Author: Nova Ren Suma
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!
If it's December 4th, it must be time to post a review of a novel beginning with the letter 'D', and today it's Dani Noir. Is that a cool title or what? The problem is that the novel wasn't anywhere near as cool as its title!
Also how cool is this author's name? It's like something out of science fiction (like from Greg Bear's Eon quadrilogy). This novel was original published as Dani Noir, which is a unique title, but then the title was changed - I guess because it wasn't selling - to Fade Out which means instead of being unique, it now became lost in a dozen novels with the same title. No one screws up a writer's work like Big Publishing™!
The problem is that this novel is already forgettable, even with a unique title. The main character is middle-grader Dani Callanzano. She is (or rather, was) referred to as Dani Noir in the title because of her absurd and highly-unlikely obsession with film noir - namely old and tedious B&W movies made in the thirties and forties.
Dani is a slacker, a freeloader, and a stalker - she never pays to see the movies, she bums free ice-cream from a friend who works in a store, and she starts stalking her supposed friend Jackson to find out what his involvement is with this girl Bella, when Jackson, who is older than Dani, is supposed to be dating Elissa. Dani is the dumbest 13-year-old on the planet since it never once occurs to her that Jackson is double-dating. Jackson is a lowlife who has at least one inappropriately violent spasm.
Dani's also dealing with the fact that her dad ran-off with another woman leaving his wife (Dani's mom) not dealing with it at all. Any kid with half-an-ounce of smarts would have put two-and-two together and drawn a parallel between her dad's behavior and Jackson's, as the author ham-fistedly did, but Dani can't even find the two's, let alone match them up.
Some reviewers have labeled her as selfish and self-centered, but she's no more so than any kid her age. Aside from that issue, this story didn't work very well. It's well-written in parts, and amusingly written in others, but it's hard to imagine many kids of that age group being interested in this story. It's much more of a young adult story, but of course then, the plot wouldn't have been credible. It was hardly credible as it is.
The characters are interesting, but almost as clumsily-drawn as is the aforementioned parallel. The film noir angle is larded all over this story and simply became annoying after a very short time. It's an amateur mistake to take a passion of your own (which I'm guessing this is - a passion of the author's) and jam it into a novel instead of sculpting the novel and the passion together to create a really well-working story.
It's highly unlikely that a movie theater like the "Little Art" (which appears to show nothing but 35mm prints of 30's and 40's movies) could possibly survive. Yes, the theater employs child labor so it's cheap to run in that regard, but there's really never anyone in the theater apart from Dani, and she never pays! I don't see how the theater survived even with the low overhead from cheap movies.
Dani isn't credible as a twelve-to-thirteen year old either. She's far too reserved - she never blabs anything to anyone, not even a friend with whom she used to hang out. She's secretive and manipulative and very selfish and not really a very pleasant person. Austin, the male interest in Dani's life, is so obvious as to be painful. I can't in good faith recommend this novel.
