Author: Helen Stringer
Publisher: Mediadrome Press
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 of any kind for this review.
p117 "...picked up his coat and started rummaged through the pockets." should be "...picked up his coat and started rummaging through the pockets."
Well this novel started out with two black marks Against it! The first is that it has a prologue (aka lazy and gratuitous info-dump), which I naturally skipped. Again, if it’s worth telling, it's worth putting right there in chapter one. The hell with prologues, epilogues etc, and especially the hell with a prologue which starts: "The sky was blue." Duhh! Really? The second problem was with the contents page. It has a list of 37 chapters, but there are no chapter titles and there are no page numbers indicating where the chapters start. So, since this novel looks like the final version, and there's no indication that it’s an uncorrected galley, my question is why do we even have a contents page which tells us nothing?!
I don't do covers or back-cover blurbs in my reviews since the author typically has little or nothing to do with those things, and this blog is about writing and authors, not about editors or publishers. But as long as I'm nit-picking, and since it's right there on the cover, I'm not impressed by yet another trope character with eyes of two different colors...! Finally Stringer, who uses the grammatically correct although increasingly archaic "whom", evidently doesn’t know the difference between superlative (best part) and comparative ("better part") on p30, but I'll let it go at that, because I can see where she could argue that her usage is correct in the context she intended it, and just like with "whom", correct grammar is itself becoming archaic for better or for worse. Or is it for best or for worst?!
But let’s focus on the story rather than the format quirks and nit-picks. This story seems to be heavily rooted in Supernatural by way of The Dukes of Hazzard, but given that I am not a fan of either show, that's not a recommendation. So now that we have our cute premise in place, it’s up to Stringer to show she can deliver a story which makes her choice of launching point worthwhile - and she actually does! Sam and Nathan (at least none of the main characters is called Josh, or Bo, or Cletus, or Daisy!) drive around in a 1968 GTO, rocking and jolting along what’s left of North American roads after some sort of apocalypse evidently some years from now. Given the state of the roads, why Stringer specifies a GTO (I assume it's a Pontiac GTO as opposed to a Mitsubishi or a Ferrari!) rather than a Hummer or a Jeep or some other off-road vehicle is an unexplained mystery (note that the Dukes of Hazzard used a Dodge Charger). Obviously it comes with the Sam & Nathan territory, but it's yet to be established if that is going to work!
Sam is evidently some sort of a telepath. He can hear the thoughts of others and can generate a directed EMP from his mind. Nathan is a con-artist that Sam curiously happened to take pity on, offering him a ride which evidently isn't over yet. The two of them are evidently (god only knows why) trying to make a career out of scavenging any old technology they can find (they seem to specialize in kitchen appliances) and selling it out of the trunk of the car. Unsurprisingly, they aren't faring too well in their occupation. And Stringer fails to explain, along with many other things she fails to explain, how the electrical grid system is continuing to work in this disastrous future, or if it isn't working, what they're using for power and how that's being fueled. They ran themselves, out of the last town that they visited when Sam noticed there were satellite dishes up all over the place. Quite what’s up with that isn’t exactly clear, but rest assured that Big Mother is watching. Given how bad the roads are and how thin traffic is, I'm also wondering how it is that convenient gas stations still dot the landscape.
Then there’s Alma the kick-ass biker girl, who runs into them (not literally) twice in the same day, and saves their asses when some hi-tech kidnappers, evidently intent upon procuring a Sam for themselves, try to sneak up on their camp one night. Other than being mysterious for the sake of being annoyingly mysterious, there's no word so far on why she would even want to help these guys, or why she mysteriously appears and then rides off so mysteriously, vowing they will never meet again after each time she encounters them. She's rather like the Harry Tuttle character in the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil!
I was given just enough in the first couple of chapters to keep me interested, but nothing more. I do like the way Stringer wastes no time in getting the story going (prologue aside!), so she does have that in her favor. The story moves at a good pace, with the dangers of living in this world shown competently without overdoing it. I found the business with the 'paradigm box' in Century City to be rather juvenile and unnecessarily mysterious, but then this is YA fiction, so I'm willing to let that go. I liked the way the character of Alma - younger than I thought she was, it turns out - grows and develops. She's definitely worth watching, but she's featured nowhere near enough in the story for my taste!
About a third the way in, I felt like I’d read enough of this to have some really useful thoughts on it. The first of these is that this seems to be written for the younger end of the YA scale, but it’s not unreadable. Some of it is simplistic, some of it not well-written in terms of providing a good narrative which keeps the reader sufficiently clued in. OTOH, too many clues might have made it all tell and no show - which means readers tend to be no-show as well!
One thing which seems to have been completely glossed-over is why Sam was tooling around the US, much less in an old GTO (which is evidently a hundred years old when this story takes place, so rumor has it). This made no sense to me, especially not if it was indeed a hundred years into our future, because the US has already passed "peak oil", and the rest of the world is going to be joining us very shortly. Even fifty years from now oil is going to be history: so where does Sam manage to get a regular supply of gasoline? Who produces it and delivers it to the out-of-the-way roadside gas stations which he frequents? If the electronics of the cities hurt him so much, and there are people out there who are trying to hunt him down, then why doesn't he find a quiet place miles from anywhere and just settle down and be self-sufficient and have zero profile? If John Conner could do it, Sam sure can!
I liked this a lot better when Sam finally got captured (after trying to make a run for it with the Paradigm box). He gets invited to dinner with the dreaded Carolyn Bast, who is creepily delightful as she plies her guests with toxic fish which, when seasoned correctly, renders those who eat it into a very compliant frame of mind; then she issues instructions to them and they do whatever she wants!
It's increasingly apparent that it's almost the norm for me, in many YA stories, to find that it’s not the lead character who impresses me most, but their best friend or side-kick. They are, all-too-often, the ones whom I find most appealing. In this case, the one who really shines is Alma. She impresses me more every time she shows up, but she shows up far too infrequently. If the story had been about her, I think it would have been more impressive. But as it is, it's acceptable and I am enjoying it reasonably well. I do like the way Stringer brings Sam and Alma together, although I still think she deserves someone better than him, and I'm failing to see what attracts her to him. He does make me feel a bit warmer towards him when he bids her goodbye - and she's sleeping and supposedly cannot hear him!
I have to confess that in the absence of information from the author, I become increasingly speculative about "Mutha" the 'big mother is watching' system which has eyes and ears everywhere and which can give people networking fixes for a few coins deposited into street vending machines! Since Sam is your typical, parent-less YA fiction teen, and his mother died before his father, and both parents worked for the corporation from whence sprang the 'paradigm box', and since Sam seems to have a really disturbing connection with Mutha, I have to wonder if Mutha is actually Sam's mother - that is: is the AI controlling Mutha a clone of his own mother's brain patterns or something? I guess I'll find out - but I'm not going to spoil the fun by telling you!
Stringer apparently doesn’t realize that Jell-O® is a registered trade-mark on p307, but she gets away with it by genericising it (is that even a word? It is now!) to "jello". On p360, Sam claims he has tapes that play in the car, but after a hundred years, no tape is going to play - the magnetization would simply fail or become so muddy that the tape was effectively unplayable. But enough niggling! The bottom line is: do I like this or do I not? I read most of it, but have to confess that I found myself skimming the last sixty pages or so, wanting it to be over, ready to move on to another novel. It dragged on too long and wasn't interesting enough to make all those extra characters that Stringer typed worth poring over.
I think, on balance, I am going to rate this just over the worthy side of warty. There were problems with it. It was too long for its content, and there was too much disjointed stuff going on - kinda like you’d expect from a first novel. Alma becomes way too much of a deus ex machina - showing up always when she was needed and seemingly in impossible ways, and there's no rationale for why she's attracted to Sam; but then is love rational?! Alma was just too convenient, and we never got to see her really strut her stuff, so in the end I was disappointed in her, especially given the huge potential she had. Alma, BTW, is the Spanish word for soul or spirit (inter alia) so it was a good name for her in many ways. Having said all that, inside this novel there was some really good stuff, and I think this author has places - interesting places - to go, so in deference to that, I rate this a worthy read to encourage her and authors like her, to stretch themselves and take us further in the future, and I rate it worthy because, when all's said and done, it’s not too bad of a yarn.
