Written by Megan Abbott
Overall Rating: 2/5
Plot: 2/5
Characters: 1/5
Writing: 2/5
After taking a dip in the local polluted lake, several girls in a school begin showing symptoms of some strange disease, causing uproar and chaos in a small town. This story focuses on the stories of Deenie, a teenaged girl just coming into her sexual maturity; Eli, her older brother and a star player for the hockey team; and their father, Tom, a well-known teacher in the school. Viewpoints jump between these primary characters, with occasional jaunts to explore other viewpoints, all told third-person limited.
I got to the end of this book, placed it in my lap, looked at my husband and said, "I still don't know." I spent the entire book waiting to see if it was any good. Trying desperately to decide if it was worth reading. Was it scary? Was it supposed to be supernatural? In the end, I put it down feeling like I still didn't know if it was good or not. Which, I suppose, means it wasn't.
The writing is actually very beautiful. Lush and ethereal, it gives the setting a very abstract quality that works fairly well in scaring the living snot out of the reader. But the characters are uninteresting, self-absorbed, and uncompelling. The plot takes 70% of the book to even really get rolling, at which point it actually tells you everything that happened in the course of about twenty pages and then it's the end of the story. I found this book very poorly paced and not something I'm likely to recommend.
Also, as an active reader and reviewer of YA material, I found the teen characterization to be very lacking. It feels like teens written through the lens of parents or other adults who don't understand them, as if everything they do is adults looking at each other, shrugging and saying, "Kids, right? Nobody gets them." These inner thoughts are not the inner thoughts of real adolescents but the characterization of adults who have forgotten what it's like to think like a confused teenager. And that is probably the major failing of the book for me.
I read another book by Megan Abbott and I don't recall the name, but it was not impressive. I really wonder how some books get such high ratings on Amazon. I totally get what you mean about the pacing! It can literally make or break the story!
ReplyDeleteI had to put down an ARC I was reading earlier because the pacing was so bad. The story was great, the concept intrigued me, but it was taking so long to get anywhere that I just gave up.
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