Author: Robin Carroll Miller
Publisher: Zonderkidz - website unobtainable
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.
Errata:
p56 "...turn stall..." should be "..turn stile..." (let’s face it, that whole sentence needs a re-write!)
p81 Samantha's dad "...wouldn’t be up to ordering pizza"??? Is he that big of a deadbeat? Seriously what effort is needed, exactly, to order pizza - especially when he has a slave-girl right there in the house?! Or did Miller simply not write this properly, and meant instead that her dad wouldn't be in the mood for pizza - wouldn’t be "up for pizza", not "up to pizza"?
The advanced review copy was very badly formatted for the Kindle. I don’t know why this is. It used to be, in the old days, that books had to be laboriously type-set, and long galleys sent to the author for correction, which then had to be re-set, but this is no longer the case. In these days of WYSIWIG (What You Send Isn’t What I Get!), which is far from perfect, but which is passable, there's no excuse for poor quality review copies. In Adobe reader, my other option, the formatting was a lot better.
I adored the title of this novel - it’s so immediate and self important that it really tickled me. Unfortunately, the novel failed to live up to its title. There is a whole bunch of these novels about other characters, too. You can find out about them at www.faithgirlz.com if you're interested. 'Samantha Sanderson at the Movies' was one which intrigued me, since I'm such a movie fan. I'm not sure how you would end up with a whole novel based upon that particular title, but there you have it. I thought at first that Samantha was an amateur detective. It turns out that she isn’t - not by 'profession', but she is by ambition.
I was a little surprised to find out that this was an overtly Christian novel. That;s not made very clear in the book blurb on netgalley. I'm not a fan of Christian stories because I have no faith in faith, and such novels have consistently proved to me to be empty at their core. The real problem with faith-professing stories is that the faith itself is of zero utility in the novel. Never in these stories (unless they're of the completely absurd "I'm in love with a manly angel" type) do we ever see any kind of divine presence or any acts of any gods, not even hints of it. Indeed, if we did, readers would cry foul at the absurdity of it! Critics would cry "deus ex machina"! How paradoxical is that?
The consistent fact of faith novels is that people solve their own problems with no help needed from any gods (just as they did, in fact, in the Bible!); yet the fiction that a god is somehow behind the scenes making things happen is trumpeted loudly. It amazes me that so few people see through this sham; that so few recognize how impoverished and vacuous this paradigm really is. These novels all profess to be about faith in a divine providence which never appears. Just as in the Bible, it’s never any gods who do anything of utility, it’s always people who get it done. Gods are employed solely to justify human acts, and your god can never lose, since every success, no matter how much it is wrought by human agency alone, is attributed to the god, yet all failure is blamed completely on the human - or on "Satan"! How cool is that for a god? So these stories are fundamentally fraudulent in a very real way, but then all fiction is, isn't it?!
As I shall highlight as I review this, these novels are not remotely logical or rational in their telling o' the faithly tale, not even within their own framework; however, that doesn't mean that the story - ignoring all mention of the supernatural - cannot be entertaining, and this was my dearest hope going into this one, since I started out predisposed towards liking it from the title and the cover illustration alone. That hope remained even as I discovered where it was coming from, but that hope was thee one which failed to find itself in this story, and I'll tell you why.
Samantha Sanderson is in school, and has a strong ambition to be a reporter just like her mom - not a cop, just like her dad. We're offered no immediate explanation for this, but there seems to be a not-so-subtle vein of genderism running through this novel, inconsistent with modern values, but entirely consistent with Biblical values. I shall point those instances out as we go. Just one more thing which I find interesting is that a Christian novel has a main character sporting a 'heathen' name, Samantha. There was a time when Christians would have frowned upon naming a child with a non-Biblical name. This is important in that it indicates a needed and welcome decline from Bible standards (which are not to be confused with moral standards).
We first meet Samantha interviewing a team player who was injured in the previous week's game. Now why this interview took so long to put in place goes unexplained; I guess Samantha wasn't in the scene! This is odd, because she's a cheerleader. More in this anon. Fortunately, we soon get to the real theme here, which is bullying - in this case, a form of cyber-bullying, which visits itself upon one of Samantha's school-mates via some insulting text messages. This is an admirable topic to investigate, and my immediate suspect was the injured boy!
These messages focus on the intended victim's weight, but since the victim isn't even remotely overweight, the entire bullying premise falls completely flat before it even gets started! Indeed, the supposed "victim" weighs less than Samantha who, as you can see from the cover illustration, is anorexic to begin with; and is that her African American BFF Makayla on the cover with her? If so, then why isn't she actually African American?! Either this illustrates my point that cover illustrators never read the material for which they illustrate, or Samantha's BFF is dissed by being excluded from the cover!
I must note here that Samantha herself is exceptionally, even dangerously svelte. How easy is it then, for her to take the moral high-ground standing with 'lesser mortals' and protecting them from bullying? It would be really nice in a novel like this to have a protagonist who was less than perfect for once in a YA novel. Yes, we do see them, but nowhere near often enough. I guess Job, with his loser status and his skin complaints isn’t a very appealing muse, huh?!
Samantha discusses the bullying with her father (she's quite the gossip!) as she prepares the evening meal that day. Her mother is away on assignment, but she prepared meals for her husband and daughter before she left so Samantha could heat them up as needed. Here’s where the genderism struck me right in the face: why is a working mom expected to do the household chores too? Her husband can’t cook? He doesn’t lend a hand around the house? Why? Because he's too important? Because he's a police officer? Because he's a man in a Christian home? Here's a shocker: he does lend a hand around the house, but he takes care of manly things - like fixing a squeak in the garage door, because no woman could ever do that, just as no man could ever prepare a meal! This really irked me.
If we’re writing novels to teach young women how to handle life and fit into society effectively and comfortably, is it really the thing to teach them that they must be servile to men? Is it the thing to teach men that women should be expected to be servile? 'Servile' is merely another way of saying 'so vile'. I know that this is what the several thousand year old Bible prescribes, but we've moved way beyond Biblical dictates in 2014. I find all this to be an appalling thing to set before impressionable girls. This scene would have been better written if both had prepared the meal in concert with one another. In that way it would have shown how well men and women can work together to achieve a goal; it would have shown that nothing should be beneath either a man or a woman when it comes to home-making, and it would have sent a much more equitable message.
Samantha is a cheerleader, as I've mentioned. I detest this kind of thing in a novel. This is another trope which needs to be done away with, and this is another part of this novel which smacks of genderism. The guys take on the 'tough' he-man job of playing that hard game, but the lower-status 'weak and fair maidens' are fit only to cheer them on? And then there's this 'argument' claiming that cheerleading is on par with martial arts. Ahem! Excuse me?! Having registered that complaint, you can argue that this novel is doing no more than reporting what we see in real life, so why blame the author? I think we can blame the author for not trying to break molds and stereotypes - especially in a novel which is ostensibly aimed at moral and emotional support explicitly for girls!
Then comes the team prayer. Actually, it doesn't, not formally, but it seems to be in the air as the supporters of the one side pray to beat the opposing Christian team. I find this objectionable, not so much in this story, which to its credit, doesn’t get down and dirty with that, but in real life. Do these people who insist upon abusing the establishment clause of the US constitution really believe that the creator of the universe cares who wins a school football game or basketball game? Really? Do these people believe that he will support one team over the other? Suppose both sides pray? If all prayers are answered, does that mean both sides will win? Will they draw? Does the most sin-free side win, or is it the side which prays most fervently? Maybe it's the side which dons the most ragged sackcloth and has the most ashes in its hair? See? It’s patently absurd. Worse than that, it explicitly states that "our team is so useless that we routinely need divine intervention if we’re going to have a hope of winning"! Do coaches not grasp that praying is an insult to their team and a sad commentary upon their coaching skills?! And an insult to their god, for that matter (not that that bothers me). Fortunately we don’t have to deal with that in this particular novel, so kudos to Miller for avoiding it, but prayer does play a large part in the novel and not one of the prayers is answered!
With Samantha becoming ever more focused on the bullying, and whilst we’re on the topic of prayer, I have to ask here why doesn't Samantha pray for the bully to be exposed, or to change his or her mind about bullying? This goes right to the core of my opening remarks: why pray to win the game, but not pray to divine (literally) the bully's identity? If there's a benign god and prayers are answered, there's your solution right there. Of course, it cannot be this way because then every faith novel would be one paragraph long! It cannot be this way because even a Christian novel cannot pull a deus ex machina! It’s quite simply not credible and even faith writers know this. You see? It’s irrational even within its own framework. So art that point one has to decide to quit or to persevere, putting religion aside since it’s already proven itself to be useless here, and try to ignore it while enjoy the rest of the story.
The problem with that plan was that the rest of the story was rather less than tolerable, too. For example, on the topic of genderism: the only things of note about Samantha's mom that we're offered is that she's a journalist and she's pretty. How superficial can you get?
Samantha is supposed to be on the cusp of becoming a "young adult", around twelve or thirteen, but she behaves rather younger than that, and her parents treat her like she's eight or nine. Her dad consistently calls her 'pumpkin' (how original - and no initial cap!) and her mom calls her 'my sweet thing' which is sickly if not outright sick. I sincerely hope not all Christian families are like this one!
On the topic of the bullying, initially I'd been convinced that Nikki, the girl being bullied, was overweight, but it turns out she's not. Not even close. This makes it truly bizarre that she would be bullied in this way, and even more bizarre that someone as snotty and spoiled as Nikki would even pay attention to it. This by no means makes the insults acceptable, but it seriously cheapens the point which Miller seems to be striving to make. It would have been a much stronger novel if Nikki were actually overweight. As it is, this renders the treatment of a serious subject into something of a joke, and thereby achieves precisely the opposite of what Miller was supposedly trying to do here.
It’s disturbing in the extreme that the nominees for Homecoming queen and "court" (aka the losers) are all cheerleaders (except for two who work with Samantha on the newspaper). How misguided and sad is that: only two girls in the entire class who were not cheerleaders were considered worthy of nomination? What happened to the Biblical injunction against pride and adornment? Something about gilding the lily...? This obsession with looks isn’t confined only to the nominations, it spills over into the rest of the narrative too, with people being described as "cute" which is religio-speak for "hawt". It has nothing to do with personality, because the only worth anyone can have, apparently, in "Samantha world" resides in their looks.
Not a word is said, for example, about how decent a person Nikki Cole is (or isn’t) or how smart she is (or isn’t), because all that evidently matters is the superficial: whether she's "cute" or not. The same applies to Thomas Murphy. No word on how smart or decent he is (or isn’t), it all boils down to whether he's "cute" or not. And because he's a bit of a loaner, he's dismissed as "odd" - and by Samantha, who is supposedly a Christian. I expect this in your regular YA novel because, generally speaking, that's all that ever seems to matter in the majority of those novels (although thankfully there are some really good exceptions), but given that this is a Christian story, supposedly professing certain values and standards, I would have expected it to rise above pettiness and blinkered bigotry, and I would certainly not expect Thomas to be relegated to the same category as a school stalker, regarded with suspicion as a potential bully for no other reason than that he's looking at a "cute" girl and is a bit of a loner! Is Samantha really this short-sighted? If her Christian upbringing cannot make a better person of Samantha, then of what value is it?
Indeed, the more I read of this novel, the more Samantha seemed to be on something of a witch-hunt, which is fine, I guess: the Bible does explicitly order us to kill witches! Fortunately Christians don’t do that (except maybe in Nigeria), which only goes to prove that even Christians do not recognize the Bible as a moral authority. But Samantha rejects the Bible again here, specifically the portion which says something to the effect: "judge not, lest ye be judged", because the new girl, Felicia, immediately becomes a suspect. Samantha is as judgmental as you can get! Or maybe she's just mental? I liked Felicia, though. Felicia was apparently expelled from a Christian school for fighting! So much for "forgive those who trespass against us"; Christians obviously don’t practice what they preach! At that point, I was seriously interested in Felicia; she sounded much more intriguing than ever Samantha could be - or any other character I've so far met in this novel. Unfortunately, Felicia hardly appears in the novel - merely a brief glimpse in passing, here and there; so much for her big entrance! But here’s the rub: Felicia was a cheerleader and also on the school newspaper! What the heck is with cheerleading and newspapers in this novel? But Samantha's judgmental attitude spreads like a disease, way beyond a single fight at a school. In Samantha's condemnation-obsessed head, this one incident gets blown up into Felicia being "mad at the world"! Exactly what kind of a bigot is Samantha?
In many ways this novel cheapens bullying: by making it about a weight issue, yet dumping it into the lap of a girl who has absolutely no such issue! It evades any real bullying entirely. The bullying portrayed here, whilst technically bullying it is, or more accurately perhaps, harassment, it's barely much above the level of teasing: a handful of texts, and a couple of notes calling non-fat Nikki a "fatty". When Nikki finds a small carton of diet bars in her locker, Samantha melodramatically declares that this "ramping it up to the next level". Behavior like that is never acceptable, but I found it appalling that this weak definition of "bullying" was the best (or worst, if you like) example Miller could think up to address in her story. It just made it into a joke rather than a serious issue which needed to be nipped in the bud.
And I found it laughable when Samantha goes though her "I'm not naming my sources" phase, and her mother backs her up form a professional journalism perspective! Samantha is not a professional journalist! She's just a school kid. She does not have the protections or requirements that a real journalist has. She is, primarily, required to abide by school rules, not by the professional rules of journalism. Yes, she does have the constitutional right to remain silent, but there is another factor in play here which is that she's supposedly a Christian, and yet she refuses to render to Caesar that which is Caesar's!
So, whilst I still love the title of this novel, I was sorely disappointed that it offered so little and I cannot rate it as a worthy read. I don't get how this is sold as Christian novel, because there really isn't anything Christian going on here. If you removed all references to faith, religion, and church, you'd still have exactly the same novel, the same plot, the same story, and the same people behaving in the same way. That's what I meant when I said that faith novels are hollow at their core. They're just regular novels featuring regular people. The faith angle is nothing but a sham - a gossamer veneer which is, ultimately, entirely irrelevant.
