Author: Trish Marie Dawson
Publisher: Smashwords
Rating: WORTHY!
Errata:
p24 "A chance to pick a part the choice me made which ended us all here"? Seriously?!!
p35 "borage"? Should be "barrage" unless you're talking about a hairy plant found in southern Europe…!
I don't normally do book covers because this blog is about writing, not window-dressing, but I have to remark that this cover has nothing whatsoever to do with the story!
This is yet another in a seemingly unstoppable onslaught of first person PoV young adult female narrated novels. In the library or the book store you can stuff these back onto the shelf, but you can’t do that with ebooks! Fortunately not all of them are awful and I include this one in that select group. This novel had a prologue. I don’t do prologues. If the writer doesn’t think that the text is important enough to include in chapter one or later, then I don’t think it’s worth my time to read it! I didn’t miss it.
This one - book one in a series, note - starts out with high school friends Piper Willow, the narrator, and best friend Bree traveling to a roller rink. It’s their last day of high school, and there's a party ahead which Piper is not planning on attending. Something really bad has happened between her and Ryan Burke (who is evidently appropriately named) and she's not in a boy-friendly mood any more. So who should show up at the roller rink where Piper is sitting out and watching Bree and her boyfriend Preston, circle round and round? Whatever happened was so bad that Piper has become a cutter.
Piper has a bigger problem - she's a really bad driver, and when Bree calls her in tears (Preston's being a jerk) to pick her up from the very party which Piper didn’t wish to attend, Piper obliges, and promptly crashes the car on the way home. Apparently Bree is too dumb to wear a seatbelt and the last view of her which Piper gets is her best friend's head disappearing through the windshield. The tragedy doesn't end there. Piper can’t deal any more and takes a bottle of her father's Diazepam pills.
Next she's waking up in a "station" and filling out paperwork, and discovering that she has an afterlife choice: she can spend eternity alone with her misery, or she can volunteer to "go back" and help someone else who is in her position - but still alive as of yet. Piper chooses the latter. In some ways, this story feels a bit like a cross between the Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life, and the Warren Beatty movie Heaven can Wait, which is a move I really adore.
I found it a bit disturbing that Piper's therapy sessions so quickly and easily - indeed, almost magically - wipe away all her issues with cutting, and The Burke, and with her being the instrument of her best friend's untimely and precipitous death (she now dismisses this as "carelessness"! No, it was (wo)manslaughter for goodness sakes!). I found that a bit hard to put up with, but I was at this point intrigued enough by the story to keep on reading.
The story goes downhill rather in chapter eight. Piper gets her first assignment, and suddenly it appears that she's had absolutely no training or practice whatsoever. I know the author's intent is to make it all new, nerve-rending, and interesting to us, but it just made me feel like Piper had simply been thrown to the wolves, or was painfully stupid which detracted sharply from the really gentle treatment she'd been enjoying to this point. She also has a rather rude awakening when she finally gets inside the body of her first 'client'!
Is anyone else slightly disturbed at the excessive use of last names as first names in this story? We have Piper, Preston, and Sloan. This became rather farcical after a very short time, like it was a parody I was reading. On the brighter side of things, I liked her first assignment and how she handled it. I did start to get annoyed with her when she was trying to tell her host who he could date!
There was a really bizarre occurrence three-quarters of the way through, which made little sense - and it especially made little sense in light of the reason for the occurrence, but I can’t go into detail without posting unacceptable spoilers. Despite the issues I described above, I ended-up liking this story, although the second trip Piper made was nowhere near as good as the first; however, the cliff-hanger ending is a killer, so be warned!
