Author: Susan Kaye Quinn
Publisher: All Night Reads
Rating: WARTY!
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 for this review.
It was interesting to see yet another in a huge line of novels begin with the very thing which literary agents freely admit to hating: the misfit kid on the first day of school. Yet this hatred on their part has failed to even begin to not only stem the rising tide of novels which begin in precisely that manner, it's also failed to prevent some of them becoming best sellers! Of course, in this era of self-publishing, we can tell the literary agents and Big Publishing to kiss it, which is exactly what Quinn has done by starting volume one of the 'Mindjack' trilogy in this trope fashion.
Surprisingly, especially given that this is a first person PoV novel, a style which I've really grown to outright detest (with few exceptions, and especially the more of them that I read) it worked ok for me. It got me interested in continuing to read, which is the first hurdle, after all. At least it did for the opening few paragraphs, but as I read deeper, I began to have some real problems with this novel.
So, 16-year-old Kira Moore gets on the school bus with great trepidation. She's is a zero in a world of mind readers. People began to develop this ability over the last few generations due to pollutants in the water until it eventually reached the point where the mind readers were in the overwhelming majority, and the people who could not do so were treated like lepers, and abused and labeled zeros.
This was my first problem with this novel - it is such a trope to have the "outcast" - especially the outcast girl - metaphorically spat upon by every one around her. It's an even worse trope to have this bullying countenanced by the school. This novel is not set in the middle ages. It's contemporary (okay, set in the not-too-distant future), and for me personally, I've read way more than enough novels where outright bullying goes unpunished. They are no longer even close to being realistic. Even when bullying was more common, there never were any schools where every single student across the board was a coldly calculating bully, for goodness sakes!
Of course, if you're creating the fiction, you can create it to be whatever you want, but then if you're really going to do that, I'm going to ask you for some rationale (within the framework of your world) as to why it's this way, and how it grew to be that way, and Quinn has offered me none, which is why this is a problem for me. I fully agree that in any society, there are going to be jerks no matter how decent and equitable a society it is, but for everyone to consistently scorn Kira, including the girl who was, just a few months before, her best friend, struck me as utter nonsense, and this really spoiled the novel for me. Instead of finding Kira pitiable as I am sure Quinn intended, I found the whole premise laughable, which I'm sure she didn't intend.
So why did I continue to read‽ Well, it's because the novel offers some interesting and intriguing possibilities, especially when it turns out that kira is not quite the zero every one of the other seven billion inhabitants of Earth quite evidently is convinced she is (of course, that was no surprise at all). Kira is a 'mind jacker', meaning that while she cannot receive thoughts which are transmitted to her, she can invade the minds of others, including more than one person at once, read their thoughts, and control their behavior.
Here was my second problem. How, exactly, does this work? Again, we get nothing from the author to help us out here; we're simply expected to take it that this is the way things are, for no apparent reason. I don't work well with premises like that! Logic dictates that if you can read people's thoughts by "invading their mind" then you must have a receptor for absorbing their thoughts, so how come Kira isn't a mind reader when she can clearly read minds? It makes no sense! I don't expect scientific diagrams, with charts and formulae explaining every last detail. On the contrary, I detest novels like that, but I do expect the author to make some effort to create the world they're trying to sell to us and have it make some sort of sense! I saw none of that in the early part of the novel.
Kira learns she can mind-jack from bad boy Simon, who is in her year, and who completes the requisite trope love triangle with the good guy, Raf, also in her year. Yeah, another thing to dislike in this novel, because Kira is thinking only of her own deficits, which makes her sound really whiny, and of boys the whole time, which makes her seem appallingly shallow and uninteresting. She never has any other thoughts. I think it's rather sad that a female author can write about a girl and betray her gender so badly in this fashion.
This again begs the question as to why I was still reading this! A better question is whether I could justify continuing to read this given what I've been asked to put up with so far. Quinn had me balanced on a knife-edge, part of me wanting to quit reading this out of disgust for - and fatigue with - this kind of YA novel, whilst an equal part of me wanted to stay with it to see what happened. So, even as I hated myself for putting up with tropes and clichés, and with sad female protagonists, I was still hoping that this could be written out so I didn't have to write it off! Quinn isn't a bad writer; she knows what to do, technically speaking. She's just not very inventive when it comes to writing her away around tropes instead of falling into them.
Here's another inexplicable oddity: the students at Kira's school study Latin because it’s supposed to be a universal root language, but this isn’t true. Latin itself is rooted in what’s called the Proto-Indo-European language, which some scholars have tried to reconstruct, but Latin itself isn’t a root in any really meaningful sense, and even if I granted that and agreed for the sake of argument that it were, it certainly has no application outside of the Indo-European region!
The Proto-Indo-European language itself hasn’t been spoken in over five thousand years. It makes no sense that a society which already has several very widely spoken languages, such as English, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish, would back-track to a dead language which no one outside of Catholic church officials and some linguistic students actually speaks today. If you're going to pick a "dead" language to promote, then why not Greek - which not only has a proud history every bit the equal of Latin, but which is actually still spoken in modern form today in one part of the world?!
Another real issue that I had was that Simon's relationship with Kira is inappropriate and Kira seems to be unaware of this, letting him touch her rather intimately when they have no relationship other than their shared facility for mind-jacking. I find it both annoying and distasteful that so many YA authors (a shamefully large number of which are female authors) seem to be obsessed with sending out this message to young women that it’s perfectly fine for someone they hardly know to manhandle them, such as by taking hold of their chin with his fingers, or by stroking their hair, as though the girl in question is some sort of a pet or a possession. Simon is completely guilty in every regard, including, at one point, grabbing Kira and kissing her right in the school hallway as though he owns her. He's already referred to her as "my girl" by that point, so I guess Kira lamely bought into his propaganda, which means I have no respect at all for her as a strong female protagonist.
Simon frequently appears as a stalker, often demanding and expecting that Kira meet him, or abruptly dragging her off with him with neither explanation nor by-your-leave, and never once does Kira honestly question the appropriateness of his behavior. There is one time when he outright threatens her, not in words, but by his demeanor and posture, and she caves in to him, dissing Raf in the process. I cannot respect a woman who behaves like that. I realize that Kira and Simon have a secret in common here, which means that they'd be inclined to take more liberties than two strangers ordinarily would, but this doesn’t excuse her limp submission to his every demand, nor does it excuse her letting his behavior continue unquestioned and unchallenged. It doesn’t excuse his abusive and threatening behavior, either. I'm not saying that guys cannot be that way. I am saying that Kira is a sad human being to knuckle under to him so easily and I don't feel any need to like or respect a character like that. Portraying her this way is not a smart move and it’s entirely the wrong message to send to female readers. I would have liked Kira better if she'd had some self-motivation and some self-respect, even if she did feel compelled towards more acquiescence than she felt comfortable with.
She does question the appropriateness of mind-jacking people, but never Simon's behavior towards her, and her guilty feelings about jacking sure don’t last long. It’s a rather hypocritical paradox that Simon is on the one hand urging her to make her choice, whilst simultaneously robbing her of any choice with his own behavior. In this same vein, her behavior towards her close friend Raf is inexplicable. Every love triangle has to have the good guy and the bad boy because it’s the tired and sad trope, and YA authors have shown themselves to be almost universally incapable of thinking outside this box in which they've so willingly rushed to incarcerate themselves. So Raf is the superficial good guy here, although he's quite capable of stalking Kira, too. Why Kira didn't have the smarts to reject Simon and accept Raf is a mystery. Indeed, why she hadn’t accepted Raf already (before she even got to know Simon) is the real mystery. Yes, she believes they're so different, but for her to honestly believe that she's so worthless that they could never have anything together doesn't fill me with a lot of admiration for her brain patterns.
This whole triangle caused me to seriously lose respect for Kira, but what really was not believable was that, for as much as she has shared with Raf, for as long as she has known him, and for as decent a human being as he is, she refused to go to him with her new-found knowledge of mind-jacking! It made no sense that she wouldn’t run this by him at least hypothetically, if not as an outright confession of what she has learned. Instead, she metaphorically kicks him in the balls, and that behavior on her part is inexcusable. She tells him their love is impossible because she's a zero and he isn’t. I know she's thinks she's trying to protect him, but that she can be such a heartless bitch in doing so turned me right off her. I honestly had to question why an author would go significantly out of her way to make me dislike her own hero.
I don’t like the way Quinn pigeonholes Raf, either. He has a "simmering Portuguese temper" - not an ordinary temper, but a Portuguese one. What kind of stereotype is that? Oh, he's 'the Latino breed' therefore he must have a fiery temper? Because we all know that no one who is Caucasian or African or Asian could possibly have a fiery temper, whereas everyone who hails from the Mediterranean environment just has to be completely fiery. I actually liked that Raf was not your typical US YA trope guy. Now I find he's your typical 'smoldering Hispanic' trope guy. Oh well there goes another review bonus point down the drain!
I started out really liking this despite the first person PoV, but I was less than one-third the way through when I started really disliking it. After further trashing Raf, Kira is stalked again by Simon, who shows up outside her house late at night telling her to sneak out. Kira limply does exactly what he orders her to do. At that point I felt like simply ditching this novel because it had now reached a nadir of asininity, and Kira had repeatedly proved herself to be nothing but Simon's toy. I don’t choose to read novels with a female protagonist only to see that woman become a man's play doll, which he can drag where he wants and pose as he wishes. I read these novels to see women break the mold. Kira isn’t breaking the mold, she's burying herself in it.
I decided to read this as far as page 122 which was exactly half-way through (yes, it’s 245 pages, but chapter one doesn't start on page one, it starts on page six, and the novel itself ends on page 238!). I decided that if I was still disgusted with it by the time I reached that point, I was outta there! In the end I read a little further because page 122 wasn't at the end of a chapter, and in reading on, the novel actually turned around a little bit, but at that point it was nowhere near enough for me to want to continue reading this.
