Clementine’s Weekly Reading Series: You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt
By Clementine The Hedgehog

Welcome to Clementine’s Weekly Reading Series, where Clem the Hedgehog discusses whatever she’s currently reading. This week: You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt.

I’m not really into all that Scooby Doo shit, but when I’m reading a mystery, I inevitably get emotionally involved. Us hedgehogs are high-strung creatures — you try living with hundreds of spikes on your back and fucking relaxing.

Anyway, You Are One of Them isn’t straight up Sherlock Holmes, but there’s a big unsolved question at its core: the narrator Sarah loses her BFF in a fiery plane crash after a publicity tour of the U.S.S.R., but no body is recovered — and as anyone who’s seen even one episode of Law and Order knows, if there’s no body, that person is most definitely alive and living under a new identity.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

The part that really got my quills in a bunch was the ending:  It turns out Jenny, Sarah’s supposedly dead bestie, was the daughter of a K.G.B. spy – and is now living in Russia under the uber-trendy name Zola. 

You have no idea what this does to my already nuclear-level paranoia. I already loathe 90 percent of the humans I come across, but now I also have to assume they’re K.G.B. spies scheming to overthrow America and everything it holds dear? I cannot deal with that shit. After I finished the book, I had to bury it in my litter box for a while in order to emotionally digest everything.

If you thought Cold War paranoia was a thing of the past, you obviously do not know a hedgehog. We are always in fear of a nuclear meltdown because we are genetically coded to dread that moment when we slip into permanent hibernation. If you think I’m exaggerating, then I highly recommend this book. When you’re done, come join me in my fucking fallout shelter.

Clementine was born on July 2011 to an unknown breeder in New Jersey. She made her Internet debut on September 2012, and since then, her Tumblr book review series has gained acclaim from authors like Emma Straub, Ned Vizzini and Jami Attenberg. In her spare time, Clementine sleeps, eats and exercises on her scurry wheel. She also has a new book that’s out now from Black Balloon Publishing: Clementine Classics: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.