Author: Rachel Sa
Publisher: Tradewind Books
Rating: WARTY!
I don’t agree with publishers that reporters are the best people from whom to accept book proposals. Yeah, if it’s a non-fiction book, maybe you're onto something, maybe, but if it’s fiction, nope, you’re on something. A reporter is no better qualified to write fiction than is a janitor, a sports personality, an actor, a machinist, or a trash collector; that is to say that every one of them might be able to tell a story, but none of them has a built-in advantage over any of the others.
In this case, Sa pretty much telegraphs her entire plot on page 14 like this is a newspaper story. The only thing left after that is to see how she tells it, and that didn't turn out at all well. The improbable plot is designed at a level which would be more appropriate for ten- to twelve-year-olds rather than for the age it's aimed at which, judged by the age of its main character, is late teens.
In a sense this is a newspaper story, because it's a novel about 17-year-old Sherri Richmond, who is a newspaper reporter, if only for a summer internship at the Lewton Leader-Post (about that name…), so rather than have the new girl arrive at a new high school or prep academy, she arrives at a new town to start a new summer job. She stays at her Aunt Gillian's hotel, which is, she discovers, run down and looking like it's going out of business - as indeed is everything else in Lewton. The only business that's doing well is Shopwells, the mega-store that opened its doors a year or so before.
Sa hits us over the head with this dichotomy repeatedly. What she doesn’t explain, is how it is that Lewton has parking meters in a town we’ve already been told is not only tiny, but practically dead. She does however loudly announce the not-so-devious means by which Shopwells is doing so well on page 30. The problem is that none of her plot makes sense, and the story simply doesn't work even within it's own framework. The town seems to be simultaneously both large and small so that it can accommodate her widely disparate views on what kind of a town it actually is!
The newspaper 'organization' makes no sense especially given the size of the town. The paper employs only five staff including the editor and the receptionist, but the three reporters are given "beats": sports, covered by Bill, a municipal beat covered by Krystal; Sherri gets the social (sherry, social, get it? lol!) beat which was previously held by Krystal. Mac (what else would his name be?) the editor, warns Sherri that there is to be no cross-over reporting. Apparently Mac lost his nose for news in some sort of catastrophic amputation, if we're to judge from his complete docility and lack of interest in what’s been hard-hammered into our skulls since page 14. OTOH, Shopwells is a big advertiser in the paper. OTO,OH, if everyone in town is losing their business and their jobs, and/or spending their money at Shopwells, who has any change left to buy a newspaper? Again, it makes no sense.
Very little makes sense, much less economic sense in this novel. There is no way that Shopwells could be putting everyone out of business and then doing a roaring trade with hoards of customers. Where are those customers earning the money to buy all the crap they're brainwashed into buying at Shopwells? Yeah, some of the mega-store's employees are those who went out of business in town, but seriously? The economics simply doesn't work. This same story was told in the movie You Got Mail and it was better done notwithstanding the fact that it was another Nora Ephron extravaganza in Trite Brand™ sugar.
Sherri's instalove was announced loudly on p48. We've been prepped for this by her 'difficulties' with her current boyfriend, Michael, which amount to nothing more than a mild tiff; however, that seems to be more that enough for Sherri to treat him like dirt, to ignore his calls, texts, and emails, and to rudely rebuff his every attempt at apology and reconciliation. You know, if Sa wanted her main character to get a new love interest, she could have dispensed with Michael altogether and just had Sherri be unattached. I don't get what the point was of even having Michael as a character, unless it was to do precisely what Sa achieved as far as I was concerned, which was to convince me that Sherri is a heartless bitch, and certainly not someone I'd want to know even casually, let alone someone with whom I'd want to become involved.
Just six pages later we're shown how petty both Sherri and Krystal (a rival reporter) are as we see their first encounter, and then watch Sherri type a "story" about her. Krystal is the one who has the beat which Sherri covets. The whiny fake story which Sherri types has nothing whatsoever to do with Krystal's attitude; it’s devoted entirely to how Krystal dresses, which confirmed for me that Sherri is indeed a bitch, and actually a bigger one than is Krystal.
This trend was to continue over the next few pages. By the time I’d reached page 100 or so, all there was left for me to conclude about Sherri is that she's a juvenile, petulant, moody, vindictive, and petty person who probably needs to get on some medication for being a manic depressive. She's all but flirting with new interest Ben, while she's simultaneously angry with her boyfriend Michael for going out to dinner with an old friend, accusing him of sleeping with her! What a hypocrite! If her so-called "love" story with Ben was handled better, it might have helped OT ameliorate this situation, but all that was on offer for us there was your standard, pathetic, juvenile, YA clichéd crap.
Sherri decides to visit the mega-store, to meet with Rebecca Scott, the reporter who quit her job to go work at Shopwells. This is where we realize that Sherri is utterly clueless and oblivious to what’s going on around her - that's hardly a great recommendation for a reporter. She doesn’t suspect a single thing, even though she's being manipulated up the wazoo. I mean, they don't give every staff member that flu shot for nothing you know. And…wait a minute - a flu shot when it’s not even flu season? Sherri is so bad a reporter that she doesn't become even remotely suspicious.
She gets into trouble when she returns to the newspaper office, for going off topic and wasting the newspaper's time with her visit to the store. She never once thinks of going online with her reporting. Fortunately for Sa, this novel is really short (180 pages or so), so I was able to finish it, otherwise I would have ditched it precipitously. The over-arching problem with this novel is that it’s so simplistic and juvenile that I just don't understand how this could have got past a literary agent or a book editor in its published form. And Sa doesn;t understand the difference between 'bunting' and 'punting' on page 139!
In short, this novel is warty. Maybe Sa has a novel in her, but it's not this one. This is Ian Wood reporting for Ian Wood's Novellum. Good Night and Good luck!
