Title: Ink
Author: Amanda Sun
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I have neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" ebook, supplied by Net Galley! I will be reviewing others of this nature in future and will note which ones those are in the review.
Please note that I am not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, I don't feel comfortable going into anywhere near as much detail over it as I have with the older books I've been reviewing, so this is shorter, but most probably still be more detailed than you'll usually find elsewhere!
Yes, I'm reading a Harlequin book! The shame! The book looked really interesting from the information on Netgalley. I guess I learned my lesson! I should have been suspicious when I saw that the illustration on the cover looks suspiciously like the author! Oh, and good luck (or look, maybe in this case?) trying to find this novel on the Harlequin Teen web site. I don't know if they're embarrassed by this novel, or if they simply have the worst search engine ever, but this book isn't to be found on their web site, and neither is Amanda Sun, so what she's gushing thanks to them for is somewhat of a mystery. And if anyone can explain what "...the incredible detail they've paid to INK." means exactly, I'd appreciate it. Is that a direct translation from the Japanese?!
That's not the only time that the English language runs away with her. Check out these examples:
"He rested a hand on my shoulder and it sent a jolt through my body to feel his fingers closing around me, to feel the warmth of the pads of his fingertips." The warmth of the pads of his fingertips?
At one point after Katie and Tomo are rescued, having been kidnapped by the Yakuza and rescued by a Kami employing ink snakes, Katie is concerned about the propriety of closing the doors to the castle in the park?! Honestly?
Here's a classic: "We lay there clinging to each other, knowing the world would tilt if we let go, that without each other, everything would fall out of balance." (Drama llama much, Katie?!)
What? Yes, I'm snarky! Amanda Sun had done everything right: she'd taken the story out of the USA and set it in Japan and she'd introduced a supernatural mystery. It’s always a fun thing to bring in new culture, and new experiences, but then after all of this, she had to invite along the standard bad-boy-hot-guy, whose hair is seriously in danger of impaling his eyeballs, and have him clashing with the fem protag from the off?
Why start this out in such a great way only to bury it under a liberal slathering of Trope du Ya (which is ironically and poetically reminiscent of the liters of ink in which Yuu Tomohito's himself seems to be drowning!)? Here's a sample: "He looked over at me and grinned, the breeze twisting his spiky hair in and out of his deep brown eyes. I almost melted on the spot." I detest book burning, but honestly if the books were like this, I could actually understand the Nazi passion for immolating them.
I'm really hoping right now that we can get a decent story out of this. The premise was great. I even put up with the absurdly overdone drama of the magical cherry blossom picnic, but to have Katie Greene, the sixteen-year-old fem pro act like an airhead, limp rag, thirteen-year-old was too much. Has she no self-respect? And what’s with the melodramatic agonizing over how her life is so tragic because of this horrible pressure which she apparently suffers from living in a great foreign nation layered in history, learning a new and fascinating culture, along with a new, sweet, and elegant language? It's a bit much, frankly, and Will Smith's son already did it in The Karate Kid. but at least I learned a few things from this novel. There's a glossary in the back which taught me that Che Guevara, in Japan, would be known as Dammit Guevara! That's worth knowing, but I was disturbed by the similarity of Suki, which means "I like you" and Tsuki, which means a hit to the throat. There's too much room for confusion there!
But back to our story in progress. For Katie to obsess over this Tomo guy to the point of quite literally stalking him when everything she knows about him is bad, and not just bad, but abusively bad (even as she contemplates how shallow she is!) endeared me neither to the tale nor to her! Tomo-Boy has cruelly ditched his girlfriend, he's apparently got another girl pregnant, he badly cut-up his best friend several years ago and then fled to avoid punishment, and he's a bully.
Whether all these things turned out to be exactly what they immediately appeared to be or not, is immaterial: the fact is that this is what she knows about him at that point, yet she's still stupid enough to follow him around, trilling like a love-struck guinea pig. If we had a male protag tailing a girl around like that, spying on her, it would rightly be perceived as creepy at best and threatening at worst, so why is it perfectly permissible for a female to act like this? Has she no decency Ms. Sun? Has she at last, no sense of decency?
I had an early wish that the supernatural aspects of Ink would rescue the unnatural aspects! It was the only reason I was pressing on with this, but it got no better. It wasn't all as bad as the lack of continuity between page 98 where her aunt needed the bike (which she had loaned to Katie so she could stalk the bad guy into the worst areas of the town) for Monday, but on Monday on page 99, Katie still has the bike! So was her aunt taken for a ride, or was Katie just recycling?!
Katie uses the bike on more than one occasion to stalk Tomohito, and into some dangerous locales in the town (that's where she sees him bullying another guy on behalf of his friend, so naturally she falls in love with him). What a blind, clueless, loser Katie is! She has no (intelligent) reason whatsoever for liking him (especially not with those grotesque spikes of hair sticking painfully in his eyeballs like cocktail sticks into silverskin onions...). Since she's seen drawings done by him actually move on the page (and off it!), she has to know that there's something distinctly weird going on with him, or there's something distinctly delusional going on with her, which means she should definitely not be making potentially dangerous decisions about whom she should hang with! But he's hot and has spikes of hair in his eyeballs, so what's not to like?!
So finally milady doth stalk too much methinks and ends up being abducted (that is, having her abs re-routed through a system of ducts, along with the rest of her body) to a Yakuza hang-out, where, of course, the Yakuza hang out. Is 'Yakuza' like sheep - both the singular and the plural? I'd ask them but I'm a bit sheepish. I think it's a verb: Ya, Yak, Yaku, Yakuz, Yakuza, Yowzer! Anyway, they fail, of course, to abduct her phone from her, and she calls a friend to help, but wouldn't you know it, she accidentally calls the other guy in her triangle (and you thought it was her five! Wrong! It's always a three in YA), who Juns to her aid revealing that he is also a Kami (with the emphasis on khasi), and he busts her loose before loosening her bust no doubt. I must admit, this little twist did pick things up a bit, but I fear this story is too far gone for a rescue of this nature to save it.
In the end I did make it to the end, but it was nothing but an annoying pain in the neck and I'm now officially and permanently done with this series of paper novels. Life is too short to waste it on this limp of an effort. If you feel you must pursue this novel yourself, you do it at your own risk!
One thing you might do to entertain yourself (if you get bored with the number of times she talks about Tomo's hair banging into his eyes), is to consider how many times Sun uses keitai (which is nothing but the Japanese word for cell phone!) in place of simply using 'cell phone'. She behaves as though keitai is something fundamentally different or magically special, but there's no intelligent or logical reason to use it. If there's no English equivalent for the word then by all means use it, but to employ it for pretentious reasons only, is a big turn off to me.
You can survive the excruciation of reading this if you imagine keitai to be a euphemism for something sexual. This made the novel far more entertaining, and was the only reason I got through the last one hundred pages! Here are some examples:
- When my keitai chimed, I grabbed for it gratefully.
- In my bathroom, I took out my keitai…
- I’d forgotten to put my keitai in manner mode…
- I closed my keitai and shoved it back in my bag.
- He pulled out his keitai…
- His palm opened slowly and the keitai dropped to the floor...
- Then his keitai rang again, spewing rainbow colors across the floor.
- Okay, I said, pulling out my keitai…
- My keitai beeped with his info.
- A buzzing noise sounded in my purse. My keitai.
- I sat down with a bowl of shrimp chips and flipped open my keitai.
- You could try his keitai.
- The sound of my keitai beeping woke me the next morning. I rubbed my eyes until they turned red.
- …although he hadn't tried my keitai yet…
- I screamed at my brain to think. My keitai.
- The ink and blood dripped off my wrist and onto my keitai.
- Tomo, I said, flipping my keitai open and closed again…
- I grabbed the keitai putting it beside his face, then breathed out in relief.
- I lifted the keitai out of my pocked and saw him hunched over in the dim light.
- Are you okay, he said, and my keitai blinked out.
- My keitai went off in the middle of the night.
- How phallic is this: Then he pulled out his keitai, the little kendo warrior swinging back and forth on his phone strap!
