Love and Other Unknown Variables by Shannon Lee Alexander

Title: Love and Other Unknown Variables
Author: Shannon Lee Alexander
Publisher: Entangled
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 Entangled Publishing. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

Erratum:
p8 "bicep" it's actually "biceps" although with the number of authors making this mistake these days, I'm probably in the minority already when it comes to appropriate English.
p65 "grit my jaw"? I don't know what that means. 'Grit my teeth' makes sense. "Grit my jaw"? Not so much.

It took nine seconds to turn the first page! This wasn't helped by multiple endpapers. I think it's because the pages are images - or at least background images - of graph paper and it really slows the page turning in Adobe Digital Editions. I can;t vouch for it in other electronic media, but it was annoying to say the least, and there were many beginning pages:
the praise page - why in an ebook (more on this anon)?
blank page
title page
blank page
title page with author's name
publication details page
dedication page
blank page
quote from Einstein page showing his ignorance of biochemistry. Einstein was not a chemist
blank page
I wouldn't note these unremarkable pages except that every one of them took time measured in seconds to turn the page.

I know there are "rules" (so-called) about how a book should be laid out to keep Congress happy - standardization rules - but to me it makes no sense to treat an ebook as though it were a print book. And if these "rules" are so cast in iron, why are they not adhered to in audio books? Hah! So much for a publishing code. They're more like guidelines really....

It makes equally as little sense to include third-party recommendations (for the book you're already reading) in an ebook. This doesn't work on me, but in a print book, when you're looking through it in the library or in the book store, I can see that recommendations from people you've never heard of and have no reason to trust might sway some potential readers, but in an ebook? You've already bought or borrowed the ebook sight unseen. Clearly you're already about to read it. So what on Earth is the purpose of the recommendations?!

Chapter one starts on page three of all pages, and speaks of tragedy so we know that this novel isn't going to end well, and it's pretty obvious how it will end because the first person narrator isn't the one who's going to die. How could he be telling this story if he did?! The thing is that this might be all well and good if it started well, but it didn't.

We meet the first person PoV narrator. This isn't my favorite perspective by a long chalk, since it's all 'me' all the time and that's way too much "me' for me. Once in a long while an author can carry it, but unless it's done really, really well, it just smacks of undue self-importance and destroys the reading experience for me - especially if the novel has a purportedly tragic ending. Even if the first page hadn't given it away we'd know that tragedy was in her future because she's an artist.

Anyway, the protag (Chuck, as in a part of a cow or part of an electric drill) is unable to keep his hands to himself where girls are concerned and despite supposedly being MIT material is far too dumb to grasp that he can't go manhandling people without their expressed consent. This behavior is inexplicable given that his best friend is actually a girl, Greta, with whom he's been acquainted for some considerable time. I guess he has so little respect for his best friend that he's unwilling to learn a single thing from her.

Chuck attends the Brighton School of Math and Science, but it hasn't even taught him that you cannot simply move the hair of the girl in line in front of you if want to see the tattoo on her neck, and if you do inappropriately so touch her, then the way to apologize isn't to inappropriately touch her again. This is where the "bicep" enters the picture. I'm going to write a novel about "The Bicep". Yeah! Kiss my bicep, people!

Chuck's sole observation about this girl (other than the tattoo and the fact that she sports a "bicep") is that she's "too beautiful"! Not just beautiful but too beautiful. Oh, and she smells amazing, so immediately we've classified her as a species of orchid, not a person.

Yeah, I know he can't nail her on anything else since he doesn't even know her, and superficial appearance and smell are all he has to go on, but seriously? "Too beautiful"? For what? For a glamor magazine? For a beauty pageant? To live? Why doesn't he just slaughter her right there? Beautiful is her sole defining characteristic already? We know it is because he uses it on both of his first two meetings with her. Oh and she has a chip in her tooth because even they who are too beautiful need the trope "small chip on the bottom corner of her central incisor" (yes, central! Charlotte evidently has an odd number of teeth) to give them an adorable flaw.

Could we not have gone somewhere else for a change? Please? Pretty please? Or even somewhere else even if it was still in the same neighborhood? Like not beautiful but attractive? Good-looking? Appealing? Warm? Unforgettable? Anything other than the tiredest bullshit in YA fiction: beautiful? Why is it that YA writers have the hardest time thinking outside the book?

Coincidence of coincidences, Charlotte - the beautiful tattoo - is now Chuck's sister Becca's best friend. Oh and she's known as Charley because that makes her too cool as well as too beautiful. But Becca won't call her that because having two Charlies is too much even though her brother Charlie is actually known as Chuck. Wait, what? If Charlotte is now wanting to be known as Charlotte instead of the detestable 'Charley', how does Becca even know that she was referred to as Charley by her older sister? Did Charlotte blab to an almost stranger the very name by which she doesn't want to be known? Not too bright, is she?

Hmmm!

I made it only a third of the way through this and I had to push myself to get even that far. It was too cloying, too slow, too uneventful, too meaningless, too cliched, too sugary, too vacuous, with characters which were too flat and uninteresting, and quite frankly, Chuck's obsessive-compulsive addiction to Charlotte's beauty above and beyond anything else was a huge turn-off. This contest between science and art has been done to death. Oh, and yes, you can scientifically measure love and beauty! Humans are rooted in biology; biology is rooted in chemistry; chemistry is rooted in physics; physics is rooted in math.

The bottom line is that I really just did not like these characters. They were too trope and cookie-cutter-ish to stand out. There was nothing about them to make them any different from your standard geek guy and standard too beautiful to live girl. I cannot in good conscience recommend this novel.