Author: Victoria Schwab
Publisher: Disney
Rating: WARTY!
I can see why Disney-Hyperion wouldn't want a reviewer like me posting an advance review for a novel like this - a living dead version of Blade Runner, but guess what? They can't stop me reviewing it - they can only delay it, and hope I don't count. Newsflash: I do count! Everyone does! Deal with it Disney!
This novel begins in a really confusing manner. Once again it's a YA told in first person PoV because you know it's quite illegal in the USA to write a novel for teens that's not in first person. I once examined a library shelf holding 29 novels, and only six of them were not written in 1PoV, which I confess surprised me a little bit. I thought the percentage of 3PoVs would be lower, so maybe there is hope; maybe writers are becoming smarter? We'll see.
I digress. My confusion came from the author's assurance, right there on the first page of chapter one, that "There should be four of us. Mom, Dad, Ben, me. But there's not. Da's been dead for four years." I guess Schwab isn't familiar with punctuation. I note: a colonectomy after "us", the substitution of a period for a comma before "But", perhaps a semi-colonectomy after "not", but that's not what's confusing. My confusion can be reasonably politely expressed as: "Who the hell is Da?".
At first I thought it was her dad. I thought that her biological father was dead, and this "Dad" was her stepfather, but the more she rattles on about "Dad" the more he seems to be her actual father as opposed to a stiefvater - which is the German for stepfather don't you know - and isn't Schwab a name of German origin even if she isn't?
If you're confused by that last paragraph, you know how I felt at this point in reading this novel.
Perhaps Mackenzie - the main character with a Scots family name for a first name shades of Gabaldon - is speaking loosely, I thought, confused. I didn't know until later that "Da" referred to her grandfather. Who in hell calls their grandfather "Da"? Schwab appears not to get that there's a significant difference between creating mystery to intrigue your readers, and simply obfuscating for the sake of being obscure.
She uses the term "My parents" just a couple of paragraphs later, and the term "Da" disappears, replaced by "Dad" as though there is only one - the original one. Oh, except for this, on page five: "I try to picture a wall between Dad's hand and my shoulder, like Da taught me". Confusing your readers isn't a smart move unless you have a really good 'get out of confusion free' card in hand for later, but not too much later. Schwab didn't. Just out of curiosity, why would she picture a wall...on her shoulder - as opposed to say, a shoulder pad, or a Kevlar jacket, or a suit of armor, or a force-field? I have no idea.
I guess Schwab really wanted to ramp-up the confusion because also on page five we get inset bolded text that runs to page seven which appears to be some sort of flashback and it's not the last of these tricks, either. These things very gradually come into better focus for the reader, but by that time, the irritation level with this has risen significantly. The first of them was simply annoying.
The Bishop family is moving into an aged hotel which has now been converted to apartments. The reason for the move is so that a very selfish Mom can indulge herself in yet another of her whims: to run a coffee shop. The rest of the family (minus Da and Ben, of course) falls into line once more, but Mackenzie, aka Mac, is receiving messages from somewhere.
It turns out that Mackenzie works for the DEA: the Death Enforcement Authority! Instead of hunting down rogue androids, she hunts escaped...what? I have no idea. Let me backtrack. In this world, the dead are never really dead. Instead, their bodies are squirreled away in an archive for no reason at all, where they're kept with their bodies and memories intact in some sort of suspended animation, which begs the question as to what it means to claim that they're dead in the first place - because they're not. They can get up and get down.
When this happens, and apparently when it's in McKenzie's age range, she gets tickled in her pocket where some magic paper reveals the name and age of the animated corpse. She has to use her magic key to pass through a wall at a specific point she can detect. Inside is a corridor known as the narrows, which branches in multiple directions, and is lined with doors. She has to identify an escape door - usually the one through which she entered, and a return door through which she can slip the runner.
This novel was completely nonsensical. Nothing made a lick of sense, nothing was explained so that it might make some sense, and it was tedious and boring as all hell. I simply ditched it unfinished on the principle that life's too short to waste on a sad sack of meaningless and obfuscatory trash like this.
