Author: Nola Decker
Publisher: 7 Sparks Press (no website found)
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.
erratum: p50 "Last night she stayed wake watching..." "stayed awake" maybe?
Oh, what do we do about a novel which gets 85% of it right, but in the last fifteen percent, really goes seriously down hill? I was all ready to rate this as a worthy read. I'd even put up the first draft of this review and had it set-up that way, but I hadn't finished the novel! Let this be a lesson to all we who review! Now I have to seriously think about how much this last fifteen percent undermines every good thought I'd had in reading the first 85%!
This novel began very strongly. It felt to me like the one which makes it worth wading through a dozen other average or even crappy novels in order to reach such a novel. I don't know where Nola Decker came from; I'd never heard of her, but she is without doubt a writer to watch. No, strike that! The heck with watching: Nola Decker is a writer to read! This story really grabbed my imagination from page one, and it refused to let go. I love stories like this! At least I did for some four-fifths of it!
Unfortunately, that's not to say it was perfect, but which novels are? There are some flaws in it, but that there are flaws is not the issue. The issue is whether the story is a good and engaging one 9in general it was), whether it's original (it is), whether it has something to say (it does, particularly if you want to know how to really write a YA 'romance'. No writer is perfect, and this novel comes close to delivering perfection from its originality to its well-drawn characters. Is that enough to rate it a worthy read?
Gabe and Jessa have known each other since childhood, but they're not friends. In fact, Gabe isn't friends with anyone, and especially not his spoiled-rotten kid brother Watson, because it's too painful. Gabe's problem is that he knows, just knows when you're lying. It makes him so ill that he refers to it as his 'allergy'.
He can't stand to be around people, since people tend to lie to a greater or lesser degree all the time, and even 'harmless' white lies aren't harmless to Gabe. He has it so bad that he can't even lie to himself, and sometimes he can't keep his mouth shut when he feels a lie - feels it like rusty stakes in his mouth or needles under his skin - being told by someone else, and this has caused disruption and embarrassment on more than one occasion.
Jessa is one of the hot girls in school: immaculately dressed in designer clothes and heels, perfectly manicured and made-up, but she's a complete lie. Inside, Jessa is the tomboy of all tomboys, and turbo-charged at that. One day, skipping class to go for a nail-job down-town, she was cutting through an alley when four guys who evidently knew about her 'power', showed up to abduct her. She almost literally kicked the crap out of them. It felt good to her, too, after hiding her skills for so long under a "girlie" exterior. Now she's looking forward to finally getting a date with Watson (even without her nails having been done!), but Watts has suddenly, with neither warning nor explanation, disappeared.
Jessa sees a connection between the disappearance and her own experience, and she realizes that, unfortunately, she needs Gabe's help to find out what's going on with Watts going off. She thinks he was abducted by the same guys who made the mistake of trying to tackle her, and the more the two of them look into it, the more it looks like she was right.
Here's an observation which has nothing to do with the actual writing itself; it's more to do with the mechanics of presenting what's written via various media. I started reading this on Adobe Reader, where it looked fine, and then I tried it on my antique Kindle (since Adobe Reader isn't portable - not for me anyway!), where it also looked fine for the most part until I reached the end of chapter 11; that's when my Kindle went bankrupt!
The Kindle is rather small, and doesn't make for a great reading experience (I'm very much a print book guy. Sorry, trees!). In order to make it more like reading a book, I keep the text sized quite small and read it in landscape mode. When I reached the end of chapter 11, I swiped to the last screen and the text size was suddenly in a font three times larger than the text on the previous screen or on the next screen! Weird!
This same thing happened in chapter 23, where the whole last paragraph was three times larger on that last screen of the chapter! I have no idea why it did this, or whether or not it's tied to how this novel was formatted, or to some kink in the Kindle, but while it is odd and a bit annoying, it's nothing to do with the story-telling itself, so it's not an issue there. I'm just passing it on FYI.
I don't want to give away any big spoilers since this is a brand-new novel, but in order to review this and describe some problems I had with the plotting, I have to reveals a few details. There were two parts of this novel where credibility really went right out the window. The first was relatively minor, but there were issues in the last fifteen percent that were major. It turns out that Gabe and Jessa are not the way they are by pure chance - there's a lot more going on here, and to her credit, the author skilfully un-peels this story like an onion. Despite that, some of the upcoming plot points are telegraphed rather loudly, so that even I figured it out beforehand. Other parts are much more subtle.
Anyway, in process of unfolding this tale, there's a point at which someone supposedly calls the police, and this someone later turns out to be working for the bad guys, yet both main characters continue to trust that this traitor actually called the police! This issue becomes even worse later, because it's referenced by one of the police officers. This made even less sense to me, unless this university town quite literally has only two police officers. The problem with this whole thing is that it suggests that the two main characters don't have a whole heck of a lot going on behind their forehead, which isn't the best way to depict them! So I was disappointed there.
Aside from a weakness here and there, and the plot holes I mentioned, the story was solid and well-written - very well written. I was impressed, for example, by the relationship between Gabe and Jessa. It was done better than about 70% of YA romances where it's all, "Hi, nice to meet you! Oh God I am so in love with you already!", which is shamefully pathetic and speaks really badly of far too many YA novelists.
Nola Decker isn't one of those people. She knows how to write believable characters, and how to issue them with credible behaviors and motivate them rationally based on their back-story. This novel, as fantastical as it is, is for the most part very credible within its own framework. Yes, occasionally the dialog (in particular, where the bad guys monologue about their world domination plans like evil super-villains!) is a bit eye-roll-inducing, but overall there isn't anything which outright condemns the novel, and there is so very much to recommend it.
Jessa in particular has become one of my favorite kick-ass female heroes. She's actually a bit reminiscent of Spider-Man in some ways, particularly the symbiont-infected one in Spider-Man 3, because she not only has incredible power, and essentially wants to do the right thing, she also has some serious issues to contend with in the form of her own genetic urge to hurt people, and also in the form of her impossible relationships with Gabe and Watts. I felt so bad for her.
There was a weakness which is common to all YA novels in that the authors for some reason will have their characters display all manner of questionable behaviors, but they will never have them kill anyone! This particular flaw occurs several times in this novel, where Gabe and Jessa have the leader of the bad guys (or some of his minions at one point) at their mercy, and yet they let them live, and worse, in effect let them go free, meaning that these people are now free to do as they please,including continuing causing trouble, and even killing other young people!
That was insane in my opinion. Of course, if she'd done that, this would never have been able to run to a series, now would it? Since this blog is primarily about writing, here's a question for writers to consider: how much are you willing betray the quality of your writing for the sake of stretching a one-volume story into a trilogy? The answer should be: "Not at all". Jessa has two golden chances to kill the leader of the bad guys and she fails both times. hence volume two.
What bothered me about this is that we're not talking here about wanton killing or gratuitous violence. We're talking about stopping the bad guys, something which Jessa harps on repeatedly, yet when she had the chance to quite literally stop him cold, she turned her back on it. These are guys who have repeatedly shown themselves to be merciless killers, and to be controllers and manipulators. They plan on continuing abducting or executing other teens dependent upon their value to 'the cause', yet when Gabe says "No, don't kill him!" Jessa loses all her independence and self-motivation, and falls completely into line. This does nothing but cause them ever more grief down the line. For me this was a betrayal of Jessa as a character. Neither did it make any sense in context.
I wouldn't advocate novels where the 'good guys' are shown mercilessly killing others for no good or valid reason, but I honestly cannot get on board with this pussy-footing around dispatching bad guys who are downright evil, and who are clearly never going to change their minds, and never reform their behaviors.
I can see why not having your main characters kill someone in a young teens novel might make sense, but this novel is clearly for older teens and young adults, and this limp attitude which Gabe and Jessa repeatedly exhibit towards some very dangerous and downright evil people seriously undermined the import of the story and the integrity of the two main characters for me. We have PG-13 movies where death is depicted without sentimentality, so what's up with novels aimed at an age-range which is more mature than that?!
Here's another plot hole, as long as we're on that topic: there's a point where Jessa and Gabe have escaped the bad guys (and failed to kill them!) and they're driving back and forth on this one stretch of road because they can't agree on whether they should get back to their home town asap, or go and recover Jessa's car. In the end they decide to recover the car. The sole reason for finally choosing this action is because there's medication in the car which they can use to keep their prisoner under control, so this they do - but then they fail to administer the med and the prisoner busts loose!
This was a real clunker for me. I can see how people, young adults or otherwise, might make bad decisions if they're tired, or strung-out, or scared, but when they make a U-turn for a specific purpose, and then neglect to fulfill that purpose, and we're given no explanation for it, and no good reason (other than that the plot demands it!), then it really drops me out of suspension of disbelief.
But this was very tame when we compare it with the biggest clunker. This is the one which occurred in the last fifteen percent of this novel and which made me seriously reconsider if I still wanted to rate this the way I'd been thinking I would. This is where Gabe gets into a fight with his brother. Normally Gabe is as placid as they come, and it's Watts who has the violence and meanness genes, but Gabe has been pushed and pushed and pushed, and there is so much on the line that when Watts starts beating him up, and really punishing him, Gabe fights back and gives as good as he gets.
There are no adults around: no one to stop the fight (which struck me as odd), but someone calls the police, and when they arrive, they take Watts, who is hardly injured, to the ambulance to treat his "wounds" and they immediately arrest Gabe. All of this is done without the officers asking anyone - anyone at all - what happened here! They just blindly arrest Gabe, the acknowledged weakling of the family, as though he's the brute and the bully and Watts is his innocent victim! That made my jaw drop to the floor because it is absolutely nonsensical, and it carries zero credibility. How did this ever get past the beta readers and the editor? Nola Decker should ask me to be a beta reader, because these plot holes would never have got past me without a red flag being raised! Gabe, a minor, is hauled off to jail without his mother being notified, and without his injuries being treated.
I have to note that the final 15% of this novel is really badly written. And I know exactly what's going to happen in the sequel: they who are dead aren't really dead, and they who were enemies are now friends again. Make of that what you will! My problem is how to rate this. I can't rate it 'warty' because so much of it is so very good. In the end, it's for that reason: for the fact that most of it is really good when compared with the lousy standards of all-too-many YA novels, that I'm going to rate this a worthy read, in the hope (and the faith!) that an author with Nola Decker's very evident chops will get it right in the sequel. So let's look forward to that.
