When Angels Fall, Sometimes They Go: SPLAT

 I am so super-duper way ahead on my reading for 2011. Yay me. Part of the reason that I’m ahead is because I’m not tackling books like The Decline and Fall of the Roman empire or anything like that. Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock was quite fluffy and sweet. Don’t get me wrong, it’s everything that a YA coming of age in Wisconsin should be, but it was a very quick read. Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick was also a quick read. However, unlike Dairy Queen, I did not feel like this novel lived up to its potential.

***BLOGGER’S NOTE***

I think this blog is going to be a bit spoilery. I tend to do that with books I don’t like because I don’t want anyone wasting their time on it. No, I mean it—once, a girl updated her facebook to "omg, so excited to start reading Breaking Dawn!" So I posted the entire plot in the comments section. I ended my message with something like “There, now you don’t have to waste your time. You'reWelcomeVeryMuch”

Yeah, I was in cyber-purgatory working that one off for a while. But in this blog I will try to warn you if spoilers are headed your way. You'reWelcomeVeryMuch.

***END BLOGGER’S NOTE***

Nora Grey (I really just sat here staring at my screen trying to come up with the main character’s name for about 45 seconds. I’m sure that speaks to how memorable she was since I finished the book 2 days ago and it should still be fresh in my mind.) Nora Grey is as normal as any other Mary Sue at the beginning of a paranormal YA romance girl in her high school. She is uninterested in boys, gets dragged around by her cartoonish best friend, and is about as dynamic as a paper clip.

Nora's pesky Biology teacher (who is also a basketball? Coach, thereby “Coach” to the kids in the class) suddenly forces the students to rearrange their seating to sit with someone completely random. The purpose of this exercise? To use the powers of investigation (which is “all science is”) to get to know someone new. The chapter that they are studying that would predicate this activity? Sex-Ed. Someone please explain to me what teacher would encourage students to cozy up to a stranger better as a method of teaching them about sex. Anyone who has spent time with teenagers wouldn’t touch that one with a 39 ½ foot pole.

The author does try to explain this one away several hundred pages later by throwing a line of “yeah, I put that idea in Coach’s head, because I wanted to sit next to you” from Patch, the luv interest. It just didn’t feel like enough to justify the amount of time that was spent in that stupid class.

So of course, Nora is paired up with the sexy, brooding, and all-too interested Patch. His eyes are black, his skin is olive and his manner is genuinely terrifying at times. He starts to tell Nora lots of things about herself that a stranger shouldn’t know. What kind of music she likes (classical—oh, sorry Baroque), what school she wants to go to (anything snotty: Harvard, Yale etc), and what her greatest fear is (heights). She is, by turns angry about this and sexually drawn to him.

I mean, really, this whole cycle of lust/hate that went on for about 200 pages was riveting. And groundbreaking. And totally unlike anything that already exists in the genre. Like, totally.

Gag.

When I read Nora’s narration, I felt like there were three different versions of her. And those versions never overlapped.

1) There was the Nora who tragically lost her daddy to a random act of violence the year before. I liked this Nora. In fact, it was the only iteration of the character that I connected with. She really missed her dad and had to deal with panic attacks and gripping fear that something similar might happen to her. I wish the author had spent a little bit more time exploring how this affected Nora and her relationships. If it had been done right, I think it would have actually made her a sympathetic character.

The way it read to me was like the author threw her father’s murder into the character’s background and proceeded to forget about it while actually writing the story. Yet somehow, at the same time it was painfully obvious that the death of her father is not because of a random act of violence. I hope that’s a plot point in book number two and becomes something that actually affects Nora. Truthfully, that's probably why the author was avoiding the issue in the first book. Maybe I should go on Amazon and see if that's actually the case with Crescendo...

2) There was the Nora who felt threatened and violated by Patch. I identified with this Nora. If some kid in school had black eyes and knew lots of creepy details about me, I would tell him to take a hike also. Animal magnetism and sex ed class aside.

3) Then there was the Nora who was so super-duper intrigued by this smoldering hunk of man-flesh. I think most of my issues with this character lay here. I guess if you’re prone to panic attacks and you feel threatened and violated by a guy, there’s no reason for you to want to jump his bones. Seriously, if Timothy Olyphant was running around doing half the things Patch was, I would have no problem going to the cops and getting a retraining order against him. His uber-hotness would be completely eclipsed by the fact that HE’S A CREEPER.

And Patch didn’t stop being a creeper when she started hanging out with him alone. She would just trot off to wherever he was and get all giggly and tingly and hot—she got warm and flushed a LOT and I just found that a little weird.

Truly, I’m okay with all of these elements being a part of the character. I like complex depictions of people in the stories that I read, the problem is that none of these pieces seemed to interact. When a new scene started, I never knew which Nora to expect. She was very rarely (if ever) at war with herself or wrestled with the decisions she made.

I’m almost done, I promise:
*deep breath*

I wasn’t crazy about her best friend either. Things start to feel a little too contrived for me if the main character who has no interest in boys whatsoever, mind you, is constantly hounded by their boy-crazy yet slightly less attractive best friend. I don’t buy that Nora and Vee (Yep, just Vee. Not short for anything that I could gather.) would ever hang out. Maybe if there had been a line about explaining some history between the girls, it would have been an easier pill to swallow. They were just incredibly different and seemed to have different outlooks on boys, school, fashion, you name it. Vee was, as I mentioned earlier, cartoonish. She was the type of character that simply ran her mouth for the sake of it. It was a contrived and tired feeling plot-device.

Now that I feel like I have sufficiently blasted what I didn’t like about the book, let’s talk about what I did like:

The sexual tension. Character consistency issues aside, there were some scenes with great chemistry between Patch and Nora. This didn't really feel like romance to me, though, so his giant sweeping gesture of love at the end of the book felt a bit contrived. But this is the section about what I DID like: so the sexy level was good.

The mythology. Patch fell from heaven way-back-when because he was in love with a girl.  Aww. How very Manny Sue of him. I won’t give away too much incase you want to read the book after all of the wonderful things I had to say about it, but the mythology was interesting. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t enough of it to float the wishy-washy narrator and the contrived scenes.

I was underwhlemed ("can you ever just be welmed?")  and I think if Nora had been more consistent and the story had been a bit more mythological, I would have been welmed at least. I might thumb through the next book, Crescendo, to see if it picks up at all.

Then again, probably not...