Author: Stacey Wallace Benefiel
Publisher: Smashwords
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!
Errata
P21 "…younger sister's of retroacts…" should be "younger sisters of retroacts". Apostrophes are way over-used and all-too-often badly so!
P35 "...the busyness of the city..." is not so much an error as a really interesting use of the English language. There's already a word 'business' so why not use that one instead of making up one? Discuss!
This novel is set in the not-too-distant future where cars are self-drive. Google, believe it or not, is already testing such a vehicle in California, and even the US car manufacturers are waking up and working on the concept! It’s a pity Google can’t invest just as much into getting bloggers' pictures loaded, isn’t it?! The female protagonist is Penny Black (evidently named after a stamp!), four months shy of her eighteenth, who is released from a juvie center on the outskirts of Washington DC into the custody of an 'uncle' she knows she doesn’t have. He's young and from what he says about her resembling her mother, he's never met either her mother or her father. She goes with him because she thinks she can run as soon as she's away from the juvie center. He holds her arm firmly, but not painfully, as he leads her outside, telling her that he's just like her.
Hopefully real juvie centers don’t release children so easily, but Penny decides to go with him because he doesn't represent a threat and she's a really good judge of character (so she mistakenly believes). She gets no bad vibes from him at all. He talks about The New Society, but she has no idea what that is. Christopher hands her his 'Ret-Tech' some sort of head-worn video device. On it, Penny watches a recording of a traffic accident. This was something she dreamed, yet it turns out it really happened. But it gets even more weird. Penny sees herself in the video. She sees herself make hand gestures which rewind time itself, and prevent the accident from happening! She learns she is a 'retroact'.
It turns out that Christopher is part of a very small unit bankrolled by a wealthy business woman, who wants people with Penny's talent to be productive and cared for. Penny will have to share a room. I don’t get that part! If Clare is so wealthy, why is she so cheap with the accommodations?! Wyatt Adams, a non-retroact, is on his way to pick her up at LAX. He's a chalk-and-cheese counterpart to Penny, having a real family (two sisters, for example, one of whom he's traveling with along with her husband). Actually, I've never understood the chalk and cheese thing! Given that both have a lot of calcium in them they’re really not so different at the atomic level...!
Apparently the retroacts have a trigger person; the trigger is having sex with the retroact. Wyatt is a virgin. I guess that's why Penny isn’t with Darren any more. And both her parents are dead. So at this point I don't get why she couldn’t rewind and bring them all back. I thought that perhaps we'd find out during this particular novel but we don't!
The school they take Penny to is rich - absurdly, improbably rich. No one has that kind of money. It’s located in a street which is gorgeous, but is made to look trashy by the psychic powers of Christopher. Most of the school us underground where there are absurdly long secret tunnels that Penny discovers she can access. All the accommodations and food, and even the clothes Penny gets are provided free. I found it odd, given that this story is set in the future, that people there are having to use badges to get through doors. Why not just chip them with RFID?
At sixty pages in the writing style was really starting to grate, I have to confess. Absolutely everyone, without exception, has their name abbreviated (or should I say abbrev'd?!), which really jars because it seemed so juvenile and unrealistic to me. There's Ty, Wy, and Kai for goodness sakes! There are also good-natured insults like 'dicknob', and 'buttwrinkle', which make me feel like I'm reading a story written by a thirteen-year-old. There's "you’re a dime" or "he's a dime" meaning a ten, which is too cute for its own good. There are two Spanish words used repeatedly: 'bueno' and 'chido'. Bueno means 'good', but it’s also a bit like 'okay' - a general purpose word that can mean all right, hello, etc. Chido reminds me of Cheetohs®! It's a slang word meaning cool or awesome. Those two words really jump out, and not in a good way.
I'm not at all sure what to make of a phrase like this on p64; "The collar is high, skimming just below her delicate clavicles..." (this is Wyatt pretty much raping Penny with his eyes). Either the collar is high or it's below her collar bones. It can’t be both. There is way too much instadore between the two of them. Admittedly he's a juvenile (or close enough), and full of untempered male hormones, and she had a vision of herself kissing him, so there is some impetus behind the attraction. That alone isn’t what bothers me; it's the endless description of how hot they are for each other, which will become really tiresome if it isn’t tempered.
I don’t mind people being hot for one another, I do mind being slapped upside the head with it on almost every single page, like there's nothing more to life than how hot or not is this particular member of the other gender is, or worse, being effectively told that I'm too stupid to recall or even register that they're hot for one another from two paragraphs ago, so here's yet another booster shot!
These are people with extraordinary powers, and yet instead of being fascinated by those, all they can think about is whether they want in the pants of the nearest member of the opposite (or the same or that matter) gender? It’s not realistic, and it cheapens the story for me, turning this extraordinary school into nothing more than you average high school.
It turns out, very conveniently, that Penny (short for Penelope) and Elle (also short for Penelope!) are in fact cousins. It turns out that Penny can heal unnaturally quickly, but irrationally, she can’t heal her numerous bruises or scars! It turns out that there's a guy she meets briefly in the airport who is a look-alike for a famous singer, and this doppelganger is kidnapped, as witnessed by Penny in one of her insta-visions - she doesn’t see the future, she sees the now! A group of them take off after him and Wyatt ends up in serious trouble. I really appreciated that realism when I've read all too many other stories where young people do dumb stuff and there are never consequences.
And that's all you get - oh, apart for the humongous twist at the end, no doubt designed (and very effectively so!) to make you read book 2, despite some issues I had with book 1! Go read the ebook! I found this a worthy read and would be interested in reading more. The cutesy language, buzz-words and abbreviations were rather annoying but the story itself was strong enough that it didn’t turn me off the novel as a whole. I liked it, I found it an easy read, and I kept looking forward to the next chapter as I read each one, which is always a good sign.
