Author: Carla Norton
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: WARTY!
Read by Christina Delaine, and I have to say I'm appalled with her "performance" or whatever the hell these people claim it is they're doing when all they're really doing is just reading a story. I expect actors, of all people, to inject some emotion into their narration, rightly or wrongly, but when that emotion drools over into melodrama and yes, farce, it becomes far too pathetic to even take seriously, let alone put up with. Delaine's problem is that she simply doesn't know when too much is way more than enough. She whispers a passage almost in tears and then all but yells the chapter number that comes next. She whispers one passage almost inaudibly and bellows the next, so for me, her narration sucked big time.
If the novel were perfect, Delaine would have ruined it utterly, but as it happens, Norton's material is also sad. I reached the last disk and simply could not bear to listen to it to the end. I'm not kidding, it was that bad. I simply could not stand to hear any more of the horrific combination of Delaine's bipolar reading and Norton's mind-numbingly tedious and pedantic writing of what should have been a thrilling, action finale. Norton is obsessed with breaking in the middle of the action to relate the recent history of someone who is at best tangential to the story itself. She rivals even the master Stephen King for dumping unnecessary and nails-on-a-chalkboard irritating detail, and yes, she did this right in the middle of the last disk - the supposedly thrilling finale, which is why I simply quit at that point.
It's Norton's first novel, as far as I know, so I cannot help but wonder what the editor(s) and publisher were thinking when they allowed it through on what seems to have been an "as is" basis. It only proves to me that there are two classes of people in publishing: those who've been published and those who cannot get a break. For the most part, the quality of the written material on either side of that fence is the same (aside from extremes, of course). The only difference is the luck they had or who they knew, or maybe how little taste the publisher's book reader has.
Not to be confused with Amanda Overton's graduate thesis project from University of Southern California, The Edge of Normal is about twenty-two year old Reeve LeClaire and her long and slow recovery process from being kidnapped and held captive as a teenager by a sadistic rapist. She changed her first name to keep her memories at bay. She's extremely sensitive to moods and behaviors in others. She works at a sushi restaurant, and is still seeing her therapist Dr. Ezra Lerner, but now it's down to once a week. Reeve is slowly, very slowly, getting her life back together. She's still skittish on the streets, especially if any man, no matter how un-threatening, is nearby, and this is where Norton first falls down because I don't see that there's any credible way for the nervous wreck which Reeve is at the very start of this novel to morph into the person she is at the end in so short a time.
For example, when Reeve hears on the news (something she carefully avoids normally) that another young girl, Tilly, has fortuitously escaped from the clutches of a similar sadist, she almost has a complete breakdown. How does she recover from something like that to what she was at the end? I'm not saying it's impossible for a person to do it, just that it within the framework of what Norton presents to a reader, it didn't strike me as credible, and once you've lost your suspension of disbelief as a writer, it can be hard to effectively recover it.
The last thing Reeve expects is a call from her own therapist - asking for her help with Tilly, the escapee. He wants her to be a sort of "big sister" as Tilly begins to embark upon her own recovery. Reeve is convinced that not only can she not do this, but that she's the very last person Tilly needs in her life right now, except that you and I both know she's going to do this, and in doing so is going to come out of her brittle shell in the process, don't we now?! I guessed that she'd go for it right after her family Thanksgiving long weekend - and I guessed right! Frankly it wasn't much of a guess - it;s pretty obvious and trope-ish.
Once Reeve starts getting to know the family, she's drawn more and more into a relationship with them and starts coming out of her shell as she gets to know Tilly and her family, but what none of them know that the guy who was caught and is being tried for Tilly's kidnapping is nothing more than a pawn in the hands of the real villain here, a bad cop named Duke, who hires minions to carry out his kidnap plans and to hold the victims hostage so that he can visit whenever he likes and take advantage of his sex slave children. Duke has the Cavanaugh's home bugged since he was on the team which first responded after the kidnapping. He can hear their every word and has threatened Tilly, when she was still under his control with the death of her family if she blabs anything. Duke also has a habit of killing off his minions, but he would never hurt a child that way! Believable? Not.
Norton seems to me to enjoy describing Duke's fantasies and his evil far too much, which is why it's no spoiler to reveal his identity or what he's doing. I routinely skipped his chapters because they were so profoundly boring and self-indulgent. The novel's chapters were short, but unfortunately, this failed to translate to a short novel, which is what was sorely needed here. Norton definitely doesn't believe in showing - she believes in telling in a much lethargic detail as she can cram into the book. Like I said, this has that 'first novel' feel to it and I'm quite surprised that Norton's editor allowed her to get away with such amateur writing. I started out liking this but it rapidly became warty.
