The Madness Underneath (by Maureen Johnson)

A big part of the charm of Maureen Johnson’s first Shades of London installment was the very successful mix of humor (typically Johnson witticisms in the dialogues) and a scary story arc. As such The Name of the Star could almost have been a story on its own: good set-up, good story development, and a fitting ending to the main plot,… except of course some of the characters belonged to the Secret Ghost Police and there were oodles of possibilities to franchise this and make it into a series,… which Johnson did.

The Madness Underneath picks up just a few weeks after the very eventful finale of The Name of the Star. We find Rory in Bristol, and no longer in London, to recover from the Ripper attack. Because she can’t really come clean about what really happened (“Yeah, so I was attacked by a ghost, and now I have these really freak ghost-zapping powers.”) without being put in the loony bin permanently, the therapy sessions she has with her therapist aren’t really that successful. Rory feels the need to open up, but there really isn’t anyone. However, for a reason that will become clear later on, her therapist decides that the best for Rory might be to go back to London and pick up her old life again, have some sort of “normal” routine again. The entire first half of the book is actually a very convincing rendering of Rory as a victim of a violent crime (even though she doesn’t really want to be considered as a victim) and her having to come to terms with what happened. Once she is back at Wexford she (consciously or not) pushes away her old friends. That means that this book is a Jazza- and Jerome-light book (not to mention that also Boo and Callum are well…afterthoughts really). I totally believed “Rory as a victim” the first 150 pages of the book. I bought it. It made sense why she’d be the whiny talkative Rory rather than the funny talkative Rory. Hey, if you’d been stabbed by the ghost of a serial killer you might be whiny too!  Unfortunately, this aspect of characterization might also be a reason for this book to be accused of suffering from “middle book syndrome” (of a 4-part series, that is), though.

Anyway, I can pinpoint exactly where Johnson lost the cat…. Actually, there were two things. The first occurred when it became clear that she is basically setting Wexford up as the Hellmouth (Like, the cracks? Really?).  Still, that in and of itself could have worked, when done right, and more importantly exclusively… Sadly, that doesn’t happen. Let me explain. The book starts with a murder. This murder plotline is abandoned for about 150 pages to focus on Rory and her settling back into school but not really being able to just resume her “normal” routine of studying for exams and all that school stuff because of all the shit that happened to her there. Now, one would hope that the second part of the novel were about that prologue murder right (that’s also how the first book was structured, btw)?

But is it? Mèh…not so much. There are a few hints here and there, but the main subplot is my second (and main) beef with this book: that totally lame-ass subplot involving a therapist and a cult. Had Johnson focused on just the one subplot – that of the murder and “the madness underneath” – this book would have been so much more exciting (without losing the victimization of Rory aspect of the book) and believable. However, as it is now, Johnson will have a hard time trying to reconcile the Buffy subplot with the True Blood subplot. I dunno, I can’t shake the impression that this books reeks of (dare I say it?) derivativeness …

In any case, this book is clearly not as developed as the first book.  Maybe with some more attention to structure (and pacing! I hate it when all the action is crammed into the 30 or so last pages of a book!), it might have been possible to successfully “conclude” this “madness underneath” murder? This book is a mere 290 pages (as opposed to the first book, which was more than 370 pages), so it just really seems only half a book.  The cat still gives this book 3 stars, though, because as always, Johnson’s writing style is very engaging, and she just has you going page after page. I’m not pleased with how half-finished this book seemed, but I’m definitely interested enough to continue with the series.

 

PS. Cover photo taken @ Soul Coffee (lemon-lime lemonade & cassis-lime lemonade)

I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You (by Ally Carter)

For a book about a bunch of kick-ass girl spies, this book is terribly uneventful. The premise and the blurb, not to mention the teen testimonials at the beginning of the book set this up as a killer (literally) of an adventure book. One teen even goes so far as to say “JK Rowling meets Jacqueline Wilson”, but it’s a really boring JK Rowling and a not so humorous Jacqueline Wilson, that we’re getting. This book really misses something: it misses the spunk and the bangs that I expect when I’m promised a book about an all-girl spy school!

Cammie – the Chameleon (her talent is to blend in! Imagine that!) – is the child of two former spies. Her dad died on a mission and Cammie’s mother retired from the CIA to become headmistress of the Gallagher Academy,  a school for spies. Incidentally, no one on the town where this academy is located, knows that it’s a spy school, instead everyone in town assumes it’s a boarding school for rich girls. On one of the very few occasions when the Gallagher girls are allowed to go into town (something for their CoveOps class), Cammie meets Josh. For the first time ever, Cammie is in a situation that’s more dangerous than any mission she’s likely to embark on in the future: she falls in love.

Not only is the plot completely underdeveloped, what probably irked me the most what the lack of character use in this little novel. Case in point, Macey McHenry. In the beginning we’re introduced to a new girl at the school, snooty and snobby Macey who has all the potential to shake things up, but…nothing happens… Or, Cammie falls in love with a boy, Josh. But rather than getting to know Josh, the reader basically has to believe that this is real love (where is the relationship development??). Lots of telling, very little showing. Another example is Dillon, Josh’s best friend. For some reason he (and the rest of the town?) hates Gallagher Girls, but rather than giving some back story or developing some sort of subplot, the reader is just presented with a cardboard character who hates GG for the sake of hating GG. A lot of what is going on in the book, and a lot of what we are supposed to believe about the characters is just that: we are supposed to think they are this or that. We are supposed to take everything for granted. Don’t think, just move on.

Meanwhile, there’s no big adventure, there’s no big mission, there’s not even a teeny tiny explosion. It’s a very lackluster affair for a spy novel! I think this was supposed to be Alias for teenage girls (btw, no way is Cammie 16! She totally behaves like a 12-year-old!), but we didn’t even get wigs!! Color me disappointed!

 

PS. This book also has one of the worst titles ever!

PPS. Photo of cover taken at the renovated Bruggenhuis.

Light (by Michael Grant)

It seems the cat is suffering from Gone fatigue…  Leaving a year between installments just didn’t seem like such a good idea. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I still finished this book is record time, but it was more of a “let’s see how this ends and we’re over and done with it” kind of thing, than a “Wow, what a great and earth-shattering conclusion this really is!”

If you’ve made it till Fear – the previous book – you’re obviously going to read Light, so it’s not as if Michael Grant will lose any readers because of this book, but I doubt he’ll make any new fans either. Somehow the fights, the explosions, the violence… all of it doesn’t seem as grand anymore as in some of the previous books. The utter evil that Penny seemed to be in Fear, for instance, is somehow lost now. The only real “villain” is Gaia – the gaiaphage – but (and I blame this on Gone fatigue – she (or it) s no longer as convincingly bad as she was for instance when Caine or Lana were under its spell. Now that the gaiaphage is ‘out in the open’, so to speak, the evil that comes from her seems…expected, and her wanting to kill all and everything just for the sake of it, without any other obvious plans for what comes after… well it’s a mute sort of evilness.

Also, all the fights and near misses are just that: another fight, and another explosion, and people are just running around from Perdido Beach to wherever the gaiaphage might be next and then they fight some more, and run some more, and… you know, what was once über-electrifying (“wow, he/she fights like that, how neat is that!” or “you have got to be kidding me, killer mutant worms?????” and edge-of-your-seat excitement , is now almost normal (even the fact that some beloved characters die!) and yes, I hesitate to say it… a chore to get through until you get to the end game.

And actually, when you think about the end game and the ultimate fight… for a lot of these characters there was no conclusion, and as a result this whole last book even seemed anti-climactic, which is a weird feeling to have when your main villain is defeated, right?

Oh, one final note. The cat bought Light in a Waterstones store in Canterbury (England). Waterstones apparently got a bunch of signed books. So yeah!

Beautiful (by Amy Reed)

Beautiful by Amy Reed is Thirteen as a book, focusing on a good girl – 13 years of age – gone terribly bad: (unwanted) sex, alcohol, drugs,… you name it, and Cassie is experiencing it. Moved from tiny Bainbridge Island to one of Seattle’s suburbs, Cassie consciously wants leave her good girl image behind. We learn in the beginning that at her previous school she was not one of the popular girl which she desperately wanted to. There the “good girls” were the popular ones. At her new school she wants to be different, popular… and here the popular people aren’t the goody two-shoes, but the bad boys and girls. As such, Cassie befriends Alex, who introduces her to the world of sex, drugs and more.

There’s nothing uplifting about a story like Cassie’s: the friendship with Alex is one based on power. The relationship Cassie has with a popular high schooler is equally one that is based on power and submission. At no point you get the impression that this is something Cassie really wants – despite her initial resolve to “change her image”. It quickly becomes a downward spiral, which is both realistic – such is the way of drugs when mixed with hormonal 13-year-olds apparently – and unrealistic at the same time. Time and again the reader is pointed to the fact that Cassie is really smart, but none of her actions show that. Also the fact that she continues to get all As in the smart classes despite her increasing drug habit is not exactly realistic. At one point there’s a glimmer of hope, when Cassie makes friends with Sarah, Alex’s half-sister who’s been placed in Alex’s family because her father abused her. With Sarah there seems to be a real bond, until that too is of course nipped in the bud.

Beautiful hardly tells an original story (Ellen Hopkins fans will love this!), but luckily Amy Reed’s style is fluent and entertaining enough to keep you going. Plotwise, it’s also hard to get past the derivative nature of this book (it really is exactly like Thirteen), but Reed manages to keep her reader guessing at times, for better or worse… What happened to Cassie’s family to have them move in the first place. What’s up exactly with Alex and her mother? What about Cassie’s parents? Again, some of these elements add to the tension, but others just feel more like “underdevelopment. All in all, Beautiful is a bit of a mixed bag: compelling for the tale that is being told, but not exactly standing out in originality or execution…

Rotters (by Daniel Kraus)

When Joey Crouch’s mother suddenly dies, Joey is uprooted from Chicago to a small rural town in Iowa to live with a father who doesn’t even have the same last name as him. Life is hard on Joey, who was in Chicago a straight A student and loved to play the trumpet. Things take a turn for the worst, when Ken Harnett not only doesn’t pick him up from the station but also ends up being the town pariah – he’s nicknamed the Garbageman! The harsh circumstances at Harnett’s cabin – no food, no bathroom, no washing machine, no electronics – are nothing if not shocking, but at Bloughton High, Joey soon becomes the school pariah too (he can’t escape the horrible stench that is all over his father’s shack), bullied by the jocks (who start calling him ‘Crotch’) and a crueler than cruel biology teacher. He even loses the only friend he had in Chicago, Boris, who tells him not to call him again.  Because Joey wants to know what his father is up to at night, he decides to follow him and discovers his father’s secret: he’s a grave robber! Almost begrudgingly Harnett takes on his son as an Apprentice. From then on Joey sort of leads a double life. By day he goes to school, trying to keep up his straight As (as a sort of promise to his mother), but at night he accompanies his father on his job… a job that Joey describes in every minute horrific stinking decaying detail. And as horrible and disgusting everything is in the book… as a reader you’re almost spellbound: you want to know what is going to happen next with Joey and the Diggers, but also with Joey and his life at school. The juxtaposition of these two worlds also begs the question which hell is worse: that of the grave robbers or that of Bloughton High School.

The best way to describe Daniel Kraus’ writing is compelling. We experience everything from Joey’s almost authorial voice, which succeeds in both creating a certain distance between the reader and what is going on in the book (grave robbing, not your average teenage pastime, right?), but at the same time there are such incredible details about the machinations of e.g. digging a hole, robbing a grave, decaying bodies etc, that this voice is almost hypnotizing you and urging you to dig deeper (sorry!) into the story of the Diggers. Almost so much so that you can smell the stench!

Rotters is definitely not for the squeamish… it’s a true horror story, unflinching in its execution, uncompromising.  Although the book does sag a little bit at times, and is probably also a tad too long, it proves what an excellent world-builder and storyteller Daniel Kraus is. And even though Rotters deals with some seriously disturbing things, there’s a tragic truth to be learned here about the value of human life and human dignity – at all levels!

 

Also, here’s a bonus: