MARGOT MERTZ TAKES IT DOWN

In this contemporary novel, a young woman vows to take down a website where explicit content showing many of her Roosevelt High classmates is posted.

Seventeen-year-old Margot Mertz is the ambitious mastermind behind a lucrative business that scours out revenge porn and other compromising online material for her clients. Her only friend, Sammi Santos, a talented hacker, assists with this endeavor. In first-person, comically footnoted chapters that expose Margot’s appealing duality—confident and driven yet awkward and self-deprecating—readers follow her through a madcap scheme to infiltrate her peers’ social groups to get at the creator of Roosevelt Bitches. A victim of the site hires her to bring it down, insisting that she can tell no one, including Sammi: Since her mother is a prominent judge, and she doesn’t trust the authorities, she just wants the site to quietly vanish. Margot’s laser focus has led her to neglect both the fury she feels about the trauma she witnesses as part of her job and her personal feelings for others, including Avery, a guy she doesn’t trust because he’s “serial-killer nice” but whom it will be obvious to readers she’s actually falling for. The storylines play out realistically, hopefully, and with an abundance of hilarious dialogue. Margot is White; Avery’s mom is Black, and his dad is White; Sammi is Dominican American, and there is diversity in secondary characters.

A thoughtful, funny, righteously angry take on a serious subject.