Sunday, September 7, 2014

We were Liars by E Lockhart


Title: We were Liars
Author: E Lockhart aka Emily Jenkins
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!


I never meant to write y'all any sorrow.
I never meant to write y'all any pain.
I only wanted one time t' see y'all reading.
I only want to see you reading all my purple prose.

Purple prose, purple prose.
I only wanted dramarama from my purple prose.

I never wanted to be your weekend novel.
I only wanted to start a sales trend.
Baby I could never be your baby beach book.
It's such a shame my readership has to end.

Purple prose, purple prose.
I only wanted to see you reading all my purple prose.

Honey I know, I know, I know books are changing.
It's time we all learn how to be bad,
That means you too.
You say you want a reader,
But you can't seem to make up your mind.
Kindle, Nook, or iPad doesn't matter,
Just let me guide you to my purple prose.

Purple prose, purple prose.
If you know what I'm prosing about up here.
C'mon raise your ebook.

Purple prose, purple prose.
We were liars, just a fly on the wall.

(adapted from 'Purple Brain' a parody song from Dire Virgins by Ian Wood)

When I knew
beforehand
that this
novel
had been
recommended by John
Green,
I hawked voluminous gobs of
green
slimy
spittle upon it
in the library.
It ran down the cover
and along the shelves
spurting from between
the neatly lined books
and all over the floor
soaking the carpet as I
walked
on
by.

That was an E. Lockhart metaphor for an emotion. In other words, none of it really happened at all, which explains why I ended-up with this in my CD player in the car, trapped helplessly listening to one of the worst novels I've ever not read as I drove home from the library. The last time I came away from such a novel, I was bearing such a nauseated feeling like I needed to somehow get even with the author, that I went on and wrote an entire parody of Divergent.

I'm not going to spend any of my time doing that over this squib when I have more important projects begging for completion. Plus Jenkins/Lockhart actually has credit in her account with me for The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and Dramarama.

Emily Jenkins can do far, far better than this, I know she can. I fell in love with Frankie Landau-Banks, and I liked and respected Sadye aka Sarah, but I didn't like anything about this book, which means that the author failed, because if I was supposed to care about these people and be moved by the tragedy which befell them, that aim was tragically befouled by the writing. Frankie my dramarama, I didn't give a damn.

When main character and narrator Cadence (really?!) told me she got shot and it turned out to be a well disguised metaphor, I later found myself wishing she actually had been shot, she was so annoying. Indeed, if she'd really been shot in the chest by her departing father, that would have made for a really intriguing story.

Intriguing this was not. The ending was not a surprise (even though I skimmed and didn't finish this, it became pretty obvious what was going on). It was more twisted than twist, and it has been done before and done better. The problem here was that the characters were intrinsically boring. They had nothing to recommend them.

p>
You know if you read "how to's" about successful novel writing, one of the things they insist you absolutely do not do is make your narrator the villain and keep this from your reader. This just goes to prove how easily the "rules" are bent or discarded once you have your foot in the door of the same Big Publishing™ conglomerate which routinely disses you when you try to do the same things established writers get away with every day. If this same novel had been submitted by an unknown writer, it would never have been published. This is also why I'm so glad that none of us is dependent any more upon going cap-in-hand to the big five corporate behemoths begging them on our knees to take a look at our lowly amateur efforts.

It was really quite bizarre to read a novel about filthy rich people who lead a notably less interesting life than I do! They evidently had nothing better to do with their endless time than to play interminable games of Scrabble and wander around from one house to another in their 'compound' looking for each other so they could have pointless pseudo-intellectual non-conversations with each other, essentially about how little they know and care about anyone who exists outside their own skin.

Most of these set pieces (in the parts I managed to force myself to listen to) revolved solely around Gat's righteous indignation that the other three didn't care about anyone who wasn't them. So why on Earth did he keep on coming back and hanging out with them each summer? There was no more an answer for that than there was for the existence of this novel in the first place, and it was one more example of how caricatured and cardboard these characters were.

I cannot recommend this, not even remotely. The audio version was particularly annoying because the narrator didn't sound anything like she was in her mid-teens. In fact, to suggest that maybe she was the mother of someone in their mid-teens was stretching it. I don't necessarily advocate getting, say, a fourteen-year-old to read a story told by a fourteen-year-old, although it's certainly worth considering if someone that age can carry it. I don't demand that an actor be hired for reading a novel. In fact I see that as an appallingly exclusive habit when others can read just as well. All I require is someone who can read pleasantly, but for first person PoV novels, please do let us get someone who sounds at least a bit like the narrating character is supposed to sound!

In closing, allow me to suggest some new and improved titles for this novel: 'We Were Outliers', 'We Were Boring', 'We Weren't', 'Weedy'.