Rating: WARTY!
This volume had two potential strikes against it as I began reading: firstly it was book one of a series, and secondly, it was first person PoV, which is normally a horrible voice to tell a story in, full of self-importance and self-promotion. The all-important I did this! Hey lookit me! Now lookit me again! Imagine that for a whole series! However, there are some people who can carry that voice, just as there are some people who can carry a series so my hope going into this was that here was an author who can carry both.
The title is a bit trite. There are very many volumes out there with variations on this contradiction, most of them, it seems, series, so it's not a good title to have chosen if you're looking to make your work stand out from the pack, as most authors are, so having buried your novel deeply in the pack with your choice of title, we now have to look solely to the writing, and this is what my blog is all about.
That did start our too well, because on the second screen I read this: ""
His eyes ran over my body. "You look good... I mean beautiful."Ember's immediate response is to thank him for objectifying her, except that she doesn't frame it in those objective terms
Judged by the first two screens, this book is all about shallow. Ember's assessment of her best female friend, Kennedy, is that she "...could see the true beauty in her porcelain skin." That's her true beauty. It's not in her wisdom, or in her integrity, or in her smarts, or in her skill with something, or in her reliability - not even in her steadfast friendship over many years. It's not even, for goodness sakes, in the commonly-cited abuse: that she would make a good wife and mother! It's in her beauty, because let's face it, if you're a girl and you ain't got that, you ain't got nothing. No wonder she's going to grow up dreading wrinkles and blemishes, and spend a fortune on snake oil 'remedies' for them.
Why do female writers insist up demeaning their gender like this? Can we not get a YA novel that's not about skin-depth? Can we not, for that matter, get a novel about a "hot cheerleader" who turns out to have smarts, courage, decency, or anything that's more than skin and (good) bone (structure)? In this novel, Ember's brief interlude with Ben is rudely interrupted by this very thing (the hot cheerleader part, not the rest of it). Kallie is "tall, blonde, and beautiful." That's how she's categorized and pigeon-holed, and I'm only in the fourth screen in on my smart phone!
Every female who has appeared in this story to this point has been completely and solely defined by her looks. This is, quite frankly, disgusting. You think pornography is degrading to women? Well that's obvious. How much worse then, is this culture of stealth degradation which puts the value of a woman on her looks alone? The fact that this has been done through history is no excuse to continue it. What is this doing to young girls, subject to this barrage of objectification, story after story after story, in a subtle and not-so-subtle undermining of their value, being told relentlessly, that if they're not beautiful they have nothing else to offer? How many depressions and suicides has this relentless assault on girlhood and womanhood caused, do you suppose? Do you dare to try to calculate that carnage?
Don't think for a minute that guys avoid this objectification: "Ben was gorgeous and at the top of the food chain in our school. He was the basketball star and every girl's wet-dream." That's a verbatim quote cut and pasted directly from the Kindle app on my phone. I love that Kindle app despite various issues it has. You can't copy text from the Bluefire Reader app on the iPad for quoting.
The characters don't speak realistically. At one point Ember says, "Hide me from whom? What are you talking about?" No one talks like that unless they're nobility, pretentious, or caricatured. Ryan says at one point shortly after this, "There you are. Kennedy and I have been looking for you." Kennedy and I, instead of "We've"? it doesn't happen. The "from whom" comes from an author's knee-jerk desire to try to be taken seriously by offering correct English, but forgetting that this isn't the narrative part, this is character speech, and no one speaks like that. 'Whom' needs to be retired completely from the English language in my opinion, although there are occasional instances where even to me it sounds wrong not to use it, but never in someone's speech. Not unless the character in question is Queen Elizabeth or someone like that.
The story continued to become more clichéd as trope was piled upon trope: Ember has odd eyes, and is tall, long haired, willowy, and no doubt "beautiful", but she's detested by the entire school except for her two trope friends, the guy portion of which is of course, gay. Despite her being reviled, the hottest guy in school falls for her. Despite him falling for her, and his enjoying a god-like status in school, he lifts not one finger to bring an end to the buying she endures. The bullying is torrential, and not a single teacher lifts a single finger to try to stop it. Ember doesn't feel the slightest bit depressed ir suicidal despite this bullying. She doesn't care about the insults to herself but won't have her friends insulted. The hottest cheerleader is her worst enemy and delivers verbal assaults on her worthy of the most moustache-twirling villain in melodrama.
This latter item brings a crisis at the Halloween dance, where Ember has a Carrie moment. The lights break in their tubes. The disco ball crashes to the ground, the decorations go up in flame, the students panic and flee. Ember awakes to find she's alone in the trashed gym, and despite there being EMTs and fire-fighters galore out there, evidently not a single one of them came inside to check for injured, trapped or dead students? I'm sorry but this is bullshit and an insult to emergency services personnel. Le Stupide doesn't end there however.
When Ember wanders outside, determined to find her friends and tell them she's all right (why were they not panicked for her and trying to get back into the gym or urging the emergency response teams to find her?), an EMT immediately takes charge of her to address her 'deep cuts', but as soon as the principal comes up and harasses Ember, the EMT melts away despite not having attended to her injuries? Seriously? Way to demean and insult the EMT. The sheriff is there and both he and the principal blame Ember for this, despite having zero evidence, let alone proof. Ember runs away like a little child (forgetting about meeting up with her friends) and encounters a man with electric blue eyes who speaks in riddles and offers her no explanations for her witchy powers. She's interrupted by Ryan, and Electric Blue Eye Guy disappears like magic.
Ember Brycin and her friends Ryan, and Kennedy. No one in this book has a first name unless it's also a last name - except for Ben - or something weird like Eli Dragen, the hot bad boy. Trope much?
I'm sorry, but this isn't an original novel, not even close. Yes, the minor details are different, the character names are different, but this is essentially the same story that's been told a thousand times before and it's not worthy of being read. Some authors can take cliché and trope and make something truly new out of it, but that's not what's delivered here. I cannot recommend this one.
