Author: Alexandra May
Publisher: Pauma
Rating: WARTY!
Here's one I snuck in on you! This is the first review of a novel I read on a Kindle. It's not the first I ever read on a Kindle, but that device is such a pain to use that I try not to read on it unless I'm forced. The Kindle interface is really clunky and not user-friendly in any meaningful sense. But this has nothing to do with the review as such, since the interface didn't factor at all into how bad the story was!
This novel was awful! It's one I've had on the list for some time, and I kept putting it off despite the fact that I’d read the first couple of chapters of it. Now I know why I kept putting it off: the novel is a complete mess with no appealing features whatsoever, and I guess I realized this on some level from what I first read. It’s set in England in the county of Wiltshire, home of Stonehenge, another stone circle at Avebury, the White Horse at Cherhill, and the city of Warminster. Warminster was once bizarrely famed for UFO sightings, which was, of course, a bunch of complete and delusional nonsense, but it has faded from those "glory" days, so why May would choose to try and resurrect that hysterical garbage is a bit of a mystery in itself.
But the real problem here is, given the rich heritage of material with which an enterprising novelist can play, how did May manage to turn out such a boring and confused story? The female protagonist of the story, Rose Frost, is sixteen going on twelve. Her parents are off doing secret work, so we're told, and apparently their lives are threatened, so of course they choose to abandon their daughter to her own fate with her grandmother and disappear. Despite knowing that their daughter has powers, they tell her nothing, explain nothing, yet they give to her a bracelet which literally sticks into her skin, and idiotically tell her to keep it a secret! Later we learn that there is more to it than this, but it's still lousy.
Despite claiming to love her granddaughter very much, Grand mom Daisy doesn't tell her anything either. She merely keeps saying that they must talk about important matters, yet they never do. Daisy is tiresome and absurdly mysterious and for all practical purposes may as well not have been in the novel at all. She supposedly has connections way beyond what is reasonable, or even rational, including with the major bad guy in the city, and at one point Rose discovers that the British army is tailing her to keep her safe, apparently on Daisy's "orders"! Yet no one explains from what it is exactly which Rose is supposedly being protected, or why it’s the army rather than the police or MI5 (the Brit version of the FBI) which is charged with her safety! If the bad guy (who we never meet either!) lives in Warminster, then where is the rationale for bringing Rose right into his domain? It's beyond absurd!
Rose is far too much of a Mary Sue to even think of asking why, either! Meanwhile, her older sister (who isn't a part of this story) goes without any protection whatsoever! Apparently no one imagines, not even the bad guys, that kidnapping the sister would be a great way to get to Rose! But no one raises this issue either! I guess the bad guys are Mary Sues too.
Oh yeah, about those bad guys! Rose has an appallingly dim-witted lust-triangle with a blond haired good guy (so we’re expected to believe) - Morgan, and a black haired bad guy (so we’re expected to believe) - Aiden, who is the grandson of the city's ultra bad guy (grandson Aiden, granddaughter Rose - get it?). It seemed painfully likely to me from the start that these two roles were in fact reversed, with Aiden actually being good and Morgan bad, but whether my feeling about that was right or wrong (I'm not telling!), Rose is a complete airhead about both of them. If what she's told about the appalling things that sports-car driving Aiden has supposedly done is true, then she has no excuse for being involved with him at all, and if she is involved, then Rose is nothing but a jerk and a lowlife. But she never asks Aiden for his side of the story! OTOH, if it’s black leather-clad Morgan the biker guy who is the bad guy, then he's a pathological liar, and she has no excuse being involved with him, either - not if she wants to be in my good graces! Who knows? Maybe they're both bad guys. Either way they're both uninteresting and completely lackluster.
Rose is perhaps the most capricious, clueless, pain-in-the-ass flibbertigibbet ever in a YA novel. She blows hot and cold with both these guys, sometimes turning on a five-pence piece (that would be the size of a dime to those in the US!) from being flirtatious to being angrily reactive and rejecting them. Here's one example of what a self-centered loser Rose is: she's told not to go into the cottage on Daisy's property, which is where Little Orphan Morgannie resides. Of course the place isn't locked because Morgan is a complete moron, but Rose also ignores the prohibition and goes into his home uninvited when he is not there, and snoops all around the place. But Morgan has a camera watching the interior, and when he later shows her the recording of her trespassing, merely asking her in a non-accusatory manner what she was looking for, she becomes irrationally and intensely angry that he was "spying" on her! What a clueless jerk she is!
But Morgan is just as bad. One night when Mary Sue Rose has a dream about a magical sorceress (hint, hint!), she wakes to find Morgan in her bed, holding and "comforting" her. She isn't even remotely put-out or freaked-out, or even angered by this behavior! So, just to be clear for all you young adults out there, here's the Missed Manners guide to YA interaction:
- Being asked what you were looking for when snooping in someone's private residence: reason to get very angry. Do not apologize. Do not even feel contrite.
- Waking up to find your neighbor in bed with you uninvited: no reaction at all.
I don’t know what May was trying to accomplish here, but whatever it was, she fails epically. It’s like she had this one idea but couldn’t think of a way to make it a strong story or make it interesting, so she kept tossing in other ideas whimsically, like someone making a spaghetti dinner, and spaghetti is exactly what she got. If her hope was that this hodge-podge would resonate and fill out the pages, she was wrong: it doesn’t. This is the only explanation I can think of, though, for why we get a sorry mish-mash of Rose with her healing power, which she rarely uses, but which lets her talk to plants(!), together with stories of ninth century English warlord Alfred's jewels (not those jewels, the ones made from crystallized minerals, silly!), together with mystical visions of some ancient sorceress babe called Halika Dacome, together with flying saucers. Yeah it's that bad.
The story meanders in so many random directions that it's laughable. At one point we have this really clunky introduction between Rose and Aiden, the overture to which is orchestrated by her having a vision of a child burning. The vision appears in the middle of the street; then this event isn't ever mentioned again. Later, after snooping Morgan's private property, Rose talks to plants which leads her to dig up a box which she leaves unopened with Morgan when she has no reason to trust him. The box is never mentioned again!
It’s obvious from the off that Rose is some sort of host vessel or reincarnation of Halika Dacome, a weirdo who is mentioned repeatedly, so why there's this big (non-)reveal at the end like nobody knows this, is beyond pathetic. Hell-like Macramé is an alien who came to Earth with three other aliens 200,000 years ago to prepare Earth for the colonization by the rest of the aliens. She manifests every other generation (grand children, get it?), but these alien fore-runners were not volunteers, they were exiled to Earth as a punishment. No wonder they let Earth go to hell in a hand-basket! Why on Earth (literally) would exiles even lift a finger to help those who exiled them?! The whole plot is asinine. How overseeing the explosion of the human population to seven billion constitutes preparing the planet for the arrival of their fellow aliens is a bit of a mystery - unless these aliens eat humans! All of this comes out pretty much in the last page or two of this fable!
This novel is pathetic and is a definite, no-holds-barred WARTY! rating.
