didn’t fit the crime. And then Ashley, after being tied up, brutalized, and barely given food and water for weeks, suddenly has all the energy and liveliness in the world to exact her revenge? It seems unbelievable that she wouldn’t need some sort of recovery time.

The Abuse of Ashley Collins wasn’t a bad book necessarily. It’s shocking and horrifying and does all the things an extreme horror book should, but it didn’t hit the homerun I was expecting. There were too many things that just didn’t add up.