Author: Dana Reinhardt
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!
Audio book read by Caitlyn Greer
This novel brings new depths to tediousness. I'm serious. It was awful. The novel itself is written at about the reading level of twelve or thirteen-year-olds, which would be fine except that the novel is actually about eighteen-year-olds. It doesn't help that Caitlyn Greer can't read. She's perfect in that she actually sounds like a twelve or thirteen-year-old, but she cannot read - not that and make it sound interesting or attractive to the average ear, which is what I come equipped with.
It’s also first person PoV, which I thoroughly detest. That's bad normally (with only a few exceptions); here it’s nothing but a continuous screech. The problem is that you can’t flip open an audio book and discover this before hastily returning it to the shelf with a heart-felt sigh of relief at your fortuitous escape. No, you actually have to get it into the car and start listening to it and discover how awful it is when you're waiting at the light several blocks over from the safety of the public library.
The conceit is that this is a story about building something. I had foolishly hoped it would be a metaphor about building relationships, about growing, about coming of age, or about something, but no, it’s about none of those things. There's no building of any kind going on here. This novel is nothing more than a cheesy high-school melodrama set outside of a high school. How inventive! Harper (seriously?), the main protagonist and narrator, is almost eighteen and has chosen to spend her summer in Tennessee helping to build a home (I mean literally build one from the ground up) to replace one that was destroyed in a recent natural disaster. Some might argue that Tennessee itself is a natural disaster, but I'm not going there.
I'm tempted to say that Harper should have been named Harpy, but that doesn’t work. Harpo works better given that she is a bit of a clown, but sadly, she talks, whereas Harpo doesn’t. Unlike either of those two options, Harper is one of the most dull and pedantic narrators I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. We're treated to sentence (and I mean that in the pejorative sense) after sentence (that, too) of the most mundane and uninteresting of events. Oh, she bought a travel cup so she doesn't have to use Styrofoam. Oh, she spilled her coffee! Oh here's a wet towel to clean it up. Oh, I looked in my backpack and there's nothing in that zippered pocket. Oh a boy is sitting on the edge of the chaise lounge. Oh, I have something in my eye so I need to go to the clinic. Oh, he's driving me to the clinic; how sweet! What a guy! Oh look: there's a doctor here. Give me a friggin' break!
Despite reams of tiresome and strident lecture from Harper harping on about the environment, recycling, and global warming, there's not an iota of discussion about the pros and cons of Harper expending money on a flight to a place where she can realistically contribute relatively little, versus giving that cash to a charity which can maximize the use of it.
This novel is unrealistic, too, in that the numbers are nicely gender-distributed at this building site, just like they are in high-school. This is not to say that women cannot help, or cannot work construction - that's nonsensical to even think it. It is to say that if this project were realistic, the chances are it would be heavily male-oriented, so immediately we’re out of suspension of disbelief. That's not the way life should be, but it is the way life tends to turn out, unfortunately.
As soon as these teens arrive, their cell phones are confiscated! Harper didn’t even bother to bring hers because of this "rule". What's up with that? They get only one call a week back home? Is this building camp or prison camp? That made no sense and not a single reason was offered for it.
Believe it or not, none of that is the biggest problem here. The problem is that there is no building going on. We learn next-to-nothing about building - about how the house is put together, which would actually have been interesting. What we do learn is what a fraud this is in that we get chapters named after steps in the building process, but nothing in the chapter which matches the chapter title, neither with the physical building of the house, nor with the building of anything between the would-be builders. I found that the sad, blue color of the cover and the fact that it features not a clean shiny nail, but a rusty one to be ironically emblematic of the content of this novel.
Instead of substance, we get page after page (or disk after disk in this case) of sad, juvenile gossip, flirting, and boy talk. Bechdel-Wallace crashes and burns on every disk, which is the real disaster in Tennessee as depicted in this novel. What the author is clearly trying to force upon us here is that, despite the fraud of girls purportedly doing 'he-man work', they're still really nothing but flighty, frivolous, juvenile, empty-headed girls who have nothing but boys, boys, boys on their minds all the time. What a grotesque insult for a female writer to offer to her female main character. Shame on Dana Reinhardt for wasting trees putting this trash on paper.
