Speaking of Bad...

See, some books are just so silly that I have no problem giving them a big ol' raspberry. Darcey Bell's A Simple Favor is one of those books. I picked it up because I had seen a preview for the movie with Anna Kendrick, whom I find oddly charming, and Blake Lively, whom I find oddly offputting, and figured what the heck?

What the heck indeed. This book is mostly just Not Good.  I'm not 100% sure why I read through to the end, except possibly that A) I hoped there would be a really twisty twist that set all that came before on its ear (spoiler: newp), and B) I was baffled by the idea of Anna Kendrick playing Stephanie.

I knew from the movie trailer that Stephanie (Kendrick) was the boring one whose best friend, Emily (Lively) is all amazing and glamorous but turns out to have Secrets.  That's about all I knew.

But it turns out that Stephanie is not just the square one (which Anna Kendrick can do quite nicely, thanks), she's the frumpy one.  She runs a mom blog in which she frequently talks in broad, saccharine generalities about moms.  Like, "Moms have amazing mom powers, and their mom strength holds them together through a crisis.  The amazing community of moms etc. etc."  She's very uptight, sure, but also pretty dim.

Emily, on the other hand, is a glamorous PR manager for a fashion company in New York City.  Stephanie is a widow, but Emily is married to a gorgeous husband.  Their sons are the same age and they're friends.

The simple favor is to watch her son for a few hours after school.  The drama starts when Emily doesn't come home. The police get involved, and is there foul play, and where is Emily?

It's the most Gone Girl plot since Gone Girl itself, but it is not anywhere near as clever or shocking or gritty as Gone Girl.  As the plot unfolds, it starts to look like literally  no one in this book is actually all that smart, and instead of having fun watching an evil genius pull the strings of all the regular people around her, you're watching a sneaky stupid person play childish games with a dopey stupid person.

And, insult to injury, the major plot twist hinges on one of the classic daytime soap opera twists.  Think "amnesia!" only even cheesier.

So yeah, I read the whole thing.  I'll probably even watch the movie when it's available to stream, because Anna Kendrick is a dear.  But whoo nellie, this one was pretty dang cheesy.

Why I Stopped

Not why I stopped blogging; I'm not self-aware enough to write about that, and it's not very interesting.

But why I stopped reading this book that I had been excited about and that seemed to be giving me everything I always ask for when I talk about books. I've been thinking a lot about why the book I just set aside, Beneath the Citadel, didn't work for me, and about what to say about it.

Self-conscious aside: writing a negative post about a book that I didn't actively dislike but that just didn't work for me feels mean. I often just skip those--I'll write a pan of something that was amusingly bad (foreshadowing; watch this space), but a book that I have some respect for but that didn't work for me--taking the time to pick it apart feels kind of petty.

But the question of why I felt that way is interesting, and it's what's been on my mind. So my apologies to the author, and all of my respect for the good work that went into this book that ended up being not for me.

First, let's say that the cover is glorious. I stared at the cover for a long time before I got a chance to start reading (when it was on my desk at work), and it brought me a lot of joy. The first chapter was also truly excellent; four young rebels appear before a tribunal and are sentenced to death for breaking into the citadel. We learn their characters, get some great moments, and spend some interesting time inside the head of the Chancellor, who is surprisingly sympathetic for the head of the government against which we're going to be rooting.

This is just what I ask for--start me in the middle of some action.  Not the climax, but I have so little patience for a first page that is mostly descriptive.  Don't start me with the weather or the landscape; start with our characters doing something, so I can learn about them by watching them interact with the world.  Perfect here.

Then they're taken into the dungeons, to be executed tomorrow. They execute an unlikely escape, which is pretty cool and impressive, and they flee into the catacombs that are, appropriately enough, beneath the citadel.

Now, I read the first quarter of this book, over 100 pages. The entirety of this section was our four main characters on the run.  Aside from one very important plot driving incident, not much happens in this run.  They are finding their way through the catacombs; there are soldiers chasing them, sometimes closer sometimes further away.

What's really happening in this section is backstory. And there's a lot of it--you've got four characters to meet, to learn how they ended up here and how their relationships with each other work. We also have a huge amount of world-building--who are the rebels, and against what are they rebelling?  We have to learn about how the visions of the seers have governed this world, how the rebellion arose and was put down, where these characters fall in the hundreds of years of political backstory this represents. 

There are a lot of gaps to fill in, and there's a lot of explaining to get us caught up to date. There are scenes from the past, but there's no tension to them, because the outcomes are all foregone conclusions--here is how Cassa and Kestrel met.  We already know they'll become best friends; watching it happen doesn't have the tension, the chance of the unexpected that keeps me reading.

I think what I'm seeing is that, while the book so far has a decent amount of things happening, there is not nearly enough surprise. There is almost no change at all, not even small moments of surprise, at this point in the book.  On a different day, the writing and the characters might have kept me going; I suspect it's going to change shape soon.

But today, I'm antsy and impatient, and I'm lost.  I still want very much to go back and read this author's previous book, Iron Case, which I've heard is excellent.  But here and now, I'm just going to have to shift gears.

Slump-Buster: Sawkill Girls

I've been starting things I was really excited about and wandering away for weeks now. I'd pick up a highly anticipated new release and find I just couldn't stick with it. But then I started reading Sawkill Girls, and I burned through it in a couple of days.

At first I was concerned that this was going to be a book that depended on Hidden Information--there's a mysterious something going on on Sawkill Island, what could it be?  Marion is new there and weird things happen to her; Zoey is mostly an outcast and has lost her best friend and has Suspicions; Val is popular and has a Dark Secret. The cover copy did not give you a lot more information than that, and if the book had tried to run out the hinting and the mystery, I would have exploded.

But it didn't!  We gather information as the characters do, and "what's going on?" is only the first of many questions. You see, girls go missing on Sawkill Island--not too often, but more than you'd think.  Zoey is suspicious. Val knows the darkness.  Marion is about to get caught up in it.

Where can I begin with what I loved? It's got all the touchstones of what I need from both a narrative and emotional point of view.  There are lots of young women who are all very different but fully developed.  There many configurations of friendship, family, and love, and they all look very different and involve different emotions.  There is real emotional fallout from huge things that happen.

The more I think about it, the more I think that it's the depth of emotional reality that I loved here.  Taking just one example, the idea of forgiveness--people hurt each other in ways large and small.  One character, exhausted and hurting, lashes out at a friend with the most hurtful thing she can say, something she doesn't mean. What happens to their relationship?  It doesn't end entirely, but it doesn't snap back to normal in an instant, either. 

But there are other betrayals, large and small, everything from going out to have fun and leaving someone behind to helping a demon kill people. How the characters treat each other and how that treatment evolves is so exquisitely rendered, I'm just bowled over.

But this makes it sound like a languid, internal book, when actually, there is a monster, and a secret society, and doppelgangers, and chase scenes, and superpowers.  There is blood in this book, and gore, but it's not gratuitous. It's huge, world-breaking.

So one other thing I loved--you can't have a story of superpowered girls fighting monsters without at least noticing the existence of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  There are some nice little nods here--the use of the word slayer, the creepy controlling team of old men who stick themselves in the middle to steer things, etc.  I'm not sure if they count as Easter eggs or references or if it's somewhere between an homage and just an ur-story. But I'm pretty sure there was a nod to Buffy fandom in there, if only because you almost never hear the word "effulgent" in day to day life.

Anyway, this book made me supremely happy, and I am going to have to run right out now and read more Claire Legrand, because she clearly has a direct line into my reader brain.