Author: Seth Fishman
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!
Read a bit painfully by Katie Schorr.
I have to say up front that I've grown to detest novels that are told in the first person PoV because they all-too-often sound so self-obsessed: "Hey pay attention to me! I'm more important than anything! Lookit MEEEE! Lookit what I'm doing! Lissen to what I'm thinking!". They just really irritate me unless they're done really well, but typically, especially in YA stories, they aren’t.
This was one of the irritating ones, I'm sorry to say, and it wasn't helped by Katie Schorr's reading. She has a good voice, so I'm sure she'd be appropriate for some novels, but in this case it was just really annoying, especially to hear this voice, which sounded like it wasn't YA, read a first person story about a YA character who is endlessly rambling on about herself and her swim meets and boys.
The worst part about it was her completely flat reading - it was like listening to someone announcing flight cancellations at an airport, or the next stop on your train journey: no inflection, not a trace of emotion. Worse than that, the underlying story was boring as hell. Do I care about the minutiae of her life? Not unless it bears on the story. This was like listening to a thirteen-year-old talk about her school day thirty times in a row - the same day. It was awful. It just sounded wrong and boring.
There was an intrigue here, which made me force myself to keep listening initially, but it was almost immediately subjugated to the boring litany of the tedious details of Mia's thoroughly-uninteresting life. Mia is the main Character and her dad works in some secret government activity, literally underground. He drives down into a tunnel where there are doors almost like airlock doors - where only one set is opened at any one time. Mia has no idea what's in there and her dad rightly isn’t telling.
The well of the title appears, at least initially, to be one which mia fell down when she was four. The story is one of these metaphorical ones where the well becomes Mia's insulated life, from which she eventually escapes (at least that was the initial diagnosis). It might as well have been called The Womb's End or something. I'm not a fan of stories like this, but I admit I was intrigued by what her dad does and why a pushy news reporter was so obsessed with finding out. That I would have liked to have heard about, but the writer was just too obsessed with rolling out boring-as-all-hell high-school trivia to have any time to tell that infinitely more interesting story.
One big problem right off the bat was how this story began - with this business of Mia falling down this well. Even though she's now pretty much adult, she claims that the world is still obsessed with the well incident and that reporters are still beating a path to her door to talk about baby Mia and the well. I found this to be completely absurd.
Yes, a baby-in-a-well story is gripping, and very news-worthy as it happens, but after the child is freed, who cares any more? Can you remember the name of the last trapped child who was in the news? I can’t. I'm sure the family and close friends remember it well, but no one else does because it’s not news-worthy any more, so this rang truly false. It’s certainly not a news item a decade or two later, which is the conceit here, and it made the story inauthentic.
Plus the virus that ages you quickly made no sense - and it made less sense given that Mia was inexplicably thinking she could solve this problem by invading her father's electronics research facility. Electronics has nothing to do with biology, although there are places where they converge - but viruses? Maybe this was a computer virus that somehow attacks humans? Ridiculous! I didn't read that far, so I have no idea where this went. Maybe it made sense later, but I was too bored by it.
Also this is book one of the inevitable YA series, because why write one novel when you can split it into several and make people buy essentially the same story over and over again? other reviewers have warned of a cliff-hanger ending, so you don't even get a complete story here. I refuse to play that game.
So, to cut a boring story short which is exactly what I did! I quit listening to this. I cannot recommend it based on the portion I did hear, not when there are other stories which grip you from the beginning in an intelligent and mature fashion and simply refuse to let go.
