Author: Simmone Howell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!
I'm not sure why, but it always amuses me when the author (or perhaps the publisher) announces that the novel is a novel by having the words "A Novel" appear on the front cover as some editions of this one do. It's not really novel or meaningful. This is the kind of novel that tries too hard to be hip, where authors mistakenly think that if they set it in a book store or a record store it will automatically be literary and brilliant. No, Virginia, it won't. Nor will tossing in musical or literary references. For me personally I tend to despise such novels precisely because they do come with this pretension to being "literary".
Skylark and her somewhat developmentally-impaired kid bother Seagull (who goes by "Gully") live over a vinyl record store with their father. Mom isn't in the picture having ditched her family to pursue a career in music. Since dad won't have an on-line presence, nor will he countenance CDs in his store, it looks like the business is on the home straight to going out of, which begs the question as to why dad hired Luke to help in the store.
I know vinyl is making something of a comeback as a music delivery medium, but it's never actually going to come back in any meaningful sense, and for me, I'm glad because people have forgotten how bloody awful vinyl actually was and how it is an oil derivative ultimately, but that's by-the-by. But this did make me feel this novel was a bit anachronistic rather than realistic. Now if the story had been set in a place which, I dunno, runs an indy MP3 download service or something, that might have at least been a bit less pretentious and rather different. But then the author wouldn't have been able to slip in a host of pretentious references to obscure bands of yesteryear, would she?
Obviously Luke is really hired so Luke and Sky can get together, so it's a bit ham-fisted. The legend we're offered is that Luke's sister, Mia, died some time before, so maybe dad is taking pity on him, but aside from being annoyingly attracted to Luke, Sky is a rather confused young woman, confused by her flibbertigibbet of a friend, and by this Goth girl from school who she runs into at unexpected times which always looks like it might be going somewhere, but which never does. Also, what's going on with the police officer of whom Sky is suspicious, but who seems to have known dad for years? Well there's nothing going on because none of this goes nowhere - not anywhere you don't expect for this kind of a novel.
Normally I Love stories set in Australia, but this one was a complete fail with me. It started out interestingly enough, but it quickly became clear that all this author had to offer was a litany of character quirks. There was no real plot. Nothing happened unless you count Sky's incessant mooning over Luke as an event, which I sure don't. Gully was quirky for quirk's sake which was interesting for about five minutes.
It was pretty obvious who the mystery vandals were from quite early on, so there really was no mystery to solve unless it was the mystery of how this author thought that if you sprinkle enough character quirks into the mix you'll somehow magically have a plot or a story. The problem with that plan is that these characters were nowhere near interesting enough to carry a book-length story. I cannot recommend this.
