Author: Siobhan Vivian
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WARTY!
I've been trying to get my hands on this novel for a while, and it's been so long that I forgot why! I don't know if I was just intrigued by the title or if I'd heard that this is a novel featuring a strong female lead. If it was the latter, someone lied! The reason it took me so long was that I could never figure out if it was written by Siobhan Vivian, or by Vivian Siobhan...yeah, I'm kidding!
So, this novel was a bit weird, to say the least, and none of this has to do with the author! The cover originally had a commendation from Kirkus across the bottom, which (in my library edition) was blacked out by a thick black line across the cover! I approve of this because Kirkus = worthless when it comes to the utility of their reviews. A blog which always positively reviews novels is utterly inutile because it tells you nothing about any novel they review.
But this novel gets worse! The novel is the size of a paperback, yet it maintains the large full-sized hard-back typeface, which means it runs to over 300 pages when it's probably a 200-or-so page novel in reality, if the typeface were smaller and there were more words to a page. Why they chose to fatten it up this way is a mystery. But that's not the only mystery. The entire 'Library of Congress' page, which identifies what this novel is, how it’s described, when it was published, to whom it’s copyrighted, etc., is AWOL! I have no idea why! Oh, and it has a prologue, which I skipped as usual. Who honestly gives a damn about text that's so unimportant it’s not even worth giving it a chapter of its own?
The story was not even remotely about a strong female protagonist. It’s been a while since I've encountered a female main character who was as clueless, needy, whiny and stupid as Natalie is in this novel, which is really annoying because it started out so very well; really quite engrossing and entertaining. Natalie even has a pretty normal name for YA fiction, but her two friends - the first to be her ex, the other to be her next, have the standard exotic YA fiction names; Autumn and Spencer. I'm surprised the latter wasn't named Spring. Natalie's inevitable trope guy is named Conner, of course, because John or Dave would be an entirely inappropriate name for a YA romance guy. His name is better rendered as: Con Her
Natalie starts out as a mature, responsible girl entering her final year at Ross Academy, but as soon as Conner crosses her transom, she's downhill all the way, and stupidly so. For example, when Spencer, whom Natalie used to babysit about eight years before, behaves inappropriately, Natalie steps up to save her from suspension by offering to organize a sleep-in at the school during which these girls and any others who sign up, will use the time to educate themselves about being strong, independent women. The sleep-over fails completely when it’s derailed by Spencer who hijacks the entire evening to natter about how girls ought to be able to slut around all they want and the hell with Natalie's sensible agenda. Natalie is so weak that she gives in and lets Spencer rule.
Somehow a bunch of boys from the stereotypical football team break into the school, and Natalie has to herd them out. No other girls (out of fifty attendees) are remotely bothered by this invasion of their space, evidently. Conner is part of the break in, which ought to have educated Natalie sufficiently about the kind of guy he is, but it doesn’t. He's hiding in the girls' bathroom when she finds him, and he refuses to leave when she requests that he do so. Instead, he assaults her to which she responds by kissing him back. This event she takes as a positive sign and starts secretly dating him. How big of a major dumb-ass is she, actually? I can't say - not politely.
There's this non-mystery running through this novel that Autumn has a bad nick-name ('Fish sticks') which has haunted her through high school. We’re never told exactly what it was that happened for her to garner this name (unless it’s revealed in those last fifty or so pages I didn’t read). Frankly, I lost all interest in what it was (I can make some sordid guesses of my own, but who cares?), because it became nothing but tiresome to have this bullshit 'mystery' brought up time and time again without it ever remotely looking like it would achieve any sort of dénouement. It was impossible to relate to how serious or debilitating this was supposed to be when it was such a non-entity for the overwhelming bulk of the novel, if not all of it.
I decided that this novel sucked big stinking ones at the point of the Conner bathroom incident, yet I gamely continued to read this insult to women, thinking it was so short that I'd be done with it in no time; however, by the time I reached about page 275 out of 330 or so, it was so god-awfully bad that I could simply not force myself to suffer through any more examples of how Natalie became increasingly brain-dead under Conner's mesmerizing influence, and how petty, clueless and downright stupid these people were. Natalie and Autumn break up their friendship at this point. They've been best friends since they were six, yet completely out of the blue, for no good reason at all, they simply fly apart and become almost mortal enemies. It’s completely and laughably unrealistic. Natalie is so petty it’s like she's degenerated back into a six-year-old.
If the novel had looked like it was be going somewhere interesting, I might have been willing to continue to give it a chance, but when you're over 80% the way through, and Le Stupide continues to blossom fruitfully with no sign of a harvest, it’s way past time to call it. This novel is DoA and warty to boot.
