Rating: WARTY!
Note that this is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Not to be confused with Richard Williams's The Animator's Survival Kit which is on a related topic, this is another first person PoV story. Why so many authors are so addicted to this voice, I do not know. I detest it, but it's hard to avoid as a reader unless you can get a look at the story first, which is difficult to do with ARCs. If I do know it's going to be 1PoV, I reject the story even if it sounds interesting because I am so tired of this voice. I didn't have that opportunity with this particular novel, but as it happens, this was not awful, so I could at least start to read it without a feeling of nausea. I think novels in 1PoV need to carry a warning on the cover. My one and only such novel, just published, carries such a sticker on the print version like a cigarette pack! Fair's fair!
This is also another novel where the blurb writer isn't the author's best friend. God bless Big Publishing™. You can't blame the author for the blurb unless they self-publish of course, and ironically in this case I can't really blame the blurb writer either. The blurb is predictably misleading, but it misled me into thinking this would be about artists and animators, and it really isn't. Take that away and put the two main characters into any other medium: office co-workers, police partners, stagecoach driver and shotgun, fashion models, and you can tell pretty much the same story without having to change a whole heck of a lot.
This was a big disappointment for me. I kept wondering why I'd been lured in with the talk of art and animation if it wasn't really going to be a big part of the story. Yes, it entered the story and yes, it exposed the main characters' pale underbelly to public view in many ways, but the parts of this novel which were actually focused on that subject became increasingly scarce as the story progressed, and with that came the waning of my interest in it. In the end, I reached the fifty percent point, and it felt like it had taken me forever to reach it. I decided I could not support a story which had felt more and more like bait and switch-off, and where the art and animation had become pretty much tangential to a story which really was only about sad-sack childhoods and family melodrama, and which wasn't at all interesting to me because it had nothing new or original to say on the subject.
I think the blurb was rather exaggerated too, when it suggested they became instant best friends. They quickly became friends, but it was really their college experience and the succeeding decade of working together which made them best friends. The problem is that we got none of that at all, which is a shame because for me that would have been far more interesting than what we did get.
This was another thing I resented. I had to ask why this portion was there, brief as it was. Why not simply start it that decade later and merely reference how they first met? It would have made the reading experience less sluggish and avoided the breath-taking and abrupt cut-over, and made for a much less jolting reading experience. It was like a prologue, and I don't do prologues. The truth is that I wanted to learn more about that experience: of these two 'charity case' girls in a snooty college. That, for me, is where this story lived and where it ought to have been allowed to breathe, and I felt robbed! I felt that we lost so much when we time-traveled ten years into the future. In part, this is what I mean about being denied the art and animation part of this story, which for me was badly under-served.
In that regard, the author does know her stuff. Not that I'm an expert, but she seems like she knows what she's talking about when she does reference their work, but this only made me miss it more. I'd hoped for a lot more focus on what they did, and how they worked together, yet we got only off-hand, throw-away references to that. The bulk of the story is effectively divorced from their art, even though it is linked.
Most of the story is about difficult and underprivileged childhoods, and it seemed like it took forever to tell even that. It just went on and on and on, with these women magically coming up with cash (when they were all-but claiming bankruptcy) to crisscross the country in search of answers. I felt like getting in their faces and explaining to them that most of us have childhood issues. We don't wallow in them or act out about them, or let them dominate our lives. We don't let them control or propel us, and we certainly don't helplessly allow them to push us into our friends' faces demanding explanations or exposés from them about painful childhood experiences!
That sounds cruel to write it so baldly, and if the story had moved a bit faster and focused somewhat more on their work, I would have felt more charitable, but I kept looking at the percentage meter at the bottom of the screen and it crawled as weakly as one of the characters might have at one point after a hospitalization. I kept thinking, "I can't believe how slowly this is moving!" It felt like I would never get to the halfway point and when it did, I didn't have the interest or the stamina to plow through any more stock dysfunctional family references and get-togethers or to read any more about how addicted these two characters were to smoking (pot or tobacco) or drinking. It was juvenile and boring, and for me it was the story itself which ironically became more damaged than the characters were!
The blurb tells us that "...they draw upon their own pasts to make intimate animated movies, a process that has left their personal lives-including their friendship-in tatters." This isn't actually true. It's not the first animated movie they make - one which draws on main character Mel's life - which screws with their friendship! It's Mel's inexcusable and appalling behavior caused by her disregard for the feelings of others and her lack of an internal censor augmented by her dangerous drug and alcohol abuse.
I was starting to really dislike the story and Mel herself, whom I had liked best of the two of them to that point. When she appears to turn herself around, it's not the renaissance I'd hoped for, but merely the overture to a predictable story-line which has been done over and over. It was at this point too, where I thought it might be starting to get good again, that things began to descend into the obligatory "hellish childhood issues" trope that I was so hoping would be danced over rather than slogged through.
The story is told by the improbably-named Sharon Kisses, a poor Southern Gal who gets a scholarship to a snooty art college up in New York state. She meets a girl named Mel Vaught, who has a somewhat similar background, and the two hit it off. With regard to their backgrounds, one odd thing which made me pause at the start of this novel was how a girl like Sharon would even know how much a "Coach" purse would cost. She didn't come across as a woman who particularly cared about or lusted after fashion-wear and accessories, much less could afford or had hung out with people who could afford such things, yet she remarked, "I watched a girl at a party barf into a five-hundred-dollar Coach purse." That struck a false note with me and is one of the problems with 1Pov.
If you're telling this in third person, you can readily say something like that without it being attached to a character, but when this girl is narrating it, it's she and not an omniscient author, who has to own the things she's saying. This just didn't feel right. If it had been worded along the lines of "I watched a girl at a party barf into what I was told was a five-hundred-dollar Coach purse," I think this would have made the assertion a lot less jarringly out of place, and would have fit the character much better for my money (all five hundred dollars of it!), but it's a minor writing issue and not a deal-breaker for me. On the other hand, I related to Mel. I think this is yet another case of me tending to find the 'side-kick' more interesting than the main character, or maybe it's because I knew someone who went by the name of Mel and who this character reminds me of in some ways. I could see where she was coming from to begin with, and she made sense.
It's when we meet Sharon's family that the complete lack of authenticity in Sharon's first-person voice becomes glaringly apparent. Her voice - neither her internal one nor her external one - is anything whatsoever like anyone else in her family! Frankly it would have been even more tedious to read if it had, so I can see why the author did it, but the fact that she sounded like she very much belonged in the snooty college and not even remotely related to her roots rang totally false. Nowhere in the narrative (not in the part I read, anyway) is this dissimilarity even so much as remarked upon, not even by Mel, which was a big fail for me.
Technically-speaking, this author can write, and I wish her all the best with her future endeavors, but I can't honestly and in good faith recommend a story which felt so false and had nothing new to offer, and which rather duplicitously lurked behind a veneer of art which ran no deeper than a coat of paint.
