Title: Hourglass
Author: Myra McEntire
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!
In which McEntire shamelessly steals the time travel gene idea from Kerstin Gier's Ruby Red series (reviewed elsewhere in this blog).
Oh, where to start with this one? I have several problems with this novel, all of which are exacerbated by the fact that, these problems aside, this is a good and interesting story. Or at least it was up until chapter 11! Whether it continues to be so, especially in the light of these problems, remains to be seen.
But the problems abound: we have the standard asinine YA trope of a girl with a ridiculous name and a hunky guy whose "muscles had muscles", and hair in his eyes - oh, and a full mouth, lest we forget that crucial component. I feel bad for those guys with half a mouth.
The female protag is named Emerson Cole. Seriously? Emerson is an electronics manufacturer - the 97th largest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States according to wikipedia. It’s not a girl. I'm going to write a YA novel with a fem protag whose name is Nokia. It’s a cross between Snooki and K.I.A. The villain of the novel is the Roaming Charges Corporation, lead by evil mastermind Ma Bellzebub. And they're the number 1 corporate producer of air pollution!
The male protag (of Trapper Myra's novel, that is) is Michael Weaver (I suspect that name was chosen purposefully. This guy is majorly creepy, but of course Samsung...er, Emerson loves him at first sight and despite the ever present mental problems she thinks she has, he wipes that churning anguish entirely away, and becomes the entire sole overwhelming, 100%, non-stop subject of her every thought. She can find no fault with him no matter how he behaves, and the pitifully few times that she thinks she's found a real fault with him are hastily swept under the rug.
Michael is hired by Em's older brother to help her deal with the fact that she sees ghosts and can't tell the difference between them and real people. He has a professional relationship with her and she's got the major hots for him. If he'd had a shred of integrity he would have recused himself from being involved professionally with her but he doesn’t. Instead he goes in entirely the opposite direction, indulging in the most inappropriate conduct imaginable!
They go out to dinner; they spend a lot of time touching; they have endless encounters where their faces are just inches from each other's. Yes, faces: Michael is two-faced. There, I said it! And once again we have to suffer the sad, tired trope where he knows everything, she knows nothing and he keeps it that way by avoiding her depressingly few questions, and warning her off finding out for herself, or simply not answering her. And she finds nothing wrong with this: with this guy - who's been hired to help her - deliberately obfuscating things and going out of his way to avoid providing information that she desperately needs.
The guy jumps out at her and scares her when she's jogging. This is a big muscular guy jumping out at a petite young woman whom he knows has some psychological issues. She has a brown belt in Karate, but she uses a Judo move on him. I don't know if this is because McEntire knows nothing about Karate, or if there are things which she's failed to convey to us about Grundig…er, Emerson. Michael follows Em into her apartment uninvited. He follows her into her bedroom uninvited. She sees nothing wrong with this.
These visions she has are not really ghosts, but Em is so incurious about them that she's never discovered this! Even though she knows she can see them and talk to them, she has never asked even the most elementary of questions of them. She meets one called Jack who knows who she is and who reappears to her in her bedroom, but she seems never to take the chance to talk to him, even though it’s painfully evident how important it is that she does.
The second time he appears to her, she considers whether he's a creepy stalker, but nothing like that crosses her transom with Michael who has scared her more than once. Michael inappropriately buys her flowers. He knows her favorite flower, but she doesn’t find this suspicious. He knows her favorite music, but she doesn’t find this suspicious. He inappropriately touches her frequently, but she finds this titillating. There are endless times when they're face to face and so close. He knows her sister-in-law is pregnant without Em telling him and she doesn’t find this suspicious. He knows what searches she has conducted on her sister's - her sister's, not her own - computer, without her mentioning a word about it, and she doesn’t find this suspicious. He warns her off making such searches, and she finally gets miffed, but even as the realizations should have flooded her that he's a jerk and a control freak who doesn't even have the integrity he was born with, she still takes time to obsess with the YA trope of gold flecks in his eyes.
Honestly, what is wrong with YA writers and these male protagonists? If male writers wrote like that, but in reverse they would, and rightly so, be pilloried for the most egregious genderism, but no-one in the YA community says a word about these tedious and even dangerous clichés? In chapter 11, page 76, Emerson admits she's an idiot. Finally. But we know she's not going to learn from this because when he shows up unannounced and asks to talk to her, she changes, brushes her teeth, and applies perfume before hurrying to meet him! Emerson is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.
Does McEntire want young girls to be this moronic? Does she think it appropriate that petite women should actually encourage big muscular guys who behave inappropriately, even threateningly, and have all the appearance of a stalker? If she does then she's a moron, too. If the story was not interesting as it is - McEntire offers enough teasers to keep the pages turning - and I wasn't really curious to see if she fix this train wreck and pull Michael out of the fires of hell in future chapters by explaining his behavior rationally, I would ditch this novel. McEntire offers a sop, however, and I want to see if that will be enough to excuse what she's written about this tragic co-dependent relationship so far, but nothing she can say at this point will ever excuse Sony's...er, Emerson's cluelessness.
During Michael's meeting with Em's freshly brushed teeth and perfume-y neck, he asks her if she's seen anyone from the future and tells her his first encounter with a "ghost" was a guy from the future. She asks him if he's seen anyone he knows and he tries to avoid the question. This - this puts her senses on "full alert"? All the appalling behavior he's demonstrated so far has triggered nothing, but this one thing wakes her up? Nothing else he's done has even made her remotely suspicious, but the fact that he's met someone he knows makes her sit up and pay attention?
Clearly this part is bad writing: the person he met is so obviously Em that it’s no surprise at all. This explains how he knows so much about her and perhaps explains - but most certainly doesn’t excuse - some of his inappropriate behavior. If he knows her better than he actually does (from her perspective), it does explains some things, but not her reaction to him, nor his behavior. If he knew her that well, he would have behaved a lot more responsibly towards her and been a lot more concerned about her. He doesn’t behave towards her like he truly cares about her, and she isn’t even remotely creeped out by this situation!
It becomes apparent now that what Em sees are not ghosts, but actual people from the past while they are still alive in their time stream. Michael can see people from the future, and together they make a matching pair! Aw, ain't that so sweet! If they can see people from a time period, they can travel to that time period, so together they can visit the past or the future.
But none of this excuses Michael's disgracefully inappropriate professional behavior, nor does it explain how he knew that her sister-in-law was pregnant (unless it was a wild guess based on what she told him in the future) or Em's complete lack of surprise that he knows. And it doesn’t explain how he knew that she had just been researching the Hourglass corporation (for which Michael works) on the Internet on her sister's computer. Or why she isn’t outraged by his stalking, - or, for that matter, why she found out so little in her search! What she did find was a story about someone dying in a fire.
At this point I'm about 40% in and I'm increasingly embracing the perception that I might not even get all the way through the remaining 60%. I do want to finish this at present because I want to review the whole thing and I'm still curious about how McEntire is gong to shovel her way out of the huge holes she's dug, but the relationship between Michael and Panasonic…er, Emerson, is really trying my patience. Plus there are other issues! And this novel is increasingly sounding like Fallen (reviewed elsewhere in this blog), which isn’t a compliment, by any means.
Em starts her new job working with her best friend Lily in her favorite coffee shop. She goes there first thing in the morning. I only mention this because very shortly after, it’s almost midnight and nowhere near enough time has passed for this to be the case! Anyway, in the café, Em immediately sees a "rip" as they're calling them: some cheerleaders in a café in the 50's. For some utterly bizarre reason, Em takes a rolling pin from the counter and pokes at them to get them to disappear, and when Lily returns from a different room, Em doesn’t replace the pin on the counter, but tosses it so that it ends up on the floor out of sight; then she tells Lily that the loud noise was giant rats.
The odd thing is that Lily knows exactly where to go pick up the rolling pin - like she saw Em toss it there. The even odder thing is that Lily merely rinses the rolling pin and hands it to Em to roll out pastry. Seriously? I don’t want to ever eat a pastry at that café. Ever. At the end of their shift, they exit the café to discover Michael waiting across the street (no explanation as to why he's not parked right outside the door). No explanation as to how this creepy stalker guy knows where she works or what time she gets out. But Lily takes a serious interest in him. I think what McEntire is loudly telegraphing here is that Lily isn't just wallpaper in this story: perhaps she's a time-traveler; perhaps she's the evil queen who's been hanging with Em not because she's a BFF, but because she's after something to which only Em can lead her.
Do we want to say a word about how tired the trope is that, no matter what the movie or YA novel, the very average fem protag inevitably has a killer beauty for a best friend and a hot tanned hunky, full mouthed, hair-in-the-eyes guy who is inescapably and deeply in love with her from the off? And no one ever tells her anything because it's too dangerous. And she's pretty much okay with this despite the token protests she raises. I thought not.
It bothers me that it's young women who are writing this stuff, but it bothers me more that it's younger women who are reading it as though this is not only normal, but the only normal. Is this what we want to teach young women? Do we want to turn feminism around and now tell our girls that the only decent relationship is a love at first site relationship where you must subject yourself to the whims of a guy who is built like he can brutalize you, and to whom you must feel bound no matter how mean or abusive he is, and if he asks you to trust him, this you must do unquestioningly? Because that's what McEntire is teaching through these characters. And she's offered no good reason for it so far.
When Michael has driven Em home, he tells her he has to be out of town for a couple of days. He's lying. Em discovers this because she has to let movers into Michael's apartment (he now has a room directly next door to Em's bedroom) and she finds his business cards which have the address of the hourglass institute on them. She's completely failed to show any interest in this place in any conversation she's had with both Thomas her brother, and with Michael, who is supposed to be helping her, but now that she finds the business card, she's impelled to suddenly drive off to snoop around the place!
She conveniently happens upon a conversation between Michael and some guy called Kaleb (yes with a K! It wouldn't be a YA name otherwise, would it now?). They are so obviously talking about their plans for Em which don’t appear to be coincident with what Michael has so far (not) been telling her. Kaleb seems a lot more interested in her welfare than Michael has so far demonstrated himself to be. When she sneaks back to her car, Michael is, of course, waiting for her but never once does she interrogate him about the conversation she overheard! Not a whisper!
Instead of taking her home, he takes her to meet a friend, who is an exotic and devastatingly beautiful (of course!) woman who tells her precisely nothing. Em decides this is so informative that she is going to stay overnight. Yes, it's almost midnight! Where did the whole day suddenly go? Well this is a time-travel novel!
Instead of getting better, this thing gets worse! The next morning Em meets Ava, Michael's previous interest before her, but that's not the worst part, They invent a new element: duronium! Evidently McEntire doesn't know much about physics. Yes, there are undiscovered elements, but elements are just as tied to the laws of physics as we are. They're predictable, and they follow rules. Here's a periodic table. Right now the number of known elements ends at atomic number 118 (that's the number of protons in the nucleus), but even beyond that we know there are elements; we just haven't actually encountered them yet.
The last one I know of that was created was 117, and only six atoms of that could be made at the time, back in 2010, and it was almost half again as heavy as lead. But even as long ago as the sixties, Glenn Seaborg predicted the existence of a stable island of heavy elements beyond lead. Seaborg had an element named after him while he was still alive: Seabogium. He once taught at the Lawrence lab in Berkeley in California, and at that time was the only person who could write his address entirely in element names: Seaborgium, Lawrencium, Berkelium, Californium, Americium which I think is one of the coolest things ever! On that subject, there is an interesting page!
The reason for this lack of discovery is that the only undiscovered elements are the unstable ones - the ones north of lead, which sits at atomic number 82. There are predicted stable ones above that, but none have been discovered. Everything north of lead that we know of is unstable - that is to say it's radioactive so we have to assume that either the duronium ring which Michael is wearing is rotting his finger off, or it's heavier than hell, and neither of these claims is made for it. Just saying!
But it gets worse! Cat can apparently produce "negative matter" matter with her hands! Not anti-matter, but negative matter! What the heck is that? Well it's not as wacky as you might think, even though its really wacky in a different sense! So the deal is that with Cat's negative matter, and with a duronium ring, and with Michael and Em's combined abilities, the two of them can travel in time. As long as their fingers don't rot off. Michael's plan is to fix everything by preventing the fiery death of Liam, the founder of Hourglass, because after his death, Landers a very bad guy took over and things went to hell. He explains that if they could prevent the death of Liam, it would fix everything. The time paradox cliché isn't an issue here because Liam's body was never identified - only a few badly charred bones were fond in the aftermath of the fire. If they can save him then, and then reproduce him now, in the present, everything should be fine. Except why do I now feel that Liam didn't die in the fire: it was someone else?
But it gets worse! Michael and Cat reveal that there are different groups like Hourglass, but focused on different strengths such as spirit-hunting skills and transformation abilities. Yes, the woo meter just went off the scale.
I'm sorry I honestly tried to keep plowing through this but I cannot. Not after Apple...er, Hewlett...er, Emerson stepped bet wen Kaleb with a K and Michael with a J for jerk and took time to feel up their muscles while trying to prevent a potential fight. Not after Emerson finally met ghostly Jack again and then expressly did not pursue finding out what he was all about. I tried to like it for two-thirds of the novel. I even did start out liking it, but Trapper McEntire killed any love I made have been fostering for it by pummeling me with one bad plot point after another, and two boring-as-hell clichés of guys making a complete cliché of a supposed "love" triangle, one of whom is supposed to be good but who is a worthless abusive jackass, and the other of whom is supposedly bad, but who hasn;t shown anything bad at all other than getting drunk. He actually is more caring of Hitachi...er, Toshiba..., er Emerson than is the "good" guy, but both of whom are utterly uninteresting white male trash clichés. I cannot read any more of this fruitless bland unoriginal crap because I honestly don't care what happens to any of these people. Time to move on to something worth reading.
