A review by caffeineaddict980
Watch Us Rise by Ellen Hagan, Renée Watson

4.0

Jasmine's Dad only has four months to live due to his cancer diagnosis and he makes Jasmine and her artistic friends promise they will live life to the fullest.

Jasmine and Chelsea, linked by the interest in women's rights and race along with their backgrounds, decide to start a women's rights club in their high school.
Despite some thoughts from teachers about the fact it won't work, it turns out to be a popular club anyway as the girls use their passions and interests to draw people's attentions.
As the blog causes a spark of interest of different types from the students, events and anger also ramps up and the principal nearly shuts their blog down.
The principal shuts their blog down eventually after the girls get their own back on a student that sexually assualted one of the girls - The principal disturbingly brushes over the assault and doesn't investigate.

I definitely preferred Jasmine's character a lot more than Chelsea. Her articles and poetry especially made me say "wow" everytime that I read the work featured on the blog that she creates.

Chelsea instantly irks me as a character from the way she begins talking about the patriarchy creeping into the names of the lipglosses that her Mum picked out for her in the first time that we meet her - although she touches on important feminist topics and makes decent points, it sometimes feels too forced and like her whole personality is just consumed by feminist views and not many of her personality traits come to light, her character reminds me a lot of what modern day feminism currently is.
Although, the poetry that she writes in the novel is actually quite empowering, I also love the way she deals her situation with James!

This book touches a lot on race and gender, which are quite important themes to write about and the opinons of the characters along with the different aspects that are discussed provide a lot of insight and exploration into those topics, a lot of the things that were discussed had me nodding in agreement at various points.

I love the poetry and art the characters come up with in this novel and found it was a great addition to the story.

However, I did notice that there was a scene of sexual assualt and harrasment that was brushed over and not dealt with properly by the school, although the woman's rights club do get their own back on the guy who did it and it strengthens their club as a whole!!

Overall, I really enjoyed this novel and will definitely be re-reading it in the near future!
4.5 stars!