Author: Sara Shepard
Publisher: Harper Teen
Rating: WARTY!
I should identify a little with this novel since it's set in Tucson, and I was in that region over the holidays last January: Tucson, Tombstone, Phoenix, but I started out not liking the way this was written at all. I skipped the waste-of-my-time prologue as usual, but chapter one started out like it was in the middle of the story rather than at the beginning. This is part of some sort of series, and was preceded by The Lying Game which I haven't read. This novel quite evidently takes off from some cliffhanger in volume one, so it's not really a new novel, merely part two of the previous novel. That's annoying, not least because this volume offers no indication that it's part 2. I have no intention of reading volume one (or any other volume after this one!), but be warned that you need to start on volume 1 if you're going to make the tragic mistake of following this series.
Emma is the twin sister of Sutton (yeah, the names really suck in this novel) and moved to Tucson to meet her twin after having seen her strangled in a video. If you can make sense of that, you're doing better than I am. Now that she's here, she's discovered that Sutton is apparently dead (duhh!) - but her body has apparently not been discovered since everyone thinks Emma is Sutton. Except Ethan, who knows the truth. Ethan is a complete jerk; more on this unsurprising discovery anon.
Emma is trying to discover who murdered Sutton. Apparently she's not smart enough to pursue this with the police (let me clarify that: she's too much of a loser to persist on the matter of her sister's murder after her first visit resulted in disbelief on the part of the police. There are myriad ways she could have convinced them, but she's so useless she can't think of a single one. What a conviction-challenged non-entity she is!
That's not the worst part though! The really sad thing is that with this novel, author Shepard is confessing to us that she simply can't write a novel where a teen actually does the right thing instead of trying to solve the crime herself, that and and make it readable into the bargain. So the impression I'm left with is that either Shepard is a really bad writer, or there was a butt-load of crap going on in the previous volume that you have to know if you want to get anything out of this novel. How convenient for an author to be in that position! And no, as I said, I'm not going back for the previous volume.
Oh, there is one more thing. Normally I would be highly suspicious about Sutton's supposed death, thinking that she's alive somewhere, but that option seems to be off the table because Sutton is now a ghost which is metaphorically if not quite literally joined at the hip to Emma, but she can't communicate with her non-dead sister, and Emma has no idea Sutton is there. So why Emma is so convinced that Sutton is dead (as opposed to having left town or being in hiding, for example) is a complete mystery. The ghost is telling parts of this story from the first-person PoV, and the rest is third-person. The first person interjections arrive without warning or distinction, sprinkled randomly through the text like bits of bone in a dog turd, and they quite literally offer nothing to the plot. In short, this novel is a complete mess with nothing whatsoever to recommend it.
I honestly don't get the ghost thing! The two cannot communicate. Emma has no idea there's a ghost, and Sutton-the-Ghost cannot lead or maneuver Emma-the-walking dead-beat, and Sutton the victim is so dumb that she has no idea who killed her! That's how useless these twins are! Yet Emma keeps getting these flashbacks to Sutton's life which clue her in to what happened. Seriously? Can you think of a more asinine or convolutedly dumb plot? I can't.
Evidently these rich kids (Sutton's "friends") found it hilarious to entertain themselves by playing elaborate and realistic hoaxes on others, which they refer to as "The Lying Game" and this was in play in the previous volume. Again without having read volume one, I can't say with any surety, but it certainly appears that Shepard has purloined this idea from The Game, a 1997 movie starring Michael Douglas.
About half-way through this novel I still hadn't found a reason to actually like it. About three-quarters through I wondered why I was even still reading it. I decided this will be my ammo against anyone who accuses me of having too many DNFs in my list this year! I slogged all-the-way through this one. That's more than enough punishment! In all-too-many places, it's so amateurish, bogged down with all the melodrama (actually not so mellow!) of a children's mystery novel even though it's about high school seniors - seniors whom Shepard has, on more than one occasion, quite literally "skip" away! Honestly?
Everything is a breathless rush in this novel, every person an enemy, every circumstance urgent, every event a crisis, every sentence overly dramatic. Like in the Harry Potter series, no one tells anyone anything - which, of course, creates ever more crises. Even people Emma supposedly trusts get no information, the distribution and processing of which might, in return, help Emma. She's too stupid for words. It’s exhausting to read material like this, and it actually made me really glad that I missed the first book!
I can see how Shepard is onto a really good thing here because as long as her readers remain gullibly undiscriminating, and she doesn’t cluelessly piss-off too many of them, she can keep milking this series for a long time simply leading readers by the spy-ring through their nose from one cliff-hanger to another. It’s very much the same deal that Ally Carter has going. I'm not willing to be so led, even as I admit, to my shame, that familiarity breeds content! The novel did seem more welcoming once I’d gotten past the sink-or-swim first few chapters, but it’s still drivel for all that! In the same way, once people buy into such a series, they're pretty much a captive audience for whatever abuses the authors wish to perpetrate upon them (and they claim that slavery was abolished!).
It doesn’t help at all that Emma, the main character, is a complete and utter moron and is determined to prove this with some frequency. For example, she deliberately got herself caught shoplifting for no other reason than that she wanted to get a look at her own police file. That's how dedicatedly stupid she is. There isn't any reason she couldn’t have a look at it, even hiring a lawyer if necessary, but because of this trouble, she gets grounded by her "parents" and then she starts breaking the grounding rule every chance she gets for purely frivolous reasons, including going on a totally unnecessary date to an art exhibition with Ethan. Yet despite breaking all these rules with impunity, she unaccountably gets nervous when she's alone with Ethan? I call bullshit on that one - big, rank, stinking dollops of it.
At another point, Emma knows that the group to which her supposedly dead sister belonged is going to prank the two sisters who are her prime suspects in her own sister's death, yet she never thinks once of changing her game and warning them of the prank. Instead she lets it happen. God forbid we will ever have a high school girl who works proactively, and who takes charge of her own fate. What a disaster that would be. "Long-live passive and weak females!" seems to be the message trumpeted by all-too-many female writers, I'm sorry to report. Talking of big and stinking, the red herrings are running in massive schools throughout this novel, which is tedious in itself. It’s like those worthless so-called horror movies where all the teens are constantly sneaking up and grabbing each other without a whisper of a warning, thereby creating a series of laughably false "scares". Shepard is trying so hard to convince me that the twins are the murderers that I'm quite convinced they're not. (I was right!).
As for Ethan, he's a jerk of major proportions. He repeatedly and deliberately entices Emma into risky ventures, designed to endanger her or get her into trouble with her parents. He does this for no reason whatsoever other than his own entertainment and satisfaction. If anyone else is to be bumped off, I'm rooting for it being him! At this point I'm afraid that it’s far too much to expect of Shepard that she might have the wherewithal to make him the villain. But who knows?
Well I am done with this and done with this series. The novel ended exactly like I expected it to - a huge red herring followed by bullshit and topped off with a cheap, trashy cliff-hanger involving the magical return of a kid who was, we were tediously reminded, absent without explanation throughout the novel. Now, professional suckers can waste more money on this trash. I'm voting for this prodigal son's dad being the murderer, and the sooner he does in Emma the better. She is bordering on being hands-down the most stupid, vacuous, incompetent, and tedious main character ever created. This novel is without question a warty.
