Author/Editor: JC Johnstonn
Publisher: Delegate Publishing
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 reward aplenty!
This is an utterly bizarre story that's like a weird fairytale. It’s also told in first person omniscient, which is totally out there. It’s even more off-the-wall in that the story is all about Sam, not about the 1PoV narrator, who is telling Sam's story and relating events in detail for which she was never present! It’s actually not a novel at all in any meaningful sense, but a Bible tract telling you how to live your life, with no attempt made to even try to disguise its nature, but it's far more out in left field than that because it has some extreme violence and some bad language in it, too.
The tale is almost all conversation. There's no descriptive writing, no setting of place or atmosphere, except in the briefest and sketchiest of manners. The story is seemingly aimed at relatively mature young-adult readers, but it’s written in a voice that seems more appropriately aimed at very young children. This makes the violent themes more inexplicable. It begins with the story of Sam Raider's dad, who likes to give away a lot of stuff, and some of this stuff is Sam's: things she had when younger but now no longer uses.
At first she doesn't want to part with her things, but slowly she adopts her dad's attitude. One of these things is a violin, and Sam decides to give it away for free, and then volunteers to give lessons to the impoverished young girl of color who gets it. This entails traveling to a really bad neighborhood, with her dad, who is rightly nervous for her safety, and won't let her go alone. Why he doesn't insist that they simply pick up the girl for tutoring is left unaddressed.
Next Samantha visits the somewhat oddball Mrs Doyle. This is the Mrs Doyle of whom Sam later decides she going to un-clutter her house and get her mind right, because clearly Sam is the only person on the planet who knows what’s good for anyone and everyone. After she leaves Mrs Doyle's house, a boy she knows runs out of a nearby house to marvel that she visited the weird Mrs Doyle.
He thinks Mrs Doyle poisoned his dog because it was known to soil her lawn, but Sam's view is that Justin's girlfriend poisoned his dog after he arranged to go to the prom with her and then turned up with a different girl. Sam's vicious and nasty retort is that she, too, would have poisoned his dog if he had done that to her.
WHAT?
Is this supposed to endear me to Sam? Make me think what a wonderful, generous person she is? It doesn't. It makes me think she's a psycho and a jerk. The narrator goes on about how having his dog poisoned had made Justin a better person (but it didn’t). She says nothing whatsoever about how evil someone would have to be to poison a dog because she was jilted for another girl by its owner. That just slides right on by! How sick is that? These people are sick and warped.
When she's not sitting in front of the mirror reflecting upon how truly beautiful she is, Sam's full-time job is messing in the affairs of her acquaintances, and lecturing them on how to live their lives. For example, when Justin dropped out of school, Sam, interfering busy-body that she is, felt compelled to visit him and read him the riot-act about not living off his parents! She says nothing about how much she enjoys living off the largess of her own very wealthy father. Sam is a hypocrite. When Justin reveals to her that his girlfriend, Molly, is pregnant, Sam starts interfering in her life, too, declaring what a huge sin it is to even think about an abortion! She starts ordering Molly around and telling her what she must do.
I find it odd that Sam, supposedly so religious, never ever goes to church or prays. Weird. Perhaps it’s because Sam is the biggest jerk, know-it-all, and interfering busy-body I've ever encountered in a story. I have no idea what color, race or ethnicity Sam is, but all of her advice seems to be doled out to persons of color, like she's the big white empress coming to tell the "colored folks" how to live their lives better! What arrogance!
One particularly striking example of interference, and strutting around over the less fortunate, occurs when they visit Ophelia again to teach her some more violin. Mr Raider suggests they all go out to eat, but Ophelia's mom demurs, saying that her family has nothing decent to wear (yep, that's how impoverished they are!), so Mr Raider takes them all to the store to buy clothes for them! Is this what Jesus would do?! Subsequently he lavishes them with presents and starts hitting on Ophelia's mom.
The next time they visit Mrs Doyle, Sam orders her to go take a shower! Lol! What a rude, interfering little jack-ass Sam truly is. Sam then went to work exfoliating Mrs Doyle! I am not making this up. Sam clearly has learned nothing from the Bible - assuming she ever read it. Under any other circumstances, I’d say was a positive thing, but this girl is supposed to be religious. She's all about pretty, about skin-deep, not about being who you are.
By chapter nine, "Sam felt she could do no wrong". Isn't that how all religious fanatics feel? It’s hilarious that all these things for which they're thanking a god are actually coming not from any gods, but directly from Mr Raider's fat wallet. There would be nothing were it not for that, including the $30,000 he wires to Ophelia's grandmother for the wedding. It’s easy to be grateful to a god when you have boundless wealth, isn’t it?
The story takes an utterly bizarre Kill Bill turn at the wedding of Sam's dad and Ophelia's mom. Evidently her father had a secret past which catches violently up with him, and Sam ends up showing her true colors: refusing to forgive him, refusing to help him, and instead, burning down his house in retribution! That's what a fine Christian she is. What a charmer. I'm sorry, but this novel is total trash and it sucked beyond anything I've read in a long, long time.
