Rating: WARTY!
Not to be confused with The Underdogs by Mike Lupica or any of a gazillion other novels titled 'Underdog', this novel posed as a middle-grade detective novel in the blurb, but which in the writing, turned out to be a young adult, snotty, elitist novel which had nothing to do with detecting. At least that's how it was for the first twenty-five percent of it, after which I gave up in disgust. Keep that in mind as you read this review. There may have been things taking place later in the story which mitigate some of my criticism, but in my experience, when a novel begins this badly and continues in the same vein for the first 25% of the story, things ain't gonna change much. It was also replete with flashback, which is just annoying to me. The chapters were interleaved (and titled) 'Before' and 'After' through the entire novel, and it was annoying, because as soon as it looked like something might start to happen, the brakes were slammed on and we got an irrelevant trip into the past before the murder. It didn't work.
Even by Big Publishing™ standards, the blurb for this was way off. It began with the usual "When" and revealed that "a popular teen beauty’s body is discovered by the pool at an elite tennis club". What her beauty has to do with it is unexplained, and I should have realized, right there and then, that something was wrong here. Would the murder have been okay if the girl had been "ordinary"? Would they have let it go un-investigated if she had been ugly? It bothers me that in a purportedly middle-grade novel, we're already focused on beauty and popularity before the story even began, and it's entirely irrelevant to the story. A girl was murdered. Isn't that enough? Is it somehow more tragic if she's beautiful and popular? Not in my book it isn't, but in this blurb writer's imagination, it evidently is.
I understand that writers don't have anything to do with the cover or the blurb when they go with Big Publishing™, and this blog is about writing, not pretty covers or catchy blurbs, so just one more comment on that score: the worst thing about the blurb was the huge disconnect between "twelve-year-old Evie and her best friend, Chelsea" and the age of the people represented in the actual story. They did not read as middle grade characters! Perhaps this was intentional. Perhaps the club catered to adults and young adults, and Evie and Chelsea were the exception, but nowhere was it made clear just what age range we were talking about here, and all of the characters seemed to me to be way older than twelve, including Evie and Chelsea! They were just not realistic, even when we take into account their privileged lifestyle.
That was a writing problem. The blurb tells us that Evie and Chelsea jump on the case. My question is, did the blurb writer actually read the novel?! The very last thing Evie and Chelsea did was jump on the case! They literally did nothing but stalk people and eavesdrop for the entirety of the 25% I read! They were the most passive protagonists I've ever read about. They did literally nothing but ogle guys and discuss guys and drool over guys, and spy on people. It was like a reboot of Harriet the Spy, but for an older audience. It was boring in the extreme, and it made these two young girls look as vapid and shallow, and clueless and tedious as it's possible to make a character look. The two of them did no investigating, came up with no ideas, did no detective work, offered no theories or had any clue whatsoever. Worse than this, they got into no mischief, made no mistakes, got into no trouble, were never in any danger, and were as monotonous and one-note as it's possible to be. There was no appreciable attempt at humor.
As I said, I read only 25%, so it's entirely possible that this entire story turned around 180° on the very next page after I stopped reading, and the story took off and was brilliant, but somehow I seriously doubt it because there never was any indication that it was going to ever do that. While the writing wasn't technically bad (i.e. was not full of gaffs, spelling and grammar errors, and it was not awful to read from that perspective, neither was it inspired or inspiring. It was refreshing given that this was an advance review copy, so I was grateful for that! Unfortunately, the author uses 'thusly'! Now while that isn't technically a gaff, it is really annoying and looks pretentious as all get-out. There was also my personal pet peeve on hair color: "Hair that was so black it had glints of blue in it...." No. Just no.
My biggest beef with this story though, was that it consistently presented young women in an awful light. Take this, for example: "Nicholas was Annabel’s brother, almost like a twin but not. He was older by less than two years, protective and so fond of his baby sister." Baby sister? She's two years younger. Why demean her like that? She's not a baby. Unless Nicholas is two years old. This was only one of endless instances where girls were summarily dismissed as one-note and shallow, obsessed with boys and never - ever, ever - given to a single thought about anything else. Just as badly, boys were objectified in the extreme, which is just as bad as objectifying women. I'm sorry, but I cannot support or recommend a story like this one, which evidently had nothing to offer but lust and improbably raging hormones, and no detecting in sight.
