Author: M L Roble
Publisher: Harper
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.
p10 "So you think you're mother's a freak too?" should be "So you think your mother's a freak too?"
This is the story of Natalie Bristol desperately hurrying home from school to try and hide the 'Psychic' sign her mother has put up in the front yard, before her school 'friends' see it and make fun of her. She fails. It's the story of Natalie, who has unpredictable blackouts, during one of which a mysterious voice warns her that, "They are stronger. They are coming. They will arrive." She desperately wants to control these episodes, but she cannot.
It's the story of a young girl who has a thrill-a-minute day at the circus until the magician's show, where the great Beausoleil brings a doll onto the stage, and invites Natalie to prove to herself that it's just a doll. After she does so, the doll appears to come to life and when it touches Natalie's hand, she feels her life energy leaving her and entering the doll, summoning yet another blackout.
When she awakens, her mother is talking to Beausoleil, and the two obviously know each other. He's desperately trying to persuade her to help him, and warning her as a friend that she isn't safe no matter how well she tries to hide herself and her daughter. But no one is telling Natalie what the heck is going on, and her friend Phillip is behaving more and more like he will do something rash in pursuit of his quest to discover what really happened to his father.
I have to say that page 72 is hilarious. I don't know what it was exactly, but I laughed out loud at that. Maybe I was recovering after a stressful day at work, but I could imagine exactly how that incident went down and how it looked. Louisa's comments slayed me! But then Louisa is a rather special girl in an unexpected way, now, isn't she?
The next page, unfortunately, was much less thrilling. It employed the tired old trope of the young protagonist not being told anything. There is no excuse for this, and I know it's a standard trope in YA fiction: the youthful hero-to-be growing up in ignorance, but when your writing demonstrates that the only tool you have to build up tension is to have your characters retreat into irrational, nonsensical, or even dangerous behaviors, it simply doesn't work. It only annoys readers, and it makes me personally reach a point where I am thinking that this had better be dealt with soon or I'm outta here! I'm all for a bit of mystery and intrigue, but when it's so artificial as to drop you right out of suspension of disbelief and into ascension of annoyance, it's nothing more than bad writing.
Chapter twelve doesn't get any better either as it progresses (or rather regresses), because even now the three kids have seen a part of what they're up against, Natalie's mom is all, "We'll talk tomorrow'. I frankly want to kick her in her obsessive, secretive, lethargic, lousy-parenting ass at that point. Yes, I know this is written for a younger age range than mine, but children are only dumb if they're persistently treated that way. They will see through this.
It was parental stupidity which precipitated the sorry events of chapter twelve, and still they seem blindly incapable of learning from it. I know there really are people who are dumb and thoughtless, and who are poor parents, but this seems to be a raging pandemic in YA literature and it needs to stop, because in the end it reflects very badly on the writer and offers a grave disservice to the reader.
Unfortunately things did not pick up from there either, because even as events actually became more exciting (as I learned more about Natalie and Phillip's "gifts"), I also became more irritated. Natalie's grandmother's habit of endlessly saying "my dear" really got my skin crawling after a while, and then the school bully problem cropped up again and Natalie's friend Phillip comes out with this appallingly genderist comment: "...three against two and one is a girl...".
Excuse me? She's a girl and therefore she's somehow not a full person? I decided right there that point that this novel now had five chapters to turn itself around otherwise I was ditching it. There is no excuse for dissing girls in YA stories. Women have enough crap to deal with without them being demeaned and down-graded at such a young age for no other reason than that they're "a girl". I can't believe that a writer who is of the same gender would demean her major character like this. It's inexcusable. What kind of a message is she sending to young girls?
This genderism is further amplified later when Phillip's mom sews together a jacket for Phillip and for Natalie. Phillip gets something that looks like an army jacket, with lots of pockets, whereas Natalie gets one with ruffles down the front and on the sleeves? Why? Because she's a girl and doesn't deserve to be treated the same and given the same options as a boy? Of course, Natalie loves her jacket because she's a girl and it's "dainty"! If only she'd go sit in the corner and be quiet until she's old enough to be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, everything would be fine, wouldn't it? Then we could have a story about manly Phillip and we wouldn't have to bother ourselves any more with The Nat, that useless girl.
This took place as Natalie and Phillip were coming into their "gifts", and undergoing training to learn how to use the gifts, yet neither one of them thinks of employing those powers to fend off the three bullies. This is a betrayal of the characters and is bad writing. For two or three days, these two have had it drilled into them that they must practice and use their powers, and control them and take charge of them, yet the last thing either of them thinks of is using a power and taking charge of this situation and controlling it? Yes, eventually, Natalie realizes this, but it just makes your characters look dumb and slow when you do this.
This situation is actually even worse because it portrays Natalie and Phillip running around in the open, unprotected, right after their parents have effectively grounded them, telling them that they cannot be running round out in the open and unprotected because they're in grave danger! The plotting here makes no logical sense at all.
So I read five chapters more and things did not improve and I called this one off. There were multiple problems with it. In addition to the one grammatical error I mentioned in the erratum, there were several issues of really awkward sentences. For example, on page 151 I read: "It's going to start to get dark soon." which is not really an error as such, but it's definitely an awkward sentence. Page 156 had another one in this vein: "A footfall tapped on the wood of the tree." It just sounds weird, is all. This novel fails the so-called Bechdel test, too. The first time that Louisa and Natalie talk to each other with no one else present, the only thing they can find to talk about is Phillip! It's sad but true!
So while this novel might appeal to undiscriminating children at the younger end of the YA scale and to pre-young adults, it doesn't have what it takes to pass my muster. It's poorly written, it's genderist, and there are plot holes galore, all of which could have been avoided. Once again this is proof that going the Big Publishing™ route is no guarantee that you'll get a decent editor.
