Author: Tanille Edwards (No website available)
Publisher: Harper Collins
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.
Tanille Edwards is one of these people who likes to go by only one name, like Madonna Ciccone and Rihanna Fenty, but her novel is isn't copyrighted to Tanille, it's to Tanille Edwards, so evidently this lone word actually isn't her name. This novel has a fifteen-page prologue (pretentiously titled a 'prelude' here) and a one paragraph first chapter! I skipped the prologue as usual. I routinely do this and I rarely have to go back and read it because I missed something. That ought to tell you how worthless prologues are. If it's worth the telling, it's worth calling it chapter one. Prologues are so thrift store drop-off box....
You can also skip chapter one in this novel, since nothing happens until chapter two, and then the story is like listening to a four-year-old explain how she managed to spill the entire box of cereal all over everything. It's all talk all the time.
The main character's name is Nia no doubt short for 'Nia sighted' since she evidently has no life whatsoever except insofar as she's an accessory to guys' wardrobes, which seem to malfunction in Nia's case. She can't relate to guys except in a hostile manner, so despite the writing, she actually managed to interest me a little. Unfortunately, the novel is essentially one long conversation, with almost no descriptive writing or scene setting or mood setting, and the conversation is almost always about guys and is sorrowfully genderist to boot. How boring can you get? If a guy wrote this novel but with reversed genders, he would be pilloried for it and rightly so.
Chapter three begins with Nia's continuing dysfunctional validation of herself as a nobody unless in reference to some boy somewhere. On page 29 there is an utterly bizarre sentence: "Sufficed it to say that was the last I playing the CD that night." Seriously? Was there no editor on this novel? If there was, he or she needs to be fired for letting this kind of thing get through - not just that sentence, but the entire novel (or at least, the first six chapters which is as much as I could stand to wade through).
It's not such much that there's nothing of interest going on, but that there's literally nothing at all going on. It's like reading some thirteen-year-old's diary - the diary of a dreary thirteen year old to whom nothing happens and who has no imagination and no interests other than endlessly gabbling about, ruminating upon, speculating over, and drooling because of boys. It's tedious and I found myself skipping more and more pages of this stuff until at chapter six I decided to skip the entire rest of the novel. I could not stand to read any more.
Tanille Edwards is a singer, but she is not a writer. You can hear her perform on You Tube. I cannot in good conscience recommend this novel.
