Author: Dan Rix
Publisher: Lavabrook Publishing Group
Rating: WARTY!
Erratum:
P93 "…unlocked the dead bold…" should be "…unlocked the dead bolt…"
Well, it';s December 2nd, so it must be time for a novel starting with the letter 'B' - and today it's Broken Symmetry. You might be surprised at how many books are out there with that title, or something similar! I started out really liking this because it's sci-fi with an interesting premise (at least one which interests me: it takes the concept of 'mirror worlds' quite literally).
The biggest problem (apart from the fact that the cover has nothing to do with the novel - as usual!) was that it was a YA first person PoV novel, and typically, they suck. At best they're rather irritating because it’s all ME! All the time. I'm not a fan of the self-obsessed, or the arrogant. Nor do I find it credible that someone can tell a story about themselves and remember events in mega-detail or conversations verbatim. I know that writers think that this 1poV approach brings immediacy to the reader and makes them identify, but if you have to employee 1PoV to achieve that, then there’s something wrong with your writing skills in my opinion.
In the final analysis, none of this works with me because it’s quite simply not realistic and unless it’s very well done, which is rare, it’s a constant distraction from the actual story. I keep wanting to say "My-oh-my! Aren't you just special?" or saying, "Sucks to be you, doesn't it?"
What makes one of these kinds of stories even worse is if it’s told by a young female and she's a moron, which is glaringly the case here. Blaire Adams, the main character in this novel, goes above and beyond that call of duty and proves herself to be a professional moron, and proudly so: she's clueless, inept, idiotic, and weak. As if that's not bad enough, she falls for the bad boy, Damian, for no other reason than that it’s constitutional law in the USA that you cannot have a first person PoV YA girl fall in love with an ordinary or decent guy. It has to be a bad boy with hair falling into eyes which have gold flecks in them. IT'S TEDIOUS to keep reading this in novel after novel. Show some originality PLEASE!
Here’s an example of how fundamentally dumb Blaire is: She tries to break into a police station! As if that's not bad enough, she takes up an internship in the company which employed her father. She's so air-headed that she forget that this is where her father worked, despite her obsession with trying to discover what happened to him. She's determined to discover how it was that he went missing for almost a year and then died from some obscure injuries when he finally showed up, and it’s this which prompts her to take up the internship.
One of the tasks assigned to her is to clean up the shards of a broken mirror. There's a chute in the floor where the broken glass goes. Her boss has told her that they test mirrors to breaking point in this room - and she believed him. The room is quite dark and Blaire is too stupid to ask for the light to be turned on, or to turn it on herself. She asks for neither gloves nor a brush. She doesn’t even think to sweep the shards into the chute with her feet, which at least have the protection of her shoes. Instead she picks up the shards in her hands in the dark and then runs her bare hands over the floor to check if she missed anything. She's a moron. But of course this allows her to get a cut which the bad boy can then tenderly and lovingly tend to, even as he's dissing her and ignoring her questions. Seriously? This was god-awful writing.
There's a big red button on the wall in the 'mirror room', and her boss tells her not to touch it, so of course Brain-dead Blaire presses it and breaks the new mirror she just installed. Despite having some sort of vision of Damian murdering her next door neighbor and burning his house down, she's immediately and powerfully attracted to him. You know they're going to be an item as soon as she says she hates him. It’s that painfully obvious. This is so clichéd as to be farcical.
The guy is a jerk. He has poor hygiene and treats her like dirt, and she falls for him. Is this really what we want to be telling young women? It would have made a better story if she'd ditched dickhead Damian, and fallen for Amy! But that wouldn't work because this is YA and the author would be arrested on capital crime charges he didn’t pair a girl with a boy. You know that.
It’s quite obvious even if you haven't read the blurb what’s going on here, but Blaire is also evidently blind as well as premeditatedly stupid. Not literally blind, just mentally. She can’t figure out what’s going on, no matter how many clues she gets. Bad Boy treats her so badly that she gets no clues from him, and eventually her new boss has to spell it out for her.
Charles and Damian do a piss-poor job of educating Blaire about what’s happening here. It would help if they had the first clue about physics and the difference between physics and chemistry. When Charles is obfuscating, Blaire observes, "I took chemistry last year", but what he's trying to explain has nothing to do with chemistry and this makes her look ever more dumb.
We're biological beings, but biology is based on organic chemistry which is a sub-set of chemistry. Chemistry itself is a subset of physics, and physics is a subset of math. What Charles is trying to tell her is that sub-atomic studies are not only applicable at the macro level (the level of the human body as opposed to sub-atomic level), but controllable there, too. This isn't actually true because the trillions upon trillions of statistical probabilities at the sub-atomic level are 'ironed out' at the macro level, which gives us our concept of a good, solid reality.
What Charles is trying to explain is that reality isn’t what it appears to be, and the bottom line is that with training, and because of her 47th chromosome, Blaire can walk through a mirror and be in in a parallel reality. That a mirror can play a role in this is one of the conceits of this novel. It makes no sense, but you have to let that slide to enjoy the story. This is where the BS comes in (BS is for breaking symmetry and for a well-known dismissive expletive, too!). The author's 'explanation' of the double-slit experiment is nonsensical. You can get a better one here in wikipedia.
This novel is rather confused. At one point, for example, Charles says that parallel worlds have been proved, which actually isn't true, and then just a couple of paragraphs later, Damian is telling Blaire that these worlds are not real. Perhaps he means something other than what I think he means by that, but it isn’t very clear. They're either real or they're not.
The problem is that it gets worse. Damian starts babbling inane philosophical ideas - like that old saw: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? Well of course it does! Basic physics will tell you that, and I guarantee you that if it fell on a deaf person the person would make an horrific sound! What this has to do with the symmetry he was discussing earlier, I have no idea, because all the previous rambling on about sub-atomic particles and quantum states is summarily tossed out the window at this point and we change the whole scenario to simple mirror symmetry as Blaire and Damian prepare to go through.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with quantum states. Instead, we're now told that everything is reversed once you go through the mirror, and that you can only return through the mirror by which you left, otherwise you won't come back to the source point, but instead go into yet another symmetrical world. Despite having this technology and ability, they're reduced to marking the mirror with painter's masking tape - red to indicate the outgoing side of the source mirror, and blue to mark that mirror on the reverse side so they can be sure they come back through the same mirror. Never mind that painter's tape is specifically designed to come away from surfaces very easily.
Here the whole story becomes hilarious because Damian constantly declares his conviction that Blaire doesn't know what she's doing, that she isn't safe, that this is dangerous, yet no one in this whole enterprise insists upon more training for her! Anyone who actually cared about Blaire would have insisted she not go until she was properly prepared. Damian doesn’t. Quite the contrary. Instead, he indulges himself in a kind of rape - as a joke, yet - when he tells Blaire that she must take off her clothes to travel through. He waits until she's down to her underwear before he tells her he was joking. Way to go, Damian, you lowlife jerk-off. What an hilarious joke. Yeah, right at the point where you're going to indulge in a life-threatening activity (for no good reason! Read on for more on this) with a girl who is woefully under-prepared, go ahead and trick her into undressing for you. Damian is a lowlife jack-ass and that's all there is to him.
Worse than this (imagine that if you can!), even Blaire knows she's under-prepared. She's told she must destroy the mirror when she returns and she fails to remember that she already broke a mirror by hitting the red button. She's a moron. She's not ready. I guess she and Damian actually do deserve each other.
Despite all of this, I could understand it if there was some urgent or life-saving reason why they simply had to go through despite the risks, but there isn’t. Neither Damian nor Charles has articulated one single reason why there needs to be travel through the mirrors. Not one. Blaire is too dumb to ask, Damian is too much of a moron to care for her, yet here they are going through. Damian hints repeatedly that if Blaire wants the truth she must go through, yet he's offered her no truth! On the contrary, he's specifically told her that none of these worlds are real. What possible truth could lie there?
The story just went from bad to worse (if that's even possible at this point) when Blaire - completely uneducated, completely unprepared, and worse, none too smart (she's too dumb to put on a seat-belt in a get-away car without being told) - steps through the looking glass into Wonderland. We still have absolutely no reason whatsoever which would compel someone like Blaire to do any of this. When she begins, we still have no explanation whatsoever as to what is supposed to be accomplished by taking these life-threatening risks. Yet she blindly goes right ahead and does it.
Damian has done literally nothing to properly prepare her for this trip - nothing at all beyond vague hints at unspecified dangers. He hasn’t warned her that each trip (for no reason at all, evidently) steals a little bit of her. The way they get through the mirror is to press against it (and note that Damian specifies that you can’t press too hard). This of course necessitates his holding her hand! Could we be any more ham-fisted than this in our story-telling?
Immediately they get through, Blaire becomes disoriented and so nauseated that she vomits; then she starts acting like she's drunk - apparently you get a high from crossing over! None of this was properly explained by Damian the dumbass. Neither was the fact that, once they get through, Blaire's job is to "distract the guards" at a military facility while Damian "sneaks up" on them and shoots them in the head.
Seriously? Note that wimp Blaire doesn’t even bat an eyelid at the brutal violence unleashed by Damian. She doesn’t get nauseated. She isn’t grossed out by it. She isn’t shocked by it. She doesn’t change her opinion of Damian because of it. She merely, calmly voices some 'concerns' over it later! That was totally weird given the character to whom we’ve been introduced thus far.
Worse than this are two really bad plotting issues. The first harks back to what Damian told Blaire about not pressing too hard on the mirror. When Blaire asks Damian why they can't use reflections in windows to "break symmetry", he says it’s impossible because it would require pressing too hard! Huh?
Another really dumb issue results from Damian going on another solo mission and getting himself arrested. How Charles knows this, since he hasn’t gone through, nor has he been in touch with Damian, is an unexplained mystery, but now Charles wants Blaire to go through and break Damian out of jail! This is after we’ve been explicitly told that they can only go through together - remember the hand-holding incident? This novel makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
At this point I was ready to ditch is as a classic example of atrocious plotting and poor writing, but I admit I was curious to find out just what the hell it was that made these dangerous trips "necessary", and it seems that the only purpose for this is that the government has found the 47th chromosome! The author writes this like no one has ever been found to have an extra chromosome - or with one short!
In reality, this happens quite frequently and usually results in serious physical problems for the bearer, so unless the Chromosome 47 in this novel is something truly extra-super-special, it’s no big deal! Moreover, there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to build a military facility to map it. The military already has genetic mapping devices. It takes very little time to do the work these days. They could have had it done in one of their already restricted facilities instead of drawing attention to themselves by spending millions on building a (not so) secret subterranean facility. Again, nothing in this novel makes sense.
At this point, 40% into the novel, I resolved to go to the half-way point (which should cover Blaire's first solo mission), and if it continued to be just as bad, I would summarily ditch it and move onto something that was:
- Well written
- Had an intelligent female character
- Made sense
- Had a clue about science
Her entire behavior during this part of the story completely betrays what went before. Carrying the mirror around, she was constantly remarking to herself about how this would be a disaster if it broke or cracked, yet when she first went through, Damian had gone out of his way to show her how tough these mirrors were - she couldn’t even put a crack in it by punching or kicking it and neither could Damian. Now she's worried about how fragile it is?!!
Her next mission is to impersonate Jennifer Cupertino - a post-doc who works at this supposedly top secret facility! Seriously? Why would they let anyone in there who didn’t need to be there? And why does no one at this top secret facility have picture IDs? Blaire breaks into Jennifer's apartment and steals her purse and then her car, but Jennifer sees her. Blaire thinks this is fine because she's taking the car and Jennifer can’t get there before she does. Apparently this dumb-ass doesn’t think for a minute that maybe Jennifer could call in to the facility and warn them that someone stole her ID! This is what Jennifer does, but it takes her an hour to do it. Why? No explanation. Meanwhile Blaire escapes a top secret military facility with no effort at all. This is pure bullshit and I can't even remotely recommend this pile of garbage.
