Recently I went to my local independent bookstore to buy a book to
send to a just-twelve-year-old. What would you recommend, I asked the
lady in charge. How about ‘The Hunger Games’, she said. Erm, children
fighting each other to the death? I don’t think so. But this was on the
same shelf, it has a great cover and it sounded vaguely romancey. When I
got it home, I found I already had it on my Kindle (don’t remember
buying it, let alone why). So I started reading. Well. Suicide,
self-harm, teenage pregnancy, promiscuity and lots and lots of alcohol.
What are they selling to children these days?
It starts well.
Seventeen-year-old Grace wakes up in a completely white room, held
captive by a strange man, Ethan. There are pens and paper in the room,
so she starts writing, both about her captivity and the last few months
before it. The story alternates between present and past, and there’s an
embedded mystery in each: why Grace is a prisoner, and what happened to
her best friend Sal the previous Easter.
The greatest strength
of the book is the way the author conveys Grace’s personality. There
were just one or two moments when an edge of adult wisdom showed
through, but generally the story was Grace, totally and utterly. She’s a
total mess, drinking too much, sleeping around, not getting on with her
mum, cutting herself when it all gets too much. And there we have the
greatest weakness of the book in a nutshell. The reader naturally has a
lot of sympathy for Grace, who has had a difficult life and isn’t coping
well, but she’s not a likeable character to read a whole book about.
There’s a certain horrified fascination in watching her falling apart,
like watching a train-wreck in excruciatingly slow motion or that
accident on the other side of the motorway that you just can’t tear your
eyes from, but it’s not something that makes for an enjoyable book.
As
the two parallel stories unfolded, I began to find Grace more and more
tedious. The chirpy, totally Grace-centric twittering, oblivious to the
world around her, is no doubt authentically teenage, but it gets old
really quickly. By the half-way point, I’d had enough and was reading
faster and faster just to get to the end and find out the solution to
the twin mysteries. That’s where we come to the other big weakness of
the book: the plot is just so predictable. The kidnapping part of the
story distills very quickly into a couple of obvious and unoriginal
possibilities, and the real-life mystery is so blindingly obvious that
it’s impossible to believe that Grace herself doesn’t work it out
straight away. OK, there is a little bit of a swerve at one point, but
it’s not enough to save things.
And then, just when all hope
seems to be lost, the author pulls out an ending which, despite the
predictability, is beautifully written and very moving. This is one of
those books where I can admire the cleverness of the writing without
reservation. The author gets convincingly into Grace’s head, and the
voice is very consistent. It’s not enough, however, to mask the weak
plotting, and somehow I never felt the empathy with Grace that one looks
for with a main character. A disappointing three stars.
