How to Build a House by Dana Reinhardt

Title: How to Build a House
Author: Dana Reinhardt
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

Audio book read by Caitlyn Greer

This novel brings new depths to tediousness. I'm serious. It was awful. The novel itself is written at about the reading level of twelve or thirteen-year-olds, which would be fine except that the novel is actually about eighteen-year-olds. It doesn't help that Caitlyn Greer can't read. She's perfect in that she actually sounds like a twelve or thirteen-year-old, but she cannot read - not that and make it sound interesting or attractive to the average ear, which is what I come equipped with.

It’s also first person PoV, which I thoroughly detest. That's bad normally (with only a few exceptions); here it’s nothing but a continuous screech. The problem is that you can’t flip open an audio book and discover this before hastily returning it to the shelf with a heart-felt sigh of relief at your fortuitous escape. No, you actually have to get it into the car and start listening to it and discover how awful it is when you're waiting at the light several blocks over from the safety of the public library.

The conceit is that this is a story about building something. I had foolishly hoped it would be a metaphor about building relationships, about growing, about coming of age, or about something, but no, it’s about none of those things. There's no building of any kind going on here. This novel is nothing more than a cheesy high-school melodrama set outside of a high school. How inventive! Harper (seriously?), the main protagonist and narrator, is almost eighteen and has chosen to spend her summer in Tennessee helping to build a home (I mean literally build one from the ground up) to replace one that was destroyed in a recent natural disaster. Some might argue that Tennessee itself is a natural disaster, but I'm not going there.

I'm tempted to say that Harper should have been named Harpy, but that doesn’t work. Harpo works better given that she is a bit of a clown, but sadly, she talks, whereas Harpo doesn’t. Unlike either of those two options, Harper is one of the most dull and pedantic narrators I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. We're treated to sentence (and I mean that in the pejorative sense) after sentence (that, too) of the most mundane and uninteresting of events. Oh, she bought a travel cup so she doesn't have to use Styrofoam. Oh, she spilled her coffee! Oh here's a wet towel to clean it up. Oh, I looked in my backpack and there's nothing in that zippered pocket. Oh a boy is sitting on the edge of the chaise lounge. Oh, I have something in my eye so I need to go to the clinic. Oh, he's driving me to the clinic; how sweet! What a guy! Oh look: there's a doctor here. Give me a friggin' break!

Despite reams of tiresome and strident lecture from Harper harping on about the environment, recycling, and global warming, there's not an iota of discussion about the pros and cons of Harper expending money on a flight to a place where she can realistically contribute relatively little, versus giving that cash to a charity which can maximize the use of it.

This novel is unrealistic, too, in that the numbers are nicely gender-distributed at this building site, just like they are in high-school. This is not to say that women cannot help, or cannot work construction - that's nonsensical to even think it. It is to say that if this project were realistic, the chances are it would be heavily male-oriented, so immediately we’re out of suspension of disbelief. That's not the way life should be, but it is the way life tends to turn out, unfortunately.

As soon as these teens arrive, their cell phones are confiscated! Harper didn’t even bother to bring hers because of this "rule". What's up with that? They get only one call a week back home? Is this building camp or prison camp? That made no sense and not a single reason was offered for it.

Believe it or not, none of that is the biggest problem here. The problem is that there is no building going on. We learn next-to-nothing about building - about how the house is put together, which would actually have been interesting. What we do learn is what a fraud this is in that we get chapters named after steps in the building process, but nothing in the chapter which matches the chapter title, neither with the physical building of the house, nor with the building of anything between the would-be builders. I found that the sad, blue color of the cover and the fact that it features not a clean shiny nail, but a rusty one to be ironically emblematic of the content of this novel.

Instead of substance, we get page after page (or disk after disk in this case) of sad, juvenile gossip, flirting, and boy talk. Bechdel-Wallace crashes and burns on every disk, which is the real disaster in Tennessee as depicted in this novel. What the author is clearly trying to force upon us here is that, despite the fraud of girls purportedly doing 'he-man work', they're still really nothing but flighty, frivolous, juvenile, empty-headed girls who have nothing but boys, boys, boys on their minds all the time. What a grotesque insult for a female writer to offer to her female main character. Shame on Dana Reinhardt for wasting trees putting this trash on paper.

We Are the Goldens by Dana Reinhardt

Title: We Are the Goldens
Author: Dana Reinhardt
Publisher: Wendy Lamb
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

Finally! Another author who has a dot net instead of a dot com. Why is that such a rare thing?! But I digress! This is an oddity of a novel. That's probably why I liked it so much, but I have to ask why I appear to be cursed with long novels which are not always a pleasant read, and then short gems like this, which are irresistible? It doesn't seem right, somehow. Can't I have longer versions of the good ones and shorter bad ones? But here’s the thing: I appreciate an author more who knows when her novel needs to end rather than one who’s dedicated to writing 400 pages no matter what state the novel ends up in!

This story is told in first person by younger sister Nell, who obsesses over her older sister Layla. Despite my antagonism towards first person stories, this one wasn't bad at all in the telling. See? Some writers can carry it, but not many. Reinhardt is one who evidently can. This is the first of hers that I've read, and I am disposed now towards reading others since this was such a good experience.

It’s a love affair after a fashion, although one in which there's nothing incestuous going on. I must confess that I don't know about this choice of names for the two sisters. Somehow 'Nell' and 'Layla' (the names) don't seem to go together, whereas Nell and Layla (the sisters) are perfect together. This (the names) bothers me a little bit because names are really important to me. In this case, it’s like the two girls are from different eras, like each name has its own un-blend-able ethos, but I digress…(again).

The novel is told as though Nell is speaking to Layla (who might be lying in a coma or in her grave for all we know to begin with) or as though Nell is writing a letter - an old fashioned hand-written one, not an email, or a dear diary to a sister who has run away or who has mysteriously disappeared. It was intriguing to say the least, and part of what drew me in to this story, because at the beginning, we have no idea how it's going to end, and I wanted to know.

Both girls play soccer which I think is hot. Yes, I know, that might seem quite disgusting to you: Nell is only fifteen and Layla hardly any older, but I'm shameless - and anyway, I'm not saying that the girls are hot, merely that their penchant for sports is hot: that they play, and play well. A sport, anyway, since the only one that they play is soccer, which is wonderful, but it seems odd that they have no other sports interests.

On that, er, score, my only real problem here was that the author completely glosses over the soccer! I know it’s not the most important thing going on here, but this sport was important to them and yet we got nothing about the first game of the season, save that City Day (their school in San Francisco) won 2-0, and this was after she had given the game a little bit of a build-up. We get precious little later, too, and I felt somewhat let-down by this, which is never a good feeling with which to imbue your readers!

It was disappointing to learn nothing of how either girl performed on the pitch, when we had been delivered pretty much a blow-by-blow account of the rest of their lives, and when the soccer was shown as an important part of their lives, being mentioned repeatedly. That struck me as an important omission, but it does let me get this in (WARNING: shameless plug coming up) for some great soccer action, you can always read my novel Seasoning, which in my totally unbiased opinion is the ultimate girls soccer novel....

The soccer, however, is a delivery vehicle - it delivers to us the first clues about what's going on here: what the underlying current is in this novel. Some might argue that there is some telegraphy at play here too, but it was never so much that you had an "A-ha!" moment where you felt you knew for a fact what was happening (or more importantly, what was going to happen), and sneakily, the tide which begins to run here serves to mask an under-current which is going to become important later. Note that neither of these affairs is anything new or avant-garde. The joy of this story does not lie in that anything happens to teens here which has not happened before; the joy lies in how these things happen, and in how they're addressed by the author and by each of the sisters. That's what makes this a worthwhile read.

Here's a pet peeve; this author doesn’t get that it’s 'biceps', not 'bicep'. I can't believe how many YA authors make that mistake! It’s becoming bizarrely common, but no, they will not convince me that they're right and that I should join them over on the dark side with this error! Other than that, the quality of the writing was excellent. It was well-done, it was intriguing, it was amusing, it was observant, and it was engrossing: in short, everything I need in a novel right there!

If I had a real complaint about it, I'd use it to question the wit and vocabulary expressed by Nell, who in her fifteen years comes off as way more mature than reasonable expectation might lead you to accept. Maybe she is. There are people like that, but Nell presents like she's an Eng. Lit. major or a book critic, or an editor, with some stand-up comedian tossed in. I would have loved to have known someone like that at that age, or better, at eighteen or twenty-one, but for a mid-teen to express herself this way strained credibility a bit for me.

Having said that, Nell, it turns out when it comes down to the bottom line, is the more mature of the two sisters who in the end does the right thing. This was an amazing novel, with twists and turns that are remarkable. It's very readable, and I enjoyed this immensely. In reading this, I found a new, strong female character to admire, and a new YA romance to champion as how it should be done. I recommend this novel very highly.