Author: Greg Boose
Publisher: Full Fathom Five
Rating: WARTY!
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. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!
p105 "bicep" should be "biceps".
p115 "The glass in the pitcher clinked loudly." should be either "The ice in the pitcher clinked loudly." or "The glasses and the pitcher clinked loudly."
Kudos to Greg Boose for putting his prologue into chapter one. He must have known it was the only way to get me to read it, and it was awesome! Now pay attention you dedicated writers of prologues: Greg Boose has shown you the way out. It can be done! Free yourselves from the shackles of the antique prologue and embrace it chapter and terse!
Does Porsche tack tacky chrome bumpers onto their cars? No. They showed other manufacturers the way when they incorporated the bumper it right into the body of the car. Now everyone does it and cars look a lot sleeker for it. Dispense with those rusty, blemished prologues! Incorporate! And let me warn you that the tale in chapter one is gruesome, so don’t read it unless you grew some of your own.
The Adobe Digital Editions version of this novel had no margins. The text ran all the way to the edge of the page left and right, and pretty much top and bottom, too, which looked a bit odd. The novel begins on page five and runs to page 219, so that gives us some 215 loosely-spaced pages in thirty chapters. It’s a quick and easy read.
Now on to the story: Lake Price is a seventeen-year-old adrenalin junkie, but not one who is into extreme sports - unless you class running track as extreme. That's why Lake set out with three friends to stay overnight at the supposedly haunted Chatham Manor. The original plan was to go alone, but one thing led to another and eventually it led to the four of them: Lake, Madison, Ell, and Logan - two girls and two boys (you sort out which name goes to which gender!).
They had to break into the place through the basement, and it was creepy as all get out (which they didn’t do), but it wasn't the house that was haunted - it was Lake, haunted by the unsolved disappearance of a younger brother Kimball four years ago. Is Lake just about cheap thrills, or is there a death wish buried the requisite fathom deep in Lake's unfathomable depths?
Okay, I'll identify one character name and gender for you: Lake is the red head on the cover (big reveal, huh?!) and I initially liked her not from the picture, but from her guts and gusto as revealed in her actions. This was a character to appreciate, to empathize with, and to feel a bit sorry for even as you admire her bravado. Unfortunately, it didn't last!
Still wanting to be alone, Lake waits until the other three are asleep in the not-so-haunted house and she heads out into the nearby forest, where she discovers a really haunted house, which roils even the imperturbable Lake. You see, one of the things she finds in the house are belongings of her long-lost brother.
On the downside, I have to say I, er, lost faith in this novel around page sixty when the author, after a great lead-in about palindromes, got to rambling on about how the wife of Judas, the supposed betrayer of Jesus, was a witch who seduced her husband for the sole purpose of luring him into betraying the purported son of a god. This is nonsense.
I don’t believe there ever was a Jesus, son of a god, but pretending for a minute that it’s true, just for the sake of argument, it cannot be otherwise than that Judas was not evil, nor was he a betrayer. He was working with Jesus, not against him. Under the inane and bloodthirsty Christian cult of death, Jesus was a blood sacrifice, without which our sins could not be expunged (so much for the Christian god being omnipotent!).
Judas was an integral part of the scheme! Without the sacrifice, there could be no redemption, so I've never actually understood how Judas is the bad guy here. It makes no sense, and serves only to show how thoroughly screwed-up in the extreme Christianity truly is. Christians really need to take a look at what the original word - the word they now read as 'betrayed' actually meant: paradidomi means to hand over. Betrayal is a meaning it came to hold long afterwards.
Fortunately this nonsense was soon swept away by Lake herself. Here's a line she spoke from page 64: "I have four years of teenage rebellion built up in me and I am not afraid to use it." That was a charmer, but her distance perception is off significantly if she really thinks that Wilmington North Carolina is several thousand miles away from Chatham, Massachusetts! It’s actually less than a thousand, and less than 700 if you fly direct.
But that aside, it’s not long before Lake discovers a secret about her heritage and she's not only haunted by her brother's disappearance, but also by witches. It was suddenly time to do battle. So far so good, but the story began to go seriously downhill after this, and my fondness for Lake with it. The problem is John Billington, a teen from Plymouth (new England) who apparently was abducted by a witch in 1621, and held in a form of suspended animation or more accurately of suspended aging since then, through witchcraft.
The witches take children so they can eat their hair which is sustenance, apparently. They were allowed this under a loop-hole in a contract signed after the Salem witch trials. Seriously, there was a contract? Why they don’t just get jobs in barber's shops goes unexplained. When Lake killed one of the witches and freed her captive children, Billington was among them, but he shows absolutely no gratitude whatsoever. On the contrary: he's rude, abusive, and insulting to Lake. At this point I was seriously hoping we didn't have a so-called "love" triangle developing with this jerk and Ell, towards whom Lake had been making advances - when she's not abusively cold-shouldering him. As I read on, it became increasingly clear that my dire wish wasn't going to be granted.
Despite his dismissive and arrogant attitude, Lake has, of course, the hots for the four-hundred-year-old guy. The problem is that there was absolutely no reason whatsoever in evidence for this attraction. There's even less reason when she meets him later, following a sadly ham-fisted breach between her and Ell tossed-in for good measure. The story went straight downhill for me, because until this point I'd admired and respected Lake. I’d been on her side, but once she began actively swallowing unwarranted abuse and disrespect from Billington, instead of becoming angry and shunning him, she was betraying the very character she'd shown herself to be up to that point.
It was not only sad, but sick and I had to ask: do we seriously need yet another YA novel which depicts a young woman rewarding thoroughly inappropriate behavior with the cut-rate YA excuse for love (which is all we typically get in these novels)? I'd been thoroughly on-board with the story, but I became increasingly ready to jump ship as this went on unabated.
The records of the settlers do record a John Billington and his son, also John, they do not record John Jr. disappearing (except for a day or two in the woods, whence he was found and returned by native Americans - and this was despite the rampant pillaging of native American food stores by the Mayflower thieves upon their arrival. He's recorded as dying young, but several years after his arrival in Plymouth, not in 1621.
The unrealistic thing here is that Billington shows no sign of being at all traumatized by his suddenly (from his PoV) waking up in 2014. Neither does he speak remotely like a Puritan. Even his "outrage" that, without his permission, Lake kissed him (it’s how she frees children from the witch's spell) rang false.
It got worse when Halstead the witch expert started "training" Lake to fight the witches. Billington is also present for this, and also trains with her. I could not help but wonder why Lake's friends - who have already gone through the real thing with her - were excluded, but Billington the bore was included. Of course it provides a really clunky and very fake reason why the two of them are hanging out together, but it was nauseatingly done and not welcome as far as I was concerned.
This novel seemed fanatically determined to evolve into a train-wreck. We're told that John Billington has gold flecks in his eyes and muscular arms! The gold fleck trope is so over-used that it's actually nauseating now to have to read it time and time again in one YA novel after another. On top of that, there's no reason at all to think he was muscular except that this is yet another trope.
John Billington Junior's family history is essentially unknown, but given from whence they hailed, John senior was likely a fisherman. He was also a trouble-maker in New England who was eventually executed. It seems unlikely that his son was the gentleman portrayed here! The author seems to forget that four hundred years ago, people were significantly smaller than they are now. Lake would have towered intimidatingly over young John.
Lake further retreats from rectitude as she plays with the back of Ell's neck while continuing to have the hots for John. At one point she's reaffirming to herself that Ell is her boyfriend, and shortly after that she's passionately kissing John, something she never does with Ell. She behaves far more like a fifteen-year-old than ever she does a seventeen-year-old, and at this point in the novel I quit even liking her.
No one in their right mind would expect a girl like Lake to be blind to boys or to behave like a nun, but when you set someone up as the main character, especially one with a mission, and you give her a set of admirable traits, it's an awful thing to betray those very traits by subsequently rendering her as an air-headed waif with neither focus nor integrity! We've been given no reason at all for her to fall for John, and yet she's obsessed with him. Meanwhile, we've been told that her sole focus for four long years has been her brother, and now she's all but forgotten him in favor of mooning over John. It just did not read right.
This wouldn't have been so bad if we'd been given some realistic motivation for her behavior, but we've had no such thing. It's quite clear that the only reason she's behaving like this is that the author felt it necessary to give her not one, but two male "love" interests in her life because that's what the YA rut (and I do use that word ambiguously) demands. I have a lot more respect for authors who do not kow-tow to mindless trends than I do for ones who are slavishly dedicated to perpetuating YA trope and cliché.
It's an interesting revelation of Lake's character that she performs no chores whatsoever at her grandmother's B&B where she lives in the basement for free. Nor does she ever offer to help out. And she gets an allowance! I found it hard to believe that she wasn't involved in running the B&B at some level. This makes it harder to see how she managed to transition to what she supposedly became at the end. On an unrelated topic - but about one of her relations! - it's also interesting that every time we meet her grandmother, we're treated to a detailed description of what she's wearing - something which we never seem to get for any other character! I found this peculiar at first, and rather irritating as it continued.
Lake's behavior isn't the only thing which is off about this story. Ell behaves like a schizophrenic: one time when he drops Lake off for her training, he talks to her really snottily, but when he picks her up a bit later, he's all BFF, yet we're given no good reason for his earlier behavior and even less for his complete turn-around shortly thereafter. That's a minor consideration in comparison with Madison, Lake's female BFF, however. They're best friends and then for no reason at all, Madison starts acting like a complete spoiled-brat jerk right out of the blue. It was entirely unrealistic.
There are also events - like the flooding of the changing room, which no one else in the school seems to notice! There are no questions about why Madison was screaming, why hers and Lake's clothing is soaking and torn yet no one comments on it, or why they have bloody scratches on them, again which no one notices! I guess everyone in this school is blind!
The worst part about this whole thing is that it isn't the whole thing. It's episode one. It's a prologue. Nothing is resolved at the end; rather than a complete novel, we get only an introduction to volume two, which I now have no interest in reading, I have to say. While this 'partial novel' started out great, had some original ideas, and featured some decent action, the real problem was that it devolved too quickly into cliché, and the characters never seemed realistic to me. I was strongly in favor of the main character at the start, but her behavior and actions made little sense and spoke badly of her, so she lost my support long before the end of the novel.
In the final analysis, my whole reading experience was dissatisfying, and the novel was nowhere near impressive enough to make me want to rate this positively, or to induce me to read more in this series.
