Rating: WARTY!
This is the first in a bizarre series which goes to at least volume three or four followed by two or three novellas, but there are also volumes 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, and 0.4. Definitely a Whisky Tango Foxtrot series. This author's entire oeuvre consists of ripping-off of Franklbaum. This story sounded great from the blurb, but then don't they all? Unfortunately, as the start of a series (which I didn't realize when I picked it up from the library) it's nothing more than a prologue, and I don't do prologues (introductions, prefaces, etc.). Yiou could undoujbtedly skip this and go straight to volume two because, although I DNF'd this one in short order, I'm reliably informed that nothing happens here. Certainly nothing happened in the portion I read.
Once I got started listening to the audio, told in worst person PoV and read irritatingly by Devon Sorvari, I decided this wasn't such a good idea as the blurb suggests it is. The first few paragraphs were an exercise in how much cliché and trope an author can cram into a YA book. A main character who is a flat-chested (check!), bony (check!), disaffected teen (check!), attending a school where bullying is rife and unchecked (check!!) by a girl with breasts (check!) and a non-descript side-kick (check!)? A protagonist who has quite literally no friends (check), can get no justice (check!), whose father isn't in the picture (check!), and whose mother is not only almost permanently zoned out (check!), but who also resents her daughter for her miserable life (check!). A girl who thinks she has no chance with the cutest boy in school? Check. It's all there.
Amy Gumm (any relation to Thomas Harris's Jaime Gumb perchance?! More like it's Judy Garland's real name: Frances Ethel Gumm) is delivered to Oz by your standard tornado, but this is not your Dorothy's Oz. Or rather, it is. This Oz looks like it was hit by a tornado, but it was actually hit by Dorothy, who returned, took over, and completely lost it. Dorothy is now the paranoid dictator of Oz. Everything has changed. The one thing you might find familiar is the legendary yellow brick road, and even that's crumbling. This sounds like a great premise for a story, but if you tell it in first person, have the main character a whiny, weak-kneed trope (who fails in her objective), lard it with every YA cliché there is, you ruin your great idea and make a trailer trash of a novel. That's what happened here.
The saddest thing about Amy when we meet her is that she is entirely defined not by any noble characteristics at all, but by a boy - Dustin. So Amy isn't even a person, much less a woman. Instead, she's a male's brief afterthought as in "Yeah I'd do her if she brought her own brown paper bag." Some authors simply don't get it, and that there are still so many female authors - mostly but not exclusively in the YA genre - who still don't get it is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Creatively, they are as empty as the Tin Man, as writers, they are as full of hot air as the lion, and as for something to say? They're as stuffed with chaff as the scarecrow, with and no wheat in sight. That's them all over.
Amy's only detailed interaction with anyone at school is with Madison, the trope school bully, and their entire interaction is about Dustin, the cutest boy in school, whom Amy unaccountably lets copy her algebra homework (I guess Dustin thinks math is hard) whilst enduring relentless insults from his girlfriend Madison - none of which Dustin seeks to stop. Finally, when Amy indirectly calls the pregnant Madison fat (she evidently never thought of this before, and yes that's an unforgivably cheap shot, but entirely understandable in the circumstances) Madison actually punches Amy. Madison's friend pulls Amy by the hair. So far Amy's only 'retaliation' has been to give as good as she gets in the insult department, yet it's Amy who is immediately suspended without any sort of investigation. This is not a story. It's barely even caricature. It's a cartoon channel reject.
Let's take a minute to examine Amy's parentage and how this author evidently can't come up with a plot that doesn't insult one or other sector of society if she tries. Absentee dad? Check. Dad is dismissed completely in a few words. Judged by how bad the mom is, dad can be excused for abandoning her (but not his daughter), yet the only take we get on dad is how awful he is - nothing else. So he's gone and forgotten.
Do we then get at least a good picture of mom, winning out despite her husband leaving her with their child? Nope. Mom is just as bad, as this author's misogynistic take on single moms would have it. Mom isn't shown as taking care of her; she's shown as not working, and not even capable of maintaining a decent home - not even a rental apartment. She's depicted as work-shy and living in a trailer park. Does the author despise single moms? Evidently, as judged by this.
I'd recommend boycotting this book (as I intend to now boycott this series and everything else that comes out of FFF) based on what Wikipedia (and other sources) says about that book mill:
In 2009, Frey formed Full Fathom Five, a young adult novel publishing company that aimed to create highly commercial novels like Twilight. In November 2010, controversy arose when an MFA student who had been in talks to create content for the company released her extremely limiting contract online. The contract allows Frey license to remove an author from a project at any time, does not require him to give the author credit for their work, and only pays a standard advance of $250. A New York magazine article entitled "James Frey's Fiction Factory" gave more details about the company, including information about the highly successful "Lorien Legacies" series, a collaboration between MFA student Jobie Hughes and Frey. The article details how Frey removed Hughes from the project, allegedly during a screaming match between the two authors. In the article, Frey is accused of abusing and using MFA students as cheap labor to churn out commercial young adult books.Based on this report (and other such details I've read from various sources), full fathom five appears to be how deeply you're buried as an author if you sign on for this. There is no reason at all for anyone to commit to the sweat shop this appears yo be - including Big Publishing&Trade; which is in many ways no better, in this age of ebooks and self-publishing. I refuse to recommend this book or anything from that stable, and I have no intention of reading anything else that has James Frey's sweat stains on it.
