Author: Anne Bustard
Publisher: Egmont
Rating: WARTY!
This novel was a complete bust for me. Set in 1960 for no apparent reason, it's the story of Peggy Sue Bennett who has moved with her family to Hawaii and now is the subject of racism from the locals since she's in the minority (about 20% of the population in her new school), and bullying by a local girl named Kiki.
Once again we have a YA novel featuring unrestrained bullying which goes so far(cicle) as to be completely unrealistic, rolling way past ridiculous and into the nearby neighborhood of complete parody. As if that wasn't bad enough, the story itself is devoid of any interest whatsoever. It's one blessedly short chapter after another of tediousness. We follow Peggy through lesson after lesson, abuse after abuse, bullying after bullying, and this complete wuss makes zero complaint, not even mentioning it to her parents.
If women had not complained and made themselves thoroughly obnoxious, they'd probably still be waiting to be granted the right to vote by old white men. Peggy Sue, aka Mary Sue, is, in her blind inertia, an insult to those women who fought for enfranchisement. If the story had seemed like it had been thinking about going somewhere, that might have made some sort of a difference, but it didn't - unless the lesson here is that bullying is best dealt with by kow-towing to it by going out of your way to please the bully.
Maybe it got better but I had better things to do with my time than stick around and read it to the end in the hope that the writing would improve. Believe me, if it hasn't shown any sign of it by 75% of the way in, which was further than it deserved to be read, it ain't gonna get better. I quit there and the only thing I regret is reading that far before I wised up and dropped it.
In closing - and this isn't a dig at this novel per se, although the ARC for this was a great illustration of the problem - I'd like to say another word or two about wasting trees!
And yes, I get that this is a non 8.5x11 format novel showing on an 8.5x11 format page, so let's take out the excess white space, and bring it down to the area within the cross-hairs - and coincidentally render it into the same dimensions as the cover illustration above:
See it now? This is yet another problem caused and sustained by Big Publishing™ because they're the ones demanding a certain layout for a novel, and part of the layout is 250 words per page. Every time we give in to this, trees are wasted. That's why I urge writers not to turn out typescripts like this one, and to buck Big Publishing™'s demands, and write more per page.
Naturally there are constraints on how much you can fit on a page. Certain amounts of white space are required for margins and for gutter (to permit binding - the thicker your book, the more gutter you need). Additionally, you don't want to cram words everywhere - for readability if not aesthetics you need to provide a decent layout of course, and in the ebook, it doesn't matter how much white space you have because it isn't wasting any trees.
I'm not telling you how to write; I'm just asking that we as writers consider what the environmental impact is of what we do. Is it necessary to write a trilogy? Can you shorten the book and make it just as good? Can you run to three hundred words per page? I'm just saying it's worth thinking about.
