Author: Deb Caletti
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WARTY!
The audio book is on Brilliance audio, read by Julia Whelan. It was not that great.
Here's a couple of nifty rules of thumb for avoiding pointless, pretentious, and boring novels. Any novel which has a title featuring the words "In Search of" or "Looking for" - skip it. Any novel which is titled "The Nature of" and which then makes a cheap play on someone's name, skip it. Trust me this will save you hours of wasted time.
This novel is about a girl named Jade who suffers a panic disorder and has OCD. She spends a lot of time focused on elephants, which may well account for the annoyingly ponderous nature of this novel. The only thing which saved it for me in the early chapters was the narrator's humorous observations, particularly the highly-amusing account of the lunch break she took with several fellow high school seniors off campus.
The only problem was that after disk one - around chapters 4 & 5 - it started going determinedly downhill into the tediously repetitive and excruciatingly boring. In fact, it became so god-awfully bad it should probably have been awarded a Newberry medal.
Jade's tone overall was far too self-centered and self-obsessed for my taste, and it really began to wear me down after a while. This is why I detest first person PoV novels: they're "It's all me all the time!" Ugh! Would you want a friend like that? So then why a novel like that? Once in a while an author can make that work for me, but Deb Caletti isn't such an author. Unlike with a print book, in audio books and in ebooks, you cannot flip the pages - the pages flip you! You can't peruse an audio novel or read a section just to see what you're letting yourself in for. You can't even listen to a piece of it before you make up your mind about going with it or avoiding it like the plague.
On to the story. Jade's family is completely dysfunctional, and while she has an interesting relationship with her mother, she has effectively none with her father or little brother. I strongly suspected the mother and/or the father was having an affair. The father was abusive in that he forced his ten-year-old son Oliver (get it: jade, olive? I’ll bet you're green with envy you didn’t think of it first, huh?) to pursue sports in which his son had no interest, and which made him miserable.
Despite Jade mentioning more than once that she loves her little brother, neither she nor her mother ever lift a finger to come to his aid (unless you believe that his sister's advice to lie about being sick constitutes 'coming to his aid'). It was completely predictable that Oliver would get hurt. No stars for originality, or for inventiveness, or for imagination for this author.
Jade is a voyeur who likes to spy on the elephants via the zoo's webcams. One day she sees a boy who looks hardly older than herself, visiting the elephants. He's carrying a child in a baby-caddy. For no reason whatsoever, she begins obsessing over this indistinct and unidentifiable image on the screen. OTOH, Jade is OCD, so perhaps this is credible?
This boy sounds like trouble from the off, because she espies him visiting after zoo hours, meaning he's breaking in, but this doesn’t bother her. She decides she wants to meet him, but she fails in her attempts at hanging out at the elephant compound hoping to run into him, and instead, she ends-up running into him accidentally after she takes up a volunteer job at the zoo, working with the elephants.
When she finally does meet him, this novel, if you can imagine it at all, goes even further downhill. He works in a bookstore. There's a Newberry waiting to happen right here. Get this: "It's nice walking beside Sebastien. There's a cosy-ness to it: the easy normality of heading in the same direction..." because going in any other direction is completely insane and abnormal....
This girl is supposed to be eighteen, but she behaves like a thirteen-year-old - and a protected and sheltered thirteen-year-old at that. She thinks its good grammar to say "He raises his eyebrows up and down. I really need to see someone raise their eyebrows down.... Seriously, what was up with the editor here? Did she or he have the same problems Jade did?
The narration went so badly downhill (and this has little to do with the narration on the audio, which was passable, but nothing great as I indicated earlier) that I was forced to skip track after track (they're about a minute long, ninety-nine to a disk, so this was a significant chore). I simply could not stand to hear one more time which classes she was taking, or which homework she had, or hear her say, "I say" one more time, or read about what the hell Jake Gilette or the guy with the pineapple T-shirt at the video store is doing.... Who the frick and frack cares? Honestly?
Jade is too dumb to realize that if she's stuck for things to talk about with Sebastien, then she's with the wrong guy. She's so abysmally dysfunctional that she thinks he's wonderful for giving her a breath mint, but doesn't find it odd that he never told her that her mascara was running....
The problem is that Jade is obsessed with telling you every single tedious boring detail of her life: "I run back to the elephant house, take off my wet overalls, wash my hands. I hurry out to the viewing area..." Honestly? Quite frankly I just don't care if she farted before her brother or after him. Really.
For example, most people would simply say, "I left the house", whereas Jade has to describe closing the door as she does so, like if she doesn't specify that detail we'll automatically assume that she, like everyone else, routinely leaves their front door flapping in the breeze, and shoot ourselves in despair. It's T-E-D-I-O-U-S to read this stuff. Once again can I point out that going the Big Publishing™ route does in no way guarantee that you will end up with a decent novel.
I can't recommend this, not even as a sedative. Stick your Printz in it: it's done.
