Author: Julie Mata
Publisher: Hyperion
Rating: WORTHY!
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.
This is yet another novel where I quite simply could not resist the title. Had it had a different title I may well have not even read this, and what a loss that would have been to me. Let this be a lesson to budding writers: the title is vital! Don’t choose one that gets lost in fifty near-identical titles on BN or Amazon. Don’t let your publisher make you title it with something ridiculous. Tell the publisher to go screw and self-publish before you let someone take over your creation. The world is littered with the corpses of novels that failed. Big Publishing™ does not have a guaranteed Midas touch. Now I’ll look a prize idiot if Disney-Hyperion chose Mata's title for her! Lol!
Kate Walden, the main character, has issues, the most serious of which seems to be what almost amounts to a phobia regarding the chickens her mother keeps. Kate, 12, resents these chickens with a passion so great that she spends her entire energy budget on creating her movie, and thinking about her movie, and plotting her movie. If there's one thing she hates on par with chickens, it’s eggs. Which is worse? It's hard to say; it gets kinda scrambled in my mind.
The movie, being made on a leg and a wing, is about a time when the chickens cause everyone in the vicinity to turn into zombies. She's yoked in a host of people to play zombies, and her best friend Alyssa, who dreams of Hollywood, is the star. The movie has become a swollen Soufflé of about three hours length, and she still has no ending. In her ongoing search for extra zombies, Kate is lured by Alyssa to invite the head of the pecking order at school, Lydia, to play one more zombie for one more scene. From that point on, life seems to turn into chicken-droppings for Kate.
Lydia is a disaster, and Kate gets no useful footage, but Alyssa starts bonding with Lydia: they're cracking each other up, egging each other on. Soon, Alyssa and Kate are no longer on speaking terms and Kate is hatching an elaborate and risky plan to get even with Alyssa for this betrayal. As if that isn't bad enough, she suspects her dad of being a bad egg in their family life, and she's walking on eggshells with her mom after a big fight. What on Earth ruffled all these feathers? Is it wise, in forming friendships, to put all your eggs in one basket? You're going to have to read this novel to find out, but be warned, you will be laughing out loud at those evil chickens, at Kate's take on life, and at her daily trials and tribulations. At least, I was. Then you'll be disturbed, then sad, and finally, happy again. Kate is awesome, and Julie Mata is an amazing writer who'd probably be a riot to have a conversation with. Don’t chicken out. Read this.
Where I ran into problems was in the same place where I seem to have consistently run into problems with ebooks this month. I look at this novel in Adobe reader and it’s fine, but when I want to read it in the Kindle, the formatting is lousy. Note that this is a review copy, so hopefully the final version will be much improved, but in this electronic age, there really is no excuse for spelling errors and poor formatting. All that does is set the fox among the chickens....
In Adobe reader, each chapter starts with an image of a film frame which contains the chapter number. Film frames are antiquated these days, but so is the hourglass, yet we still see it on our computer screens, especially if we’re running Windows! That's not the issue. In the Kindle, the frame is divorced from the chapter number. New chapter numbers do not start on new screens, but are tacked onto the end of the previous chapter, sometimes with the chapter number at the bottom of the screen and the actual chapter on the next screen, headed by an empty frame. Chapter 11 looks fine in Adobe, but in Kindle it’s chapter 1111. I don’t like to crow, but I know that's fifteen in binary. It gets an 'F' in hexadecimal….
Some speech isn't separated as it should be (by starting a new line for a different character's speech), but run together pretty much in the same sentence. Some words are run together with spaces between the individual letters instead of between the sentences! There were also (a very few) spelling errors. There is no excuse for poor spelling or poorly formatted ebooks, not even for ARCs. Fortunately, the poor formatting seems to have started (curiously!) when Kate's life starts going downhill, and particularly post chapter 1111, so I didn’t see it at the start of the novel, and I became won over by the writing sufficiently that I was willing to put up with it, but it’s never a good thing to antagonize reviewers with poor formatting. I will remember the 11/11 disaster for a long time…!
Back to the review in progress. Kate starts bonding with the class outcasts, Doris and Margaret, and discovers that their company isn’t so bad. Duhh! Everyone has a story to tell, and Kate ought to realize this as a movie writer/director! But she's only twelve so I’ll let that slide. This part of the novel reminds me strongly of another novel I reviewed not long ago. I was hopeful that this would not turn out like that one did. Okay, so I didn’t get the opening paragraph of chapter 24 where Kate observes that Lydia, who seems to laugh all the time, should move to India where she would have "the biggest laugh club of them all." That seemed to be off at best and a slur at worst. I'm rather fond of the Indians.
Here’s a classic quote for ya: "…it's not easy being a twelve-year-old director. I mean. How many directors have to do their math homework before they can work on their script?" I don’t know if you find that funny, but I sure do. It's well in line with the opening couple of paragraphs which feature this delight: "Worst of all, eggs come from chickens. Don’t even get me started on chickens." I don’t know what it is about that arrangement of words, but I found that seriously funny. How about this: "…my mother prefers a bunch of organic, free-range, overachiever, diabolical hens to me." and "Once again, the hens have outmaneuvered me." Finally, "There's something spooky about a bunch of chickens staring at you." Methinks Madame Mata has chickens in her past if not her present.
In summary, this is a really good novel. It’s perfect for the intended age range, and it’s even perfect for me. I loved how things went from funny to bad, to worse, to recovering, to great again. The characters are believable and well-conceived. They behave like you might expect, even when they're unpredictable, and the ending is perfect. Kate is a smart, strong, flawed, determined, inventive, funny, real girl, who doesn't need super powers to be special, or to be The Chosen One to have a great story to relate. I didn’t even mind that it was first person PoV, something which I normally detest. I thoroughly recommend this novel; get it now before it flies the coop!
