This Is Not a Love Scene Misses an Opportunity for Important Character Growth

Wednesday Books

I have a confession to make: I accidentally glanced at the Goodreads reviews before reading this book. The most upvoted ones were low, and I didn’t read them too closely, but they gave me a strange sense of foreboding going in anyway. Still, I kept up a positive attitude, at least at first; other books I’ve loved have low ratings on Goodreads, and the start of S. C. Megale’s debut novel was very promising. The more I read, however, the less I enjoyed myself, until I realized that the online community had been right.

This Is Not a Love Scene is about Maeve Leeson, a teenage filmmaker who has muscular dystrophy and a wicked sense of dirty humor. While filming her senior project for class, she gets the chance to grow closer to Cole Stone, an aspiring actor who returns her flirtatious banter. While his hot-and-cold attitude isn’t ideal, Maeve continues to pursue him, despite her friends’ warnings to be careful.

Let’s start with the positive. S. C. Megale is 23 and has spinal muscular atrophy herself, so her portrayal of Maeve’s daily life and routines is insightful and based on lived experience. Maeve herself, while she can be vulgar, is hilarious and and blunt with the people around her, and some of the antics she gets up to were fun to read. I also loved that Megale addressed the controversy of the 2016 film Me Before You—which received criticism for its representation of life with quadriplegia—from the perspective of someone with paraplegia. Seeing a film very similar to Me Before You stirs up Maeve’s worries of feeling like a burden on her friends and family, as well as the annoyance she feels for Hollywood’s treatment of people with disabilities.

The things I didn’t like, however, far outweigh the things I did. Maeve, with all her bravado, is very insecure and feels the need to be validated by men. She often finds herself an Old Man Friend (or OMF) to spend her time with, and while nothing goes beyond friendliness and a little flirting, it’s still very uncomfortable to read about teenage Maeve interacting with men far older than she is. Meanwhile, her relationship with Cole is very surface level and based solely on attraction; this isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but the fact Maeve is clearly more into it than Cole is raises red flags immediately. She’s convinced she needs to be sexually desired to feel beautiful and like a supposed “normal person” and tries constantly not to come off as “asexual.” (I’m paraphrasing here, but she does mention a couple of times that she doesn’t want to appear that way, and it made me roll my eyes at her clear misunderstanding of the term.) While a well-written protagonist obviously shouldn’t be perfect from the first page, I didn’t feel Maeve grew out of any of these traits.

Maeve has another suitor in the form of KC, a childhood friend who has depression and is very secretive about his home life. While KC is an important character, especially during the climax of the novel, his mental illness isn’t important beyond that, which is disappointing. Depression is treated as no more than a plot device, and while I can’t say I was a fan of KC as a person, I wish he had been handled with much more care than he was.

My biggest issue with this book, however, was that Maeve never changed. Protagonists are typically supposed to be dynamic, to grow over the course of a story. Maeve remained the same girl she was at the beginning of the story, and while it was nice to see her working toward her dream of going to UCLA for film, she didn’t seem to have learned or grown from her experiences with Cole. It really bothers me when a book for young adults seems to push the angle of needing a significant other to feel validation; speaking as someone who felt that way for a long time, I can say firsthand how damaging that viewpoint is. I understand why Maeve feels discouraged and craves male attention, but she never grows out of that mindset, and the most other characters do about it is mention that she comes on too strong sometimes.

I really wish I had better things to say about this book. The fact that S. C. Megale is so young and already a published author is an impressive feat, and I firmly believe that everyone should be able to see themselves represented in literature. But This Is Not a Love Scene is messy in its execution and disappointing in its message, and teens deserve better. Megale’s voice is very strong, however, so I hope that she continues to write, because I have a feeling she has more unique stories to tell.

This Is Not a Love Scene is out May 7, 2019.