meredithdias.com

** spoiler alert **

I had a review written for this, but I can’t bring myself to post it. It isn’t constructive, and I try not to pan a book without offering up at least something positive or helpful. I once self-published an ebook (which has been offline for “repairs”/a total overhaul for three years now), so I know firsthand how unbelievably grueling it is to write a book. I struggle with it daily, and am the first to admit that the original version of my story (and possibly even the current one) was, in parts, really bad. I’m still learning. Even Salman Rushdie and Haruki Murakami are still learning. So, keep in mind as you read this that, while I may complain heartily about a book, I’m always respectful of the mind-melting work that went into it.

There are so many things about this story that make me worry for impressionable young women reading it that I held nothing back in my original review. Beyond the numerous Twilight ripoffs and the protagonists’ own abhorrent behavior, this book (like so many others) romanticizes stalking and controlling romantic relationships. It glorifies dishonesty and cheating. It even, at one point, has the “heroine” driving drunk to school, an appalling act for which she suffers no real consequences–and, even worse, something she treats as a big joke.

I will share the lists from my original review and spare you the rest:

Behavior that, according to Ever and Damen, is totally copacetic:
–Using psychic powers to cheat on tests (and then criticizing mortal girls for doing the same, sans psychic powers).
–Using psychic powers to cheat at gambling and win hundreds of thousands of dollars.
–Stalking.
–Breaking and entering.
–Self-medicating with booze.
–Driving drunk.
–Lying, as long as it’s about “unimportant” things.
–Invading your significant other’s thoughts, allowing him/her no privacy.
–Controlling your girlfriend’s clothing, music, thoughts, and dreams.
–Ditching your girlfriend to “go surfing” when she turns you down for lovin’.
–Stealing another woman’s husband over and over, and then killing her for not taking it lying down.
–Flirting with other girls to make your lady love jealous.
–Plying your girlfriend with tulips every time you do something jerky.
–Breaking the code and going after your best friend’s crush.
–Not giving your girlfriend a choice to spend eternity with her family before making her an immortal like you (even Edward gave Bella a choice, which basically involved Bella convincing him for 1500+ pages that she had nothing to live for and just wanted to be like him–but, still, he gave her the choice).

Blatant Twilight ripoffs:
–The sequel is called Blue Moon. (“Come on!!! Are you serious?!” asks Mr. Mere.)
–New girl in new town meets new boy in new town. The two sit next to one another in class.
–Immortal boy thinks bland, somewhat unlikable first-person narrator is more extraordinary than any of the girls he’s met across time and space.
–Ever can read everyone’s thoughts but Damen’s.
–Damen is seventeen, immortal, rich, and drives a fast car.
–Damen never eats and his lips are “icy cold.”
–These characters are centuries-old virgins.
–Damen cuts school a lot, leaving Ever to plotz over his absence.
–Damen shows up randomly and without warning in Ever’s bedroom. Sexless sleepovers ensue.
–Ever has no parental supervision whatsoever. Even when she narrowly dodges expulsion for getting wasted at school, her adoptive aunt (Sabine) half-heartedly hides the booze in an unlocked cabinet rather than pouring it down the sink.
–Ever and Damen share a timeless love but, really, their central conflict is not being able to have sex. Though I’m not sure what’s stopping Ever–it’s never really made clear.
–Key scenes in meadows/fields.
–Damen to Ever/Edward to Bella: “I can’t stay away from you” (258). A blatant, word-for-word dialogue lift.
–Instead of catching a falling apple in the cafeteria, Damen catches Ever’s falling water bottle. Like Edward, he moves so fast that it’s a blur.

Things Damen can do:
(Note: According to Ever, Damen has a “neverending list of things he’s good at” (55). There are several paragraphs in this book that are just laundry lists of all the things that make Damen awesomesauce.)
–Anything. Everything.
–Painting, diving, surfing, soccer, guitar, piano, violin, saxophone, magic tricks, etc.
–He taught Picasso everything he knows about painting. No joke. Picasso and Van Gogh both painted him, and he was also BFFs with Leonardo da Vinci. His modern-day art teacher realizes “she’s never had [a student:] with such innate, natural ability–until now” (56). This is some serious Gary Stu (thanks, Ashley) characterization. On top of all this, he has signed books from Emily Brontë and William Shakespeare, and he knew Marie Antoinette and all four Beatles.
–He’s ambidextrous and, to quote Bella Swan, “impossibly fast.”
–He regularly cribs passages from various popular New Age texts, which combine to form a confusing mish-mash of manifesting, positive thinking, Transcendental Meditation, chakras, karma, and reincarnation. These concepts are not, as pop American pseudo-philosophy would have you believe, interchangeable.
–In other words, he bastardizes legitimate Eastern religions/philosophies to make them palatable to an American teenage audience. It happens all the time.

Miscellaneous other issues:
–Excessive use of participial phrases and miscellaneous copyediting errors.
–Using “nauseous” instead of “nauseated” multiple times to describe feeling sick to one’s stomach.
–Blatant product/celebrity placement (Sidekick, iPhone, iPod, Orlando Bloom, Johnny Depp, Evanescence, etc.).
–A plot more than vaguely reminiscent of The Twilight Saga, Fallen, Hush, Hush, Numbers, The Lovely Bones, and others.

I’ve heard that the subsequent books improve, so maybe they iron out some of the kinks of this first one. I think that I could have forgiven a lot if the core relationships in this book had been stronger. Sabine is too busy with her job to parent Ever at all. Ever is too self-involved to be a good friend to Miles and Haven. Damen is too controlling to be a healthy choice for Ever. Riley is too derivative of The Lovely Bones for me to take her seriously. I felt no real connection between any of these characters. And, once again, I’m left wondering if physical beauty is the only thing that attracts Ever and Damen to one another.

My spoiler-free, character-based review. It does, however, contain generic quotes from throughout the book, so be warned.

Title: Why Katniss Everdeen is not your typical YA heroine
Subtitle: In other words, why Katniss rocks

I am going to break this down one quote at a time. Indirectly, this book calls a lot of young adult authors onto the carpet for lazy storytelling and limp-as-a-dishrag heroines. It’s hard to say whether or not this was deliberate, but my first quote, exhibit A, makes me think it might have been.

Exhibit A: Haymitch: “‘I want everyone to think of one incident where Katniss Everdeen genuinely moved you. Not where you were jealous of her hairstyle, or her dress went up in flames or she made a halfway decent shot with an arrow. Not where Peeta was making you like her. I want to hear one moment where she made you feel something real.’” (74)

Read this passage. If you have ever so much as fantasized about writing a novel, memorize it. It is glorious. It is an APB to authors everywhere that a character needs to be more than a blank slate. A character needs dimension and clear motivation. She needs to evoke genuine emotion, rather than merely the adrenaline thrill associated with a first kiss or romantic scene. She needs to aspire to something more than boys. Don’t tell us she is awesome without providing the narrative goods to back it up. Don’t reduce your secondary characters to a mere claque that worships everything about her and reminds the audience at every turn that she is the most amazing girl who ever lived. Show us why she is amazing.

Exhibit B: “The very notion that I’m devoting any thought to who I want presented as my lover, given our current circumstances, is demeaning” (40).

Katniss is one self-aware young lady. In key scenes, she is not whining about her romantic melodramas, but actively seeking solutions. She waits for no one to save her–she is perpetually proactive. Moreover, unlike so many young adult heroines I’ve read recently, she does not begrudge others their happiness. Despite her belief that she is “manipulative,” she genuinely cares about others. She asks Prim how she is doing and actually lets her talk. When others are happy, she becomes a lens through which we witness that happiness, never subjecting us to self-indulgent whining about her own troubles. Take that, one-sided friendships (which occur often in poorly written YA narratives).

Exhibit C: Boggs: “‘Well, you’re not perfect by a long shot. But times being what they are, you’ll have to do’” (91).

This snippet of dialogue may not seem significant, but it is a tremendous leap forward for YA literature. A character can become popular without, as I mentioned earlier, a claque of characters giving her a standing ovation every time she so much as smiles. The characters in the Hunger Games trilogy are allowed to dislike Katniss and disagree with her openly, without fear of narrative retribution later for daring to dissent.

Exhibit D Johanna: “Jealousy is certainly involved. I also think you’re a little hard to swallow. With your tacky drama and your defender-of-the-helpless act. Only it isn’t an act, which makes you more unbearable. Please feel free to take this personally” (220-1).

This should really be Exhibit C2. Again, we have a character who doesn’t particularly like Katniss, and she isn’t a villain. She isn’t vilified to sanctify Katniss. She just is. This scrap of dialogue not only pokes fun at Katniss, but at a host of YA heroines who are, simply put, “unbearable.”

Exhibit E: “Because an angry, independently thinking victor with a layer of psychological scar tissue too thick to penetrate is maybe the last person you want on your squad” (251).

Did you hear that, Bella Swan? In a believable story, if you are cold and detached from your peers while sporting a vague superiority complex, people will not like you. They will not line up to be your friend as the teens of Forks inexplicably did. Katniss knows this. She understands the ramifications of her behavior, and doesn’t expect people to pat her on the back when she is in the wrong.

Exhibit F: “And what was I, really? A poor, unstable girl with a small talent with a bow and arrow. Not a great thinker, not the mastermind of the rebellion, merely a face plucked from the rabble because I had caught the nation’s attention with my antics in the Games” (294).

Katniss has more to recommend her than most YA heroines these days, but she never, ever toots her own horn. Above, she underplays the vital role she plays in the story. Peeta says it best: “‘I think…you still have no idea. The effect you can have’” (325). She doesn’t understand what Peeta, Gale, and the reader do: that she is the rare first-person heroine that has earned her spot as the narrator of the book. No one else can tell this story better. With so many other YA stories, I find myself thinking that other characters would have made more compelling narrators. Not so here. Collins got it right on the first try.

Now, for some headline-worthy quotes:

“‘Covers will be blown. People may die’” (Haymitch, 164).

“‘There will be no survivors’” (Katniss, 99).

“The Mockingjay will not lose her voice” (178).

So, without divulging any plot details, I will say that this book was phenomenal. There are quotes about warfare and society that I would love to share, but they contain vaguely spoilerous material. This series truly got better as it progressed. I gave Hunger Games three stars, Catching Fire four, and Mockingjay five. Congratulations, Suzanne Collins, on writing a trilogy that actually gained momentum as it went.

** Spoiler Alert **

“Once upon a time, there was a girl named Grace Brisbane. There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books. She loved all the wolves behind her house, but she loved one of them most of all.” (338)

Ladies and gentlemen, your heroine. Like a fine wine reduction, drain all the fluids/blood from her body (literally), and this is what she boils down to. Unlike a fine wine reduction, not exactly awesomesauce.

Four characters narrate this story: Grace, Sam, Isabel, and Cole. One of these things is not like the other. We have Sam, the haunted former wolf who must learn to be human and make peace with what his parents did to him. We have Cole, former frontman of a prominent band, wrestling with suicidal tendencies and a desire to be all wolf, all the time. We have Isabel, still reeling from her brother’s tragic death in Shiver.

And then we have Grace, the blank slate who, ultimately, steers this ship. This is her story, despite the split narrative attention to make us believe otherwise. The problem? She is, by far, the weakest character. It is by the grace (pun totally intended) of the three other characters that I gave this book three stars. They’re all so much more compelling. I would read an Isabel book.

But everyone loves Grace. Cole falls all over himself upon first meeting her, declaring that he “would do anything to be her friend and earn that smile again” (282). Earn that smile? Does it bestow blessings and good health? Does it solve differential equations? Does it cure nebulous werewolf diseases? Let’s not even mention how awful he is to Isabel, who apparently isn’t as amazing as Grace. In fact, he tells us, “She didn’t look disgusted, like Isabel had” (282)–effectively setting up Isabel as the heavy. A few paragraphs earlier, he also tells us exactly what he sees in Grace: “She was pretty in an undramatic way, and she had this great voice: very plain and matter-of-fact and distinctive.” Yikes. The reader needs something more to grab onto than this–Grace being vaguely pretty, having a great voice, and earning high marks in math and lying.

Also, when pondering Grace’s illness, Sam emphasizes that “Grace was the only one of her kind” (336). Of course. Always. Just like Bella (**Twilight spoiler alert**) was the only vampire to skip the painful transition period.

Also, like Bella, Grace contorts herself every which way to be with her supernatural boy wonder. She starts listening to alternative music, which she hates, because Sam likes it. She crosses college off her New Year’s resolution list rather flippantly so that she can shack up with him after high school and have a red coffeepot (I’m not making this up). She runs away from home to be with him after her unfair parents won’t let him sleep in her bed anymore. As much as I hated her parents, let’s get real–there is nothing normal/healthy about these Romeo-and-Juliet nightly sleepovers that have taken the YA romance market by storm.

By the end, I actually thought that Grace was going to die. This would have made sense, strangely. So many of the final scenes between Sam and Grace feel valedictory, as if building toward her death. If this story weren’t trapped in the “trilogy” mindset, maybe it would have gone down that way. Instead, she becomes a wolf in the hospital (thanks to Cole’s saliva–imminent love triangle, anyone?) and takes off for more coniferous pastures.

Not that Grace’s becoming a wolf is without storyline potential. It’s a pretty fitting reversal, and the only logical conclusion given that this is a trilogy. But her becoming a wolf means that she must rely on the men to find a cure. Grace is a good student. She’s smart. If this is her story, which I believe it to be, why couldn’t she be the one to find the cure? Why must she be the one who needs rescuing? Why couldn’t she be a Katniss (Hunger Games Trilogy) instead of a Bella (The Twilight Tetralogy )? Of course, I’m making a lot of assumptions about the third book, but the saga seems to be making a beeline toward Sam and Cole finding a cure so that everyone can live happily ever after. It would be awesomesauce if the third book proved me wrong. What I liked about Shiver was that it was the boy who needed rescuing for once.

A question: Why are all of the parents in this saga so terrible? We have Sam’s parents, who tried to murder him in a bathtub; Isabel’s trigger-happy, wolf-killing father; and Grace’s parents, who have straight-up neglected her for years and suddenly decide to try being parental in this book (with disastrous results). At least in Twilight, we had that paragon of parental win otherwise known as Charlie.

Now, for some quote-specific issues:

“‘This is why you are single’” (65) — Really, Grace? This is how you speak to your best friend? Funnier yet, she says this to Rachel simply because she’s acting a little goofy, a little offbeat–a little, I don’t know, herself? Also, is it a good idea to make teenage girls think that being single is a bad thing?

That said, Rachel can be somewhat over-the-top. A bit obscure, but when she refers to Isabel as “she-of-the-pointy-boots” (313), I was reminded of the annoying Damian Spinelli on General Hospital (yes, I used to watch soaps). He used to use similar nomenclature (and probably still does).

There are some clichés in here, most of which I overlooked, but “dark as pitch” (279) is one of my top 3 simile no-nos. Just don’t do it.

There are things that Maggie Stiefvater does really well. I give her major kudos for making Sam likable when so many other YA paranormal romance authors are cultivating harsh, abusive heroes. As I mentioned earlier, Sam, Cole, and Isabel are quite well-developed. The weak link for me, again, is Grace herself.

This is not your average young adult romance. It has layers. Annabel isn’t always on her best behavior–she has flaws. Owen is edgy without being menacing. Frightening, emotionally abusive “heroes” have become a pervasive problem in young adult romances. It’s nice to see one break free of that formula.

If there is a walking stereotype in this novel, it’s Sophie, the controlling, unpleasant popular girl who dictates Annabel’s life through most of high school. She is the only character undeserving of my empathy. Sure, her parents once dragged her through their ugly divorce. Sure, her boyfriend is a tool of the highest order. But she treats everyone horribly. It is rare, even after the chickens come home to roost for her, that she shows any traces of humanity. Her most honest moment is after being rejected by Kirsten, Annabel’s older sister.

This novel tackles all of the important issues in fiction for teenage girls: self-esteem, body image, honesty, assertiveness, identity, love, family, and independence. It’s about speaking up for yourself. It’s about not letting other people walk all over you. And it’s also about a cute boy. For once, that’s okay–because this particular boy helps Annabel to become a more honest, independent version of herself.

Before you crack open this book, understand something vital: Whatever you think you know about these characters, you’re, at best, only half-right. That doesn’t mean that this is a mind-bender of Murakami proportions, though there are some pretty significant twists. It means that the characters have depth.

This is the warm, sometimes whimsical story of Amy Rook and the people she left behind. There is Arthur, her shattered husband; Mona, her erstwhile best friend, the girl who always cleaned up after her; and Oneida, Mona’s quirky teenage daughter. On their periphery is Eugene/Wendy, boyfriend of Oneida and son of Astor, a security guard with a surprising extracurricular activity.

Mona runs a boarding house populated by quirky side characters and fondant cake creations. She makes a decent living baking wedding cakes, but has a hard time living down her spotty reputation about town (the fictional Ruby Falls, New York). As the story progresses, however, we learn that all is not as it seems, and Mona’s reputation is built upon a foundation of rumor and misunderstanding that she has done nothing to contradict. When a lost and grief-stricken Arthur shows up at her boardinghouse seeking answers about his late wife, she realizes that her days of truth-dodging are over.

The story unfolds from four alternating points of view: Arthur’s, Mona’s, Oneida’s, and Eugene’s. All we have of Amy are the artifacts and people she’s left behind, so all we gain is an incomplete picture of a woman who, for better or worse, was quite complex. It would be easy to dismiss her as a selfish, heartless woman who probably drank too much (several flashbacks feature her in a tipsy or drunken state). But all we have are a handful of memories and revelations that paint a rather fuzzy picture. Did I like Amy? Not particularly. That said, I also recognize that my experience with her was extraordinarily limited.

This is quite a debut. It’s difficult to categorize This Must Be the Place, with its mixed bag of young adult, chick lit, and romance elements. Racculia’s writing is simultaneously smart and warm, and her characters are remarkably well-developed. And the banter snaps, crackles, and pops, as all good banter should.

(Disclaimer: Henry Holt and Company sent me a review copy of this book.)