Margot Mertz Takes It Down
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4.3 • 8 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Veronica Mars meets Moxie in this hilarious and biting YA contemporary novel following Margot Mertz, a girl who runs an internet cleanup business and embarks on a quest to take down a revenge-porn site targeting the girls in her school.
For the right price, high school junior Margot Mertz will go to the ends of the internet to remove your nip-slip, dick pic, or embarrassing DM. At least that's what it says on her business card. Margot founded a now notorious company that helps students, teachers, even a local weatherman, discreetly clean up their digital shame. And since her parents lost her college fund, Margot is happy to work for anyone... if they can pay, she can clean.
But when a fellow student hires her to take down some leaked nudes, Margot discovers a secret revenge porn site featuring Roosevelt High girls. And hell hath no fury like Margot when she sees girls’ butts shared without their consent. With the help of an unwitting ally, the popular and uncomfortably handsome Avery Green, Margot will gain access to the far flung cliques of Roosevelt High. Anything to find the mastermind (read: a*****e) behind the site. But the more she digs, the deeper and darker the case becomes until Margot realizes that some jobs are so dirty, no one can come away clean. Even her. Gross.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This may be a young-adult mystery novel, but Margot Mertz is no Nancy Drew. A high-school junior with a finely tuned sense of moral outrage—and a talent for casual swearing—Margot’s saving up for Stanford by cleaning up other people’s online messes. Usually, that’s nothing more than an embarrassing Instagram post, but one day a classmate approaches her about a disturbingly professional-looking revenge porn website dedicated to photos of girls at their high school. Authors Carrie McCrossen and Ian McWethy have created a winner of a heroine in Margot, a hilarious, tough-cookie feminist with just enough self-doubt to make her relatable…especially once her investigation gets her close to Avery, the cutest of the popular boys, who may not be as awful as she’s always assumed. Margot Mertz Takes It Down deals with some tough subjects but treats its characters and readers with respect. We can’t wait to see where Margot’s adventures take her next.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For "teachers, students, parents, and one time a state legislator," white high school junior Margot Mertz ("Entrepreneur. Tech-curious. Lone wolf") cleans up "life-destroying" internet errors. The work sometimes puts her into moral gray areas, but since her parents have lost her college fund, she needs the money to pay for college. When a classmate hires Margot to take down a well-designed, password-protected revenge porn website featuring female classmates without their consent, she's furious at its existence and eager to help. But parlaying her reluctant bond with popular, biracial (Black/white) Avery Green turns up little information from her suspects. And since the victims don't want any guys involved, she can't ask her hacker friend Sammi Santos, who's Dominican American, for a cleanup assist. Married collaborators McCrossen and McWethy don't pull punches (the victims' distress, and the fact that no one thinks the school administration will intervene, are realistically rendered), while making Margot a sympathetic, fury-propelled narrator with a winningly noir-inflected voice. Ages 14–up.
