By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
Content warning: Brief mention of sex-trafficking
Tara Hodgson’s At Least I’m Trying follows Reese, a high-achieving student-athlete whose identity is built on being exceptional. Academically, athletically, socially — her parents demand perfection, and Reese does her best to deliver. Until she doesn’t. Set between a small town and the promise of freedom in Vancouver, the novel follows Reese’s unravelling, and how a predator grooms her into becoming a victim of a sex-trafficking ring.
Hodgson’s prose is intense, confessional, and emotionally saturated, like Wattpad stories and Tumblr prose. And while some may find it superfluous, it does mirror the mode of expression many teens recognize. She uses it with urgency and conviction, accurately identifying something universal about teenagehood: the quiet panic of inadequacy, the impulse towards self-destruction, the longing to be seen and chosen. And yet, I found the novel didn’t do justice to the teenage experience, determined instead to discipline it.
Like a slippery slope argument, it starts with very real emotions: Reese’s dissatisfaction with herself and her exhaustion in trying to fulfill her parents’ expectations. But with no clear inciting incident, she finds herself fighting off her “gut feelings” and seeking freedom in rebellion. Soon, every character, setting, and event pushes Reese towards a predetermined outcome. Drugs, alcohol, sexuality, and social media are framed through judgment-laden stereotypes: students using drugs become symbolic academic failures, the singular “party girl” becomes a moral warning, tattoos and kissing in public become shorthand for vileness. The hippie family brews homemade kombucha, and the English teacher can’t help but care too much.
Coming from an indie author and teacher from Alberta, who has worked with teenagers for over 15 years, this fear-driven storytelling relies on moral tropes that flatten complexity, and I am left wondering how many YA readers would resonate with them. Snapchat maps, anonymous Instagram gossip accounts, and provocative dancing on TikTok appear only as mechanisms of danger, stripped of the everyday boredom, and longing that actually define teen life online.
Hodgson’s novel fails to capture the complex ways in which social media has become a constitutive environment for adolescence. Snapchat and TikTok are apps where identity, intimacy, and sociality are experienced and formed. Sure, they are spaces of visibility and surveillance but also of learning and creativity. And while Hodgson’s concerns are very real, what remains unexplored in this novel is the quieter and more persistent dangers of digital culture: how comparison shapes self-worth, how shame and FOMO have become drivers of conformity, how algorithms reward caricature-like performances that distort reality for those of us with still-developing prefrontal cortices, and with it, the ability to make well-thought out decisions.
Reese’s interactions with social media are seen as reckless choices. In reality, she is just one of us, participating in the social media spheres where we are all surveilled, where the lines between fun and risk are blurred. Our reality is constantly mediated, and checking Snapchat maps, talking to strangers, or even online stalking is increasingly normalized. As Hodgson implies, digital literacy becomes essential. But when responsibility is individualized, the structural pressures that guide major plot points from the generational trauma behind parenting decisions to the intentional design of social media to the sociopolitical factors behind crime remain invisible.
In contrast, the YA novels that still shape my imagination trust readers with ambiguity. They create narrative tension not via moral panic but through distance, in unreliable narration, speculative settings, or ethical complexity. Instead, At Least I’m Trying insists on its warning with such intensity that the space for interpretation where reflection and critical thinking may develop is closed off. For me, what it ultimately gestures towards, is the need for YA narratives that understand the nuances of social media as the terrain on and through which adolescence unfolds today, both its positives and negatives.
