Author: Anna Davies
Publisher: Point Horror
Rating: WARTY!
I can see why the publishers of this novel would not want a reviewer like me reading an advance review copy of a book which can only boast, as its best feature, the long lost twin trope - but they can’t stop me getting my hands on it sooner or later! I couldn't get past the first couple of chapters without starting to think I'd be needing an industrial strength barf bag in order to finish it, and by page 100 (very roughly half way through) I was done. I couldn't take any more of Le Stupide!
I would never go so far as to say that Hayley Kathryn Westin ever deserved to have her twin sister (come on, that's hardly a spoiler given the book blurb!) steal her identity (kinda), but I would go so far as to say that I can see why some people would think she deserves it. Identity Theft really isn't; it's much more like identity trashing, but even that really isn't what happens. It is yet another YA novel being told in first person PoV by a girl, and I have to wonder why this has become such a popular style, because it really doesn't work very well unless the author is truly skilled. There are, thankfully, authors out there who are capable, but Davies isn't one of them - not as judged by this example. First person PoV, male or female, can be really annoying because it’s all 'me' all the time. It really limits what can be done with a story and there's nothing worse than listening to a sad and self-promoting seventeen year old, going on thirteen, which is unfortunately what a lot of these novels - and in particular this one - feature. Why make your main character a moron when, with a little thought and effort, she can be developed as someone well worth reading about?
This book bears yet another example of utterly clueless cover art. Main character Hayley has slate-grey eyes. The girl on the cover? Not so much, as you can see. She and her sister are identical twins, and neither of them has gray eyes - not even close. Those eyes are not even remotely on a path towards gray (like they might if they'd been pale blue or pale green, say). Nope. The cover girl's eyes are a very noticeable bromide brown. If the cover had been a simple gray-scale they would have been more accurate. Did the author not notice this or did Big Publishing™ once again simply treat the author like trash as it's known to do? And while we're on this topic, what's with the title? Who chose a title which is guaranteed to be amongst the most common ones out there?
My own theory is that the girl's eyes were brown because the character is so full of something that it's coming out of her eyes.... Any way, I hadn’t even reached page 20 before I was slammed bodily up against an incipient love triangle featuring the smart guy and the jock (like they can never be the same), the latter of which is painted as such a standard YA trope guy that it brings tears to your eyes - the kind you get from sharp, sudden pain, not from sentiment. Matt Hartnett is chiseled and of course, has hair falling into his green-eyes. Did Davis intend for him to be a parody? I care. Adam Scott is the intellectual one and of course he's in direct competition with Hayley for the Ainsworth (read anal) scholarship, which she needs more than he does, since his family is quite wealthy. Trope. Yawn. Cliché. Wake me up if anything interesting happens.
The biggest problem with this novel is that Hayley is a fundamentally boring character. When she's not boring, she's really annoying. She's unhealthily obsessed with being the best at everything, and with getting her fingers into every pie not because she likes to do all these things, but because she feels she must do all these things in order to win this scholarship. She got a B in one test a few years back and immediately ditched field hockey because clearly that was the reason she didn’t get an A. The only thing that Davies conveyed to me by this is that Hayley is a moron. This of course flies in the face of the character Davies thinks she's presenting to me: someone who is smart. Hayley is absolutely not smart, not even close. She's an idiot.
That's not the most moronic thing that happens, however. It gets worse! As soon as she ditched field hockey, her three besties ditched her. Yeah, 'cos that always happens, because friendships are solely about whether or not you play field hockey. Hayley is so self-absorbed that she's still obsessing over it and them four years later, as indeed they are over her. Seriously? Hayley honestly needs to get a clue and then get a life. And all of them need therapy.
Hayley's divorced mom uses phrases like "Hayley Bunny" and "You sure, baby?" Honestly? Why do female writers constantly seek to belittle, marginalize, and infantilize their female protagonists? I can see how they might want to make a male character, like a dad for example, behave that way to make some point or other, but to have a mom do it to her own daughter for no reason? I don’t get the philosophy underlying this novel. Hayley is made to seem juvenile, air-headed, whiny, resentful, clingy, paranoid, and bitchy. Imagine what happens then, when she discovers that she has a Facebook page showing images of her that are actually not her. It appears to be a Photo-shopped image, or a look-alike (whom we know is actually her incredibly lost twin) disporting herself covered in whipped cream, and in skimpy outfits, and attending parties and >ulp!< kissing boys! Omar Goad! Not kissing boys! Good God she could be summarily shot for that!!!
While I agree with Hayley that Facebook is a "total time waster", I find myself completely at odds with her on her choice of movies, which are unsurprisingly juvenile. And when does she even have time to watch a movie with her obsession going full tilt? But that's fine, as indeed is Hayley. I know this because she tells someone almost literally on every other page that she's "fine" or it's "fine"! Adam Scott also over-uses that word. They're obviously made for each other. Given what an obsessive-compulsive Hayley is, it’s a bit surprising that she runs late for school the very next morning after 'Facebook Zero', but the weird thing is that when she's woken at eight by her mother, she's already missed 'Yearbook' and 'Calc'. What the hell time does school start in Hayley World™? I don’t get how she missed the yearbook meeting when they'd already had it the day before, and I can see how that might be a pre-school activity, but her first school class is before eight? Okay. If you say so. I guess it's been a while since I was in high school, huh?
So now Hayley has insta-reputation! Her Facebook pictures are, amazingly, the talk of quite literally the entire school even though Hayley is effectively a non-entity in this school, and the pictures appeared only the night before! See that over there? That's credibility leaving on the last bus out of town. Bye Bye! When she complains about the Facebook fiasco to school official Mr Klish, who is evidently a professional imbecile, they've magically disappeared, but that's not the interesting thing! Noooooooo! The really interesting thing is that super-smart top student Hayley is a complete moron.
When she fails to find not only the pictures, but also even that name in Facebook, she says, "Maybe it’s in a different browser"! I am not making this up (Davies is!) - like you can only get to one part of Facebook on browser A. You need to switch to Internet browser B to get to this other part…. If Hayley were actually as smart as Davies has deluded herself into thinking she is, she would have, right there and then, opened her own Facebook account under that name, and taken charge of the situation. She does not do so, and because of that, her twin can continue to keep kicking her dumb ass. Hayley isn't even smart enough to tell someone what's going on and to ask for help. Clearly the one with brains in this family isn't Hayley, but her twin with an inexplicable grudge. How that works is another matter. For that matter, how her "evil" twin even gets away with all the stuff she does is yet another nonsensical mystery.
So now people universally think that Hayley is a party girl, and she's invited to the big bash that evening. Her best plan would be to avoid it like the plague and appear somewhere else with witnesses that she's there so she can prove it, but you know she won’t because she's a moron who reacts instead of acts, and you know this will turn into an unmitigated disaster because she's so stupid! Why Hayley is even obsessing over Facebook when the scholarship stalkers are done with checking Facebook, and the fake account is up and down like a yo-yo so is likely to be missed by said stalkers even if they were looking right now, is yet another unexplained mystery - one amongst many such mysteries in this novel. Like, was that her sister, dressed up as a 'hipster' (whatever that is) with a fake beard spying on her in the coffee shop? How does her evil twin even know where she is at every instant of the day and where she's planning on going next?! And where does she get the time and the money to pursue her stalking activities? Maybe there's an explanation for all of this in the second half of the novel, but I'm guessing the explanation will suck.
So now Hayley thinks her life will end because there's a picture of her on Facebook with two bottles in her hand, neither of which she is drinking from. But it gets worse. Hayley has to go to the semi final of the Anal Scholarship contest. Note that this is the semi-final, okay? There are ONE HUNDRED contestants. ONE HUNDRED. In the semi-final. One hundred, and yet every single person is talking about Hayley because her twin sister emailed a revised bio for her which makes her seem like she really is: stupid and air-headed. Yep. Quite literally everyone is focused on Hayley. Seriously? Davies has plumbed new depths of dumb with this novel. Even in a world of completely dumb-ass novels, this novel would stand out as being dumber than the dumbest of the rest. But it gets worse.
So Each of these ONE HUNDRED semi-finalists is asked one question and one question only upon which they're judged. I am not kidding. Hayley's question is, "What does it mean to 'take a car'?". I'm not kidding. That's her scholarship question. To be fair, she does ace it, really stepping up for once in this novel, but then Le Stupide comes rushing back in like a tsunami. Hayley has a ride home with Adam, but she bails on him without even having the decency or the courtesy to tell him that she's leaving by herself. She asks for a taxi to take her home. The guy at the service desk calls for a limo. It costs $100. Hayley isn't even fazed by that. She literally collapses and falls asleep in the back seat, but the driver magically knows exactly where to take her, and the $100 is evidently not at all a problem for Hayley's single-mom household to come up with because Hayley makes a fortune working at a coffee bar where she's never once depicted as actually working.
That's when I said no more. Life is too short and there are far better novels to read than this one. Why even continue wading through garbage like this when there's guaranteed gold to be found elsewhere? This novel is warty.
