Author: Cara Lockwood
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WARTY!
Wuthering High is a paranormal novel which completes my Wuthering Heights 'Trilogy' along with Withering Tights. It's been an interesting excursion, but in the end, I was able to recommend only one of these three novels!
This entry in my blog also marks the start of Big July, where I plan to publish two reviews a day, every day, for the entire month - barring disasters. Yes, my reviews are backed-up and I need to open the floodgates before I run out of storage space!
This particular story, which is larded with what are now horribly dated pop-culture references, starts out by introducing an unlikeable main protagonist, Miranda Tate. This is yet another first person PoV female novel. I actively avoid these with few exceptions. Even if the novel sounds interesting, I routinely turn away from it once I discover that it's a first person PoV, whether male or female, because they're typically obnoxious. This particular one I decided to chance because of the title, but it turned out to be yet another in a sorry line of pretentious and lazy YA fiction wherein the author seems to think that if they offer one or two 'literary references', then they must writing great literature themselves.
Big mistake! If Wuthering Heights is a disaster (which it is), then you can't just vaguely 'reference' it and have your novel be a success. You have to actually do something with it. This novel failed rather disastrously in that regard. Indeed, it failed to do anything with the source material: it was confused and illogical, and it had some huge plot difficulties, to say nothing of the author sadly misrepresenting the Brontë family and in particular, the father.
Why female authors especially seem to think that it's illegal to write a novel about a woman and not have her tell it in first person remains a complete mystery to me. I know the delusion is that it creates more immediacy, but that's purest bullshit. What it creates in me is serious annoyance at being forced to listen to a shallow and mindlessly gossiping girl go endlessly on and on about herself as though there's nothing more important in the world than ME! Right NOW! Listen to MEEEEE!
Miranda is, to begin with, mildly amusing as she reveals why she's being shipped to the island academy for delinquent teens, but in the end she becomes just annoying in her dismal self-obsession. She charged a thousand dollars to her step mother's credit card for push-up bras (seriously?), some of which have already been purloined by her younger sister Lindsay, then she totaled her dad's BMW. If she had withdrawn the cash and stuffed it into her existing bras it probably would have been better expended. She shows zero remorse for any of this! And exactly how did she get away without incurring a single penalty for crashing a car after driving it illegally?
Her dad is effectively a deadbeat dad even though he's around, because he has no interest in his daughters. He evidently does nothing but play golf, which begs the question as to where his money comes from. Miranda has a hugely-inflated opinion of herself, convinced that she's the most popular girl in her (old) school and a fashion maven to boot (so she tells us - we get no independent supportive evidence for this, so she could be a lying toad for all we know).
The writing in parts of this novel is nothing short of atrocious. I did manage to reach page 18 though, before I tripped over this (descriptive of the antics of the weird bus driver who picks Miranda up from the ferry to take her to the school): "He grounds the gears of the bus and takes off..." Yep, those gears ain't goin' nowhere! They're grounded!
Seriously? Fire the frigging book editor and slap the author's wrist. Chalk up yet one more example of the well-established fact that getting into bed with Big Publishing™ is no guarantee that you're going anywhere - especially not if you're being ground as those gears should have been....
This wasn't the only exemplar of incompetent writing/editing. There were several others, including an inappropriate plural somewhere around pages 135 and 145 (I forget exactly where), and on page 151 "wrecking more havoc" when it should have been "wreaking more havoc". This is simply illiteracy, and to find it in a book that touts itself arrogantly as some kind of a literary novel about the classics is nothing short of shameful. Never mind haunting the "Bard academy" - the corpses of Virgina Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Charlotte Brontë would be rotating in their graves at high speed.
This is not a novel about the classics, or a homage to the classics; it's a cheap rip-off of the classics and it hardly has anything to do with them. Instead, all the author did was to simply take a random sampling of classic authors and characters and make a pastiche of them in a story which makes no sense.
For example, we're told at one point that the teachers at the academy are are all authors who committed suicide (Hemingway, Woolf), so how then do we get a head"master" in Charlotte Brontë? She did not commit suicide! And why are all these English authors in a school in the US, other than that the author is too arrogant, self-centered, ignorant, or lazy to set it in England where it belongs?
We're told frequently that Miranda's father has little or nothing to do with his daughters, so how then do we get him taking any interest at all in which school she goes to? Yes, she ran his car into a tree, but even so, why would he concern himself with getting her into a boarding school as opposed to some sort of correctional institution or a reform school? It makes no sense!
My favorite character is Blade, but she's nothing more than a caricature, and Lockwood once again displays astounding ignorance in that she clearly cannot tell the difference between satanism and Wicca! How shameful!
The author's literary ignorance is also on proud display. She has one scene in a greenhouse where there are carnivorous plants taken from The Little Shop of Horrors, but that's not a classic novel, it's a movie! Does Lockwood not know this? And why has she never heard of The Day of the Triffids?
Her attempts at romance are equally risible. She provides us with a sad trope triangle of Ryan, a guy at the academy whom Miranda knows from her old school. He's pathetic, and nothing more than your clichéd jock-style teen romantic "nice boy" interest, who is actually a complete jerk, but of course Miranda is blind to that. The bad boy leg of this wrong-angled triangle is Heathcliff himself - yes the psychotic, abusive character from Wuthering heights who here is actually nothing more than a deus ex libellus.
It turns out that all these characters are escaping from books which are stored in a secret vault in the school, let loose by Emily Brontë's evil ghost! Why not burn these particular books and secure ourselves from the end of the world? The cheap excuse for an answer is that if they did that, then the authors would die! Excuse me? The teachers (authors) are not fictional and they're dead already. What kind of a dumb-ass plot device was that?
This book sucks majorly and I rate it highly wart-infested.
