Tag Archives: ARC

Review | Remember Tomorrow, Tricia Merritt

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A year after her brother Zach dies, Alannah Greer receives an email from his partner Benson inviting her to Hong Kong for Zach’s memorial service. The email ends with a cryptic assertion that Zach didn’t have to die. En route to Hong Kong, Alannah discovers that she has the ability to time travel, and you can probably figure out the rest of the story from there.

Tricia Merritt’s Remember Tomorrow has an interesting concept. Certainly, I can understand the desire to change history and save a loved one’s life. It turns out that the hit-and-run that killed Zach may have been orchestrated by a corporation studying genetic abnormalities, and so the story takes a thriller-ish turn. It was fast-paced, I liked Benson as a character, and the mystery about the corporation interested me, however, there were several major problems with the novel.

First and most glaring is the language. Merritt goes too far in attempting to make her words sound poetic. 5% in and I was already very frustrated.

…a bologna and ennui on dry rye [1%]

…the bland despair of white bread [1%]

…a little guilt-rodent poked its head up out of its gopher hole [1%]

A mosquito-cloud of distractions… [1%]

…before there’s nothing left but a scalding vortex of antimatter? [1%]

I’m not a big fan of super poetic narratives, but at times, I can see how it works. I am also generally understanding of the occasional unfortunate metaphor. However, so many clustered even just within the first few pages of the eARC, and it was driving me mental.

This is especially unfortunate because there are times when Merritt gives truly striking turns of phrase. For example, I loved the first few lines:

Sometimes, life’s all about cravings. My name is Alannah Greer, and until recently, I’d have killed for a nice tuna salad on sourdough. [1%]

Sharp, concise, intriguing. The tone is just quirky enough to hook the reader. Merritt follows that up with the “bologna and ennui” line that I hated as being overly poetic, but because the first couple of sentences were so striking, I was willing to give her a shot. Another passage I liked:

Benson was my brother’s partner. Was. As an English teacher, I understood the finality of the past tense more clearly than most, and thus I hated it more intensely.

Fucking was. [1%]

Again, concrete details, with a distinctive voice. We learn quite a bit in just a few lines.

For a splinter of a second, I felt sorry for her with her bad posture and her endless cups of lukewarm herbal tea. [2%]

“Splinter of a second” reminded me too much of the earlier-quoted “mosquito-cloud of distractions” — trying too hard to insert metaphor — but I absolutely, absolutely love the image of “endless cups of lukewarm herbal tea.” Amazing.

Merritt has some outstanding phrases, and it’s unfortunate that just when I see a line I absolutely love, I then see a series of lines I absolutely hate. The overall impression is of a young writer in love with her proficiency with language, yet still lacking the experience to know when to pull back.

Her attempts at humour are even less successful than her overly poetic descriptions. She does have some funny moments, but oftentimes, I’d read an offhand comment or a piece of dialogue and cringe, because it just felt too forced to be funny. There was also a truly awkward moment where Zach, teasing Alannah about a date, asks “Did you spit or swallow?” [69%] Merritt acknowledges the impropriety of the question with Benson turning pale and Alannah pertly replying, “That’s for me to know and you to wonder about.” [69%] To be honest, I’m not sure what the line was there for in the first place. Crude humour, perhaps, but it just felt pointless (people with brothers, would they really ask that?) and therefore horribly awkward.

Another issue that could have used a good editor is Merritt’s propensity to go off on tangents. Just when the mission to save Zach really kicks off, and Alannah realizes she now had to investigate who wanted Zach dead in the first place, Merritt pauses that storyline to take Alannah on a shopping trip. I understand Alannah’s need for new clothes at that point, but detailed, Becky Bloomwood-like descriptions of her trip around Hong Kong shops were completely unnecessary. Just as unnecessary was Alannah’s reflections, right after the shopping trip, on her lack of a love life. Again, I’m sure she was lonely and really in need of a sexual encounter at that point, but I just couldn’t care less. A bit later on, when teased about a date the night before, she reminds Benson and Zach about their investigation and tells them they should focus. All I could think was, about time.

I was also bothered by Merritt’s treatment of Alannah’s ability to time travel. After emphasizing how physically draining it is to travel through time, such that Alannah literally collapses after her trips, Merritt then turns time travel into a convenient plot device. Alannah’s plans to prevent Zach’s death involve her travelling through time and undoing whatever errors were in each attempt. It’s still physically draining, and we do see the toll it takes on Alannah to have to time travel after Plan A fails, then Plan B, Plan C and so on, but after a while, Alannah’s ability to time travel starts to feel like deus ex machina.

After all the build up and the random tangents, the ending was rushed. It felt like Merritt realized she had to end the novel and so decided on some action scenes to tie up loose ends. The villain gives a speech about his master plan, and Merritt tries to alleviate the cliche nature of this scene by having Alannah comment sarcastically on the fact that he’s giving a monologue, but it doesn’t help. Worse, even after we get the big reveal, nothing still makes sense to me. How did the villain get involved in the scheme in the first place? Who are the mysterious “they” he keeps alluding to? How did the villain pull all this off, and what does he hope to achieve? Alannah eventually acts like she’s figuring things out, but her explanations still leave many questions unanswered.

Then, in the last few pages, there’s another big reveal, a surprise twist that I saw coming from the beginning. Unfortunately, I only saw it coming because it seemed like a convenient point to add a surprise twist, and not because Merritt set it up well. There were no indications leading up to this twist, and even the reveal was handled in a couple of pages, and in a very anticlimactic way. This revelation had the potential to be huge, yet it was handled with barely a whimper.

Finally, after the big action scenes, there were still some minor threads left unexplained. The action scenes had their casualties, and I at least wondered what happened after that, considering other people in the corporation weren’t aware of the villain’s plot. Didn’t security cameras catch the action? Didn’t the characters have to deal with some kind of fallout afterwards? I was frustrated, and I felt like the author rushed me through the most pivotal moments in the book.

Overall, an interesting concept, and despite all the problems I pointed out, the plot still makes it worth a read. I just think the story deserved better editing.

+

Thank you to Signal 8 Press for an electronic ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. This book was published under the Scarlet Storm Press Imprint of Typhoon Media in Hong Kong.

Review | Lucretia and the Kroons (Novella), Victor LaValle

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Being young didn’t protect anyone. Horrors came for kids too. [p. 163/4]

For twelve-year-old Loochie, the horror is that her best friend Sunny is dying from cancer, and no matter what she does, she is helpless to save her. I liked the beginning of this novella — all Loochie wants for her twelfth birthday is to celebrate with Sunny. Unfortunately Sunny is undergoing treatment and so is unable to attend the party Loochie’s mom throws for her. I like LaValle’s delicacy in depicting the mother/daughter relationship — Loochie’s unwillingness to believe that Sunny’s condition is irreversible, contrasted with her mother’s gentle suggestion that she make friends with other girls (somewhat insensitive, but still well-intentioned). I’m a sap for stories about people dealing with loss, as you can see in my highly emotional review of A Monster Calls), and LaValle’s beginning made me think this novella would be emotional as well.

Unfortunately, it falls apart for me once the story really gets going. Lucretia and the Kroons is about Sunny going missing, and Loochie having to travel to the mysterious apartment 6D to rescue her. 6D is ruled by the Kroons, creatures who have reportedly used crack (according to Loochie’s older brother) and have parts of their faces missing. The Kroons appear mostly as zombie creatures who, for some unknown (at least for most of the novella) reason, keep kids in their lair forever, and Loochie believes they now have Sunny.

There are several ways this story could have gone, and I was hoping for a masterfully crafted horror tale that also works as a metaphor for Loochie’s fear at losing Sunny. Instead, I thought the story was a mess. It was confusing, unable to work either as a full on horror piece or a realistic story. As Loochie explores 6D, part of her wonders how a park or any of the other locations and structures she encounters could exist inside an apartment unit. Her confusion is understandable; unfortunately, LaValle never develops his world fully enough for the reader to grasp it either. I eventually just had to ignore all the references to 6D being an apartment unit (the entire “real”/realistic world) just to make sense of the story’s geography.

Loochie’s search for Sunny and her attempts to outrun the Kroons also felt very disjointed. I can understand Loochie not having a plan on how to locate Sunny, but there didn’t seem to be a logical sequence either in her search. I could follow the thread up until she entered 6D, then the events just seemed haphazard. As well, because we didn’t really understand anything about the Kroons, beyond the fact that they looked like zombies, there was never a sense of real menace about them. It is possible to make a frightening monster without much detail (again, see A Monster Calls), and I can understand Loochie not knowing exactly why the Kroons are scary. However, there just isn’t enough about them for the reader to grasp, which makes this reader, at least, not care.

The story progresses as expected, and once we get touches of the real world, particularly about Sunny’s condition, the story strikes some minor emotional notes. But it’s difficult to lose oneself in the deeper layers of the story when the basic framework itself is so unclear.

The last couple of pages, giving a glimpse into Loochie’s life at thirteen, make sense only to remind us that this novella is a prequel (or companion piece, as it’s called in Goodreads) to LaValle’s novel The Devil in Silver. Perhaps reading that one will give me a better appreciation of this novella. As a stand-alone, Lucretia and the Kroons may have some highlights, but the central action was just too problematic.

+

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group for sending me the e-gallery of this book via Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

Review | The Hollow City, Dan Wells

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Michael Shipman is crazy. A diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, Michael sees Faceless Men and gets splitting migraines whenever a cellphone rings. So when we see the world through Michael’s eyes in Dan Wells’ The Hollow City, we know not to take it at face value.

It takes great talent for an author to get into the mind of someone who’s had a psychotic break from reality. Wells takes this to a whole different level by having readers mistrust his narrator from the beginning, yet slowly begin to question this mistrust. Some authors are able to make psychologically disturbed characters sympathetic and their views understandable, usually through eloquence (Lolita, A Clockwork Orange) or through comparison with a villainous “sane” world (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). Wells however  offers actual clues and details that make us wonder if Michael is, in reality, seeing Faceless Men, and if there is some rational, physiological reason for his adverse reaction to electronic devices.

Hollow City begins as a tragic depiction of an unbalanced mind. Michael’s hallucinations are as real to him as reality is to us, and the intensity of his fear at things we view as ordinary (cellphones, TVs, hot water faucets) inspires sympathy. His condition, particularly his obsession with Faceless Men, makes him a prime suspect in the investigation of serial murderer The Red Line Killer, whose trademark is slicing his victims’ faces off. Worse, Michael has lost two weeks’ worth of memory and is himself unsure if he is the Red Line Killer. I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult it must be not to be able to trust yourself, and when Michael begins to doubt the reality of people around him, some of whom he loves and depends on, he becomes even more isolated.

Then the story takes a completely different turn when Michael’s hallucinations start making more sense. We’re never quite sure if Michael’s perceptions are turning out to be real or if we too have been sucked into his mind. But this does open up a science fiction/horror story angle to the plot. It’s a thrilling ride to the end, and I was as desperate as Michael to find out what, exactly, is going on. Wells never gets as complex as China Mieville or as seductive as Vladimir Nabokov, which he could have done given his premise, and this is perhaps the reason Hollow City didn’t blow me away. The murder mystery that drove the plot started out compelling, but wasn’t really developed, and the big reveal regarding the murderer was fairly obvious and anti-climactic. That being said, I was definitely taken by surprise by the other big reveal, the reason behind Michael’s hallucinations. I love that Wells took a big, unexpected leap with that, and while the ending seemed a bit rushed, given the build up, it made sense. After all the uncertainty, and all the wondering about where Wells could possibly be taking this story, the ending satisfies. A good, solid, fast-paced read.