Author: Suzanne Sutherland
Publisher: Dundurn
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.
Something Wiki sounded really interesting from the blurb, but of course it's the blurb's job to make the novel sound interesting no matter what its intrinsic worth. I'd rate the blurb worthy because it did its job - it got me to get this book, but then I found myself having to slog through the mindless, endless, rambling of a twelve-year-old. And in first person PoV too boot. I hate 1PoV because few writers can do it really well, and it's all 'me' all the time, the narrator filled with irritating self-importance. It's usually impractical, very limiting to the telling o' the tale, and typically a huge distraction from the story for me.
As it happens in this story there were other, huge-er distractions so I didn't notice it so much. I don't know if a twelve-year old would find this novel at all interesting much less entertaining, but I certainly did not. I have two middle-grade kids myself, but I sincerely doubt either of them would find this appealing. OTOH, neither of them is a girl, so maybe that's not a good measure.
The first big problem with this is one which we find in all-too-many novels where the writer is significantly older than their subject (especially in a case like this which seems like it might be a bit autobiographical) is that instead of getting a true picture of the main character, we get the author in disguise, with this middle-grader improbably liking and referencing things which no twelve-year-old would be seen dead near.
It destroys credibility to read about young kids being represented as liking bands which were old before the kid was born. Yeah, some kids are outside "norm", but for the most part they're not, which is some ways is sad, but it's a fact of life. Unless you have a really original point to make, which this novel did not, you don't get anywhere by disguising yourself and trying to pass yourself off as a twelve-year-old.
A lot of writers have tried to cash in on the Internet by incorporating it into their novels one way or another. Some have even taken their blogs and forcibly squeezed them into print form. I haven't been impressed by any of this kind of novel that I've read so far.
I don't think these writers really get what the Internet is all about. They don't seem to realize that the Internet is on a different frequency than is a print book or even an ebook. It has a difference cadence. It's like trying to get two people to sync up where one is dancing a waltz and the other a jitterbug. It needs fancy footwork to make it work and all-too-often it trips over itself. This novel is not an Internet novel as such, but it does lean heavily on the culture with each chapter beginning with a mind-numbing definition ostensibly lifted from Wikipedia, which I skipped every time because it was too gimmicky.
This novel really isn't about anything other than the activities of a twelve-year-old named Jo Waller, and her three friends. These activities are, I can tell you pretty darned tedious and mundane indeed. The Internet and Wikipedia have no bearing whatsoever on the story and could have been eliminated altogether, which begs the question: why it was even raised in the blurb, misleading potential readers?
Jo is obsessed with zits, and distracted by her older brother's girlfriend becoming pregnant, and by betrayal from her best friend. In short, nothing that hasn't been written about before. The novel starts out at ninety miles an hour with Jo rambling all over the place trying to get to her point about her zits. I'm glad she didn't really get there because who cares? Really? The problem is that after that initial spurt, it reads just like a normal novel, thereby slapping the reader's face again with the glaring fact that this, like the wiki quotes at the start of the chapters, is nothing but a gimmick.
The novel had too little authenticity. I mentioned the highly unlikely referents for a twelve-year old, which were much more like those of a twenty-seven-year-old than they were a middle-grader. There were other instances of this kind of thing, too, such as on page 16 where Jo is chatting online with a friend who mentions Beethoven's "Für Elise", spelled exactly like that. That's the correct spelling, of course, if you want to be prim and proper, but since this was typed online in a chat between two middle-graders, it's hardly likely that the writer would take the time to reproduce the U-umlaut. It's much more likely she would simply type "Fur Elise". Little things like this matter when it gets right down to it because they can either support or ruin suspension of disbelief. One or two aren't that important, but when that suspension is challenged too many times, it really makes for a dissatisfying reading experience.
I can't in good conscience recommend a book with this many problems and with so little to offer that's new, original, or interesting, but given how undiscriminating and hungry middle-graders are, perhaps there is an audience for this out there somewhere. It's just not in my back yard.
