Thus was a non-starter for me. Well, not quite, since I did start it, but I also soon stopped it because I quickly became bored with the unoriginal story-telling, the abundant clichés, and the lack of intelligence in the telling.
Kelson is a high school senior who, for reasons unspecified in the portion I read, has to go live with relatives. He's a city boy who is on a farm, and the complete lack of originality was laughable. This was far more of a red-herring-out of water story than ever it was a fish-out-of-water in the claim that this city boy can't handle country life, and he quite literally spills the milk. Seriously?
This doesn't make me laugh. Instead it makes me cringe, because it tells me that purported hero Kelson is a complete moron who has no clue about anything. Any kid with even modest intelligence can handle a switch from city to country or vice-versa, especially in this day and age when no one's lifestyle is much of a mystery anymore. Yeah, there will be a learning curve and mistakes, but for the author to try and push the unimaginative and lackluster narrative that Kelson is utterly clueless and totally unprepared is farcical and amateur and makes him look like a complete moron.
That was bad enough, but to deal with that after an appalling and brutal bullying incident in school, in full view of everyone, and where no one reacted or helped, not even the teacher who witnessed it, is beyond ridiculous. No kid reacted? No teacher? No parent? When a gang of bullies picks on the new boy? Horse shit. I guess this author really hates teachers to portray them such a cynical and callous way.
Any writer who writes like this should be ashamed of their cluelessness and stupidity. This is not to say that there is no bullying in schools. Of course there is, but for it to be so brazen, violent, and unopposed is nonsensical, and it turned me off the story even before the fish-out-of-water garbage, which turned out to be the final straw that broke this book's back. I lost all interest in pursuing this story - or anything else by this author.
This is also in first person which is another problem. Some authors know how to do this, but I got the impression that this author was doing it simply because everyone else is - or so she thinks. It felt so inauthentic and ridiculous that Kelson steadily narrates his own experience of being beaten up, and for him to let it happen when he could apparently and readily defend himself, just because his cousin shakes her head? WTF?! No. No. No! Who calmly narrates being punched? No one! Get a clue authors!
The first person brought another problem, too. If the novel is in third person and the narrative objectifies a female, that's a problem. If this objectification is put into the mouth of a character, it’s not so much a problem because there are people who think like that, but when your main character, the one you're trying to turn into a hero, has these thoughts: "She wasn’t pretty, per se, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her clothes a mismatch of obvious hand-me-downs, but there was something intriguing about her." That makes me wonder about Kelson's character. At least this author didn't write it as 'per say' which I have read before in a published novel!
A better way to have written this - had it to be written at all - would have been for someone else to have made the comment that she wasn't pretty and for Kelson to have overheard it and then to have those thoughts that she had something intriguing about her. To write it the way it was written makes him sound judgmental. Or maybe just mental. Judgmental isn’t likeable. It makes him a jerk. Just a free bit of advice on character creation
But this book was a fail and I condemn it, not commend it.
