Rating: WARTY!
This novel started out with a series of strikes against it and I wasn't even aware of it! I picked up the audio book in the library because the blurb sounded good. Unfortunately with an audio book, you can't dip into the pages and read a bit here and there to get a feel for it. How did it strike me? Let me count the ways!
I avoid first person PoV novels unless they're really intriguing, because for me it's worst person PoV. I'm not at all a fan of listening to self-absorbed "all me all the time" narrators, especially ones read with the voice Kate Reinders employs here, which is irritating at best. With an audio book, you can't tell what voice it's in until you actually start listening. Strike one!
I don't do series unless they're exceptional. This one, the first of a new series titled "Bea Catcher Chronicles" promised ot be precisely the opposite of exceptional. Strike two!
I don't do novels with "Chronicles", "Saga", or "Cycle" in the title, so that was strike three that this author managed to escape! She's also lucky that when I picked it up, I didn't know that author James Patterson had said this was "...right up there with the very best of YA fiction" otherwise I would have ditched it, too, based on his recommendation - and I would have been right!
Having made it past all my defenses, how did this novel fare? Well it started out by exposing a major weakness of first person PoV: if the narrator isn't there, she can't tell you about it unless she gets it second hand, or unless the author admits to the failure of their choice of voice and switches to third person which is really clunky. Thus the prologue here was clunky and served no purpose other than to objectify a raped woman. Was a description of bruised thighs necessary? Was any description at all necessary? No, but this author chose to repeat these repeatedly almost as though she enjoyed reporting on young girls in pain! It served no purpose. That we know she was raped is horror enough. We don't need to read (or in this case listen to) the gory details. Unfortunately with audio books, it's hard to avoid the prologue (strike four!). Fortunately this one was really short. I don't do prologues, introductions, author's forewords, prefaces, etc., et-boring-cetera.
Bea (Beatrice) is a high school girl who is an artist and a recovering drug addict. Fresh out of rehab, and with the cliché of being fresh at a new school, she discovers that she can draw what she sees in the mind of another person. How this works is never explained int eh parts I listened to, and her description of how it comes and goes makes no sense whatsoever. It reads as though it's her sketch pad which is controlling her, which I doubt is what the author intended. Strike five!
There is evidently a serial rapist at loose who has most recently preyed on one of the high school cheerleaders, Willa, a cheerleader who survived the assault, but who cannot remember a thing about it. Bea, however, has drawn a picture of a guy she saw in Willa's mind when the two shared an art class together. Bea knows this guy - he's her ex drug dealer. A friend pointed out how antique the names Bea and Willa are. I don't know how the author came up with them (Beatrix Potter and Willa Cather maybe?), but since young people can sport antique names in real life, this didn't bother me very much. It's definitely an oddity, though!
My initial guess (and I'm usually hopeless at these things, be warned!) was that this guy Marcus would be far more of a red herring than a serial rapist. Sadly, Bea is evidently not even smart enough to consider that he might be the rapist, so I was not at all confident by this time that this novel would hold my interest, especially since it's larded with cliché and trope, and I was right about that. There's a snotty cheerleader elite group. There's a disaffected non-conformist main character who is an outcast. She has a best friend who is the clichéd perky gay guy with awesome dress sense, who creepily wants to mother her. There's a homophobic jock group. There's a cafeteria scene. The food is bad. Can we lard this up with any more trope and cliché? I had no doubt this author would find a way. Fortunately the audio book was only five disks, so I knew I would not have to suffer long if the novel continued to be awful.
I further reduced the time I had to suffer through third by automatically skipping any track which had the narrator start off by announcing a date and time and the amount of elapsed time since Bea became drug-free. It was T-E-D-I-O-U-S! This meant that I skipped most of the tracks on Disk 3, and perhaps an entire disk's worth of tracks, if not more, after all five disks were done. I skipped a host of tracks on disks four and five because they were larded with unnecessary interludes getting in the way of the action, and after disk three I had no patience left for the author's diversions and dilly-dallying. These tracks held the most boringly pedantic descriptions of school life. Strike six. This novel now has two inning's worth of strikes, so I plan on skipping the sequel on that basis alone.
Where was the story I was promised in the blurb? The one about an artist drawing images from a person's mind? The one about a serial rapist? That took a back seat to high school politics and trivia. Instead of listening with baited breath, all I got was bait and switch. I cannot in good faith recommend this novel.
