As you probably know by now, I often pick books out based on their cover. I'm a sucker for pretty artwork and especially pretty dresses. Usually this works out pretty well for me - some of my most favourite books were found that way (I'm looking at you, Wither). Every now and then, this method completely fails me. This is the case with this book.Above looks pretty fantastic if we're basing this simply on an aesthetic level. There's a girl with bee wings on the cover, the CN Tower (go, Canada!) and a quote from Emma Donoghue, whose book (Room) I LOVED. I read the blurb on the jacket and it seemed interesting, so I borrowed it from work. It's not often I find a good book from Canada, and I was hoping that this would be the one.
Oh yeah, the plot. Matthew, a strange boy (though everyone in this book is strange) saved Ariel, a girl who can change into a bee, a while ago. Since then he has become incredibly infatuated with her, though it's hard for him to tell if the feeling is mutual. Matthew is the Teller of Safe - he keeps the stories of their refuge's past, as well as the origin stories of all of the people who live there. "Origin stories" sounds as if I were talking about superheroes, but I might as well be - people who live in Safe have found themselves there because they are different and are not/do not want to be accepted in the normal world. They are each abnormal in their own way: some have scales, some have animal limbs, others can turn into bees, see ghosts, shoot lightning. They have a pretty good system going on: raid Above whenever they need supplies, and stay put underground the rest of the time. Except an old enemy has shown up; one that threatens their entire existence. Safe is destroyed, and only a few people - including Matthew and Ariel - manage to escape.
Okay, so I've probably just made it sound like something you might want to read. This is where I was when I started. But there are a few things that I wish someone would have told me before I started.
1. The book is told from Matthew's perspective: This is the main problem I have with this book. The problem is not that the book is told in a guy's voice rather than a girl's... it's that Matthew is not able to speak properly. Being born and raised in Safe, I suppose nobody taught him the real way to talk, though most other people around him appeared to use normal words and sentence structure. This is not the same with Matthew. Don't believe me? "...because I know that look from Tales, the kind where people stare five feet into the distance for the Telling and you need to help to Tell them, like a hand light on the curve of the back." This is one of the more normal sentences. Some things in this book I had to reread multiple times, and I only read 20 pages in a whole day because I couldn't grasp the plot or the characters.
2. It's incredibly hard to follow what's happening: Tying into the last point, it's very difficult to follow the action or make sense of the plot. This is probably mostly due to Matthew's way of speaking, but it deserves its own point nonetheless. Three-quarters of the way through the book, I had NO idea what had happened, or what was currently happening. I understood individual events, but I just wasn't getting into it enough to say what was going on. If asked, I would not have been able to explain the plot to that point. By the end of the book, this had cleared up a little for me, but I don't think a book should confuse its readers up until the ending. I don't mean this in the same way as I would mean it for a mystery book - it's not that I was trying to figure out whodunnit, but rather didn't have a grasp of what the plot was actually supposed to BE. I had problems keeping track of characters, as well, and some I just gave up on figuring out.
3. The characters were one-dimensional: Or at least, what I could understand of them. Sure, at the end a little was revealed about the motivations of some people and why they did what they did, but I feel that there were just too many characters and not enough development on each of them. The author tries to fix this by adding random origin stories throughout the novel, but it's just not enough to make the characters intriguing and interesting. For characters with such strange deformities and origins, I would have expected a lot more in terms of development. This is the first book I have read in a long time that I don't feel attached to any of the characters by the book's end.
I wish that I could say I liked this book, I really do. I hate writing a bad review, and this may be the exact book for someone else, but it wasn't for me. It's rare I find a teen book that I don't enjoy, but here we are. If you're still thinking about trying it, by all means, do. The writing I imagine was supposed to be poetic, so perhaps you'll appreciate it and take much more out of this book than I did. I may try another book by Leah Bobet at some point, but not if the writing is still this way.
SCORE: 2.5/10
IF YOU LIKE: Wither (Lauren DeStefano) *Not because it's similar to this in any way, but because I love it and have to recommend you SOMETHING here!
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