Author: Sonia Gensler
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!
This novel is about Willie Hammond, hiding under the name of Angeline McClure, posing as a teacher at a 19th century seminary which caters to girls descended from Cherokee native Americans. Why, exactly, she's doing this is never really revealed to the reader (at least in the majority of this novel. I didn't read it all but I read most of it). This is annoying at best.
The first problem is that the natives don't call themselves 'Cherokee' - which is yet another example of an ignorant English word replacing the original. They refer to themselves as Tsalagi, or Aniyunwiya as far as I know. If Gensler could not bring herself to call them what they call themselves, could she not have at least mentioned it in passing? And why did no-one have a Tsalagi name? Everyone had English names or Biblical names. The closest we got to a native American name was the trope love interest's last name. That was it! One name!
The method by which the main character, Willie, presents herself as Angeline - a new teacher at the school - is well done, but you know that one of the girls is going to betray her, and you soon discover who this person is. This was the first of many non-surprises. In addition to being predictable, there were other ways in which this novel made for uncomfortable reading. One was that it was too easy to forget that Willie is only seventeen and is merely posing as a teacher rather than actually being one.
She's not actually a mature graduate, so her behavior was irresponsible and childish on far too many occasions, but even as I kept on reminding myself that she was a poseur, I still could not escape feeling how dumb and irresponsible this main character was. Her whole life was dependent upon her carrying off this deception, and it was sad that she wasn't smart enough to realize how much she needed to do, and to make the required effort to get it done. I prefer my main characters smarter than this, but keeping her wits about her was not Willie's forte. There are different ways of being smart and Willie truly failed to embrace any of them.
This story had a Harry Potter time-lapse feel to it, I have to say. JK Rowling was obsessed with making every story last for exactly one school year regardless of what she had to sacrifice or puff-up to achieve that end. This resulted in some sad artificiality to that series as characters struggled pointlessly with problems which would have been resolved in short order by normal people. It was patently obvious that this happened for no other reason than to stretch the story across the school year.
In the same way, Gensler artificially delays things, or brings them to an abrupt and premature conclusion in order to create fake suspense and to stretch this story out over the school year. So while the novel begins in August of 1896, it takes a giant leap to Xmas of that year for no apparent reason other than the one which I just mentioned. Willie suffers grotesquely from this kind of writing by being repeatedly presented as incompetent, slow, stupid, and utterly incapable of getting herself organized no matter how many endless hours she has at her disposal.
Willie teaches English and has student compositions to grade, yet she puts these off day after day for no good reason. She's very much alone at the school, having only one 'friend', and she confines herself to her room often, yet she's always complaining that she has no time to do things. What? What exactly is she doing with her time that she has so little to spare? Is she surfing the web? Texting her friends? Watching TV? Listening to her iPod? Updating her status? Not in 1896 she isn't! She has only her school work to occupy her and she isn't even doing that!
The other inexplicable procrastination is in holding a second séance. Again what is she doing with her time that she can't facilitate this with many weeks to spare?! The problem with this school is that it's purportedly haunted by the ghost of a student who recently drowned herself (but she was actually murdered to protect a man's reputation, and this was so obvious as to be pathetic). It quickly becomes clear that there was far more going on here than Willie can evidently handle, which bespeaks badly of her.
The initials "e.s." (over which we're deliberately misled by the author: it's actually c.s. not e.s.), which Willie finds appended to a love poem secreted in her room, could apply to more than one person yet Willie never even considers this. One of the two primary candidates is a student. He's Willie's sad, sad, trope, inappropriate, clichéd, tedious, sad, trope, clichéd, (and did I mention sad, clichéd, and trope?) love interest from the nearby boys' seminary. In any self-respecting YA novel, he would have been the villain, but tiredly and predictably, he's not because there are so few self-respecting YA novels, and those are to be treasured when found. The other candidate is a mature male who frequents the school with good reason, and it quickly becomes obvious to readers (but not to Willie) that he's the perp.
While I flatly don't believe in ghosts and gods, demons and angels, spirits and witchcraft, etc., etc., because there's no good evidence for any of them, I do love a good story featuring these things. What spoils a good story about them is the inevitably prolonged build-up to a crescendo. What? The poltergeist can only make little scratching sounds at night? It takes a few weeks or months for it to be able to manifest and overturn tables and bring your home crashing down? Why?
What, the Ghost of Person Past can only tap, tap, tap at your window to begin with? They can make the room feel warm or cold, they can completely trash the chapel decor, but they can't come to you in broad daylight and simply say, "Hey, So-And-So murdered me!"? Bullshit! I know the suspense is needed to make a good novel, but it's ruined when this evidently powerful ghost has such artificial and transparent 'hurdles' placed so that it can't come right out and say what the issue is. It was obvious the ghost wasn't the dead girl, but I confess I got it wrong as to the ghost actually was, even though it was obvious that this character was also dead, and not simply missing.
The William Blatty novel The Exorcist, for example, transcended this 'slow build-up' problem because the demon had an agenda - this is why it lured people in very slowly, and that's why that novel worked so well even with a leisurely build-up of tension. There's no explanation given in this novel for this same thing.
While I was excited to read this novel and while I became quickly drawn-in initially, it turned to tedious and uninteresting with startling rapidity. In the end, I was skipping and skimming - especially those pages where Willie and Eli were together because it was so trashy and boring. I pretty-much skipped the last 25% and just skimmed pages to see if my guesses had been right. All but one of them was, and for as bad as I am at figuring out plots ahead of time, that ought to tell you something!
So I guess I'm done with Sonia Gensler. I loved her first novel, The Dark Between, which I reviewed the same day as this one on my blog, but I can't countenance, much less recommend, the poor writing which the main feature in this one.
