This is a weird book. It wasn't published by a vanity publisher, but by an unknown, small-time publisher. They apparently decided this book had potential, and I do indeed think it had potential. Potential to be a better story, but it honestly has a lot going for it despite its sheer weirdness.
The book feels amateurish, but for everything is does wrong, it does something very right that made it enjoyable for me.
Samantha is a mixture of believable and questionable. At the beginning, she does act like a 10-year-old, talking like one, realizing she's in way over her head, and being freaked out by everything that's going on. But over time, she starts to crack types of jokes or say things that sound implausible coming from the mouth of a 10-year-old, as if the author was losing his understanding of how the character ticks. It's a shame, as believable characters are very important to me. They can really put the reader in the story like nothing else. I find believable characters honestly more important than believable events. I can even tolerate implausible dialog as long as it's coming from emotional reality, like in Starbright and the Dream Eater, whose dialog is quite questionable but whose characters ring true.
And speaking of losing control of the story, it really does seem to change as it goes along, as if B. B. Hunt didn't have a consistent vision to stick to. The story starts out with a Lemony Narrator who jokes about everything and teases the reader a lot, but gradually loses that over time. And it mixes the Lemony Narrator with believable characterization of our protagonist as she shuffles through her life drama and the scary adventure she's been thrown into against her will. But what happens over time? The book shifts to action-adventure, loses some of that believable characterization, has a more straight-faced narrator, and almost feels like a different book entirely.
The world is interesting, a mixture of generic and random with some original-feeling ideas. Characters use lightsabers and laser guns. They ride flying horses. They live in a world of white skies and blue clouds and sparkling black beaches. The rebels live in a cave with a giant lake hidden underneath a massive tree with a magical door. Some of this stuff is just weird. Some of it feels half-assed, like the color swapping. And some of it is stuff seen in many other fantasy stories, like the idea of a giant tree with a door. It is consistent enough that I felt the world worked just fine, however, which is another point in the book's favor.
The story moves fast, and then eventually it moves even faster. The pacing starts out pretty good, I'd have to say. You get introduced to the characters enough to get to know them well enough, and then things quickly happen. But the pacing is broken later on, as it just speeds up too much for me to really get to care as much as I otherwise might.
And that teleportation. Seriously, what a Story-Breaker Power. It's handled with inconsistency; being bound and gagged is the only way to prevent Samantha from using it, yet she is seen using it earlier with no indication that she even spoke at all. Did the author forget that, and decide later to invent rules for the use of the power? This is why you need someone to read through your story and proof it for you - to prevent things like this. But either way, it's still way overpowered. Samantha can teleport at will, out of harm's way, right behind an enemy to attack them, or just appear in or out of the enemy's base. Honestly, someone who has unlimited teleportation power would make the ultimate assassin. There'd be no way around it; they'd have to be killed. Pulling the gag down (say, to feed or interrogate her) would simply mean Samantha could teleport out right away. The power breaks everything.
Finally, the content of the story. There's profanity used at times, kids being killed in the story - albeit none who are major characters - and yet it has an eccentric, petty villain with a cartoonish ego. What on earth? At the same time, I can see kids loving that. As a kid, I could easily see myself being impressed that the book has the nerve to kill kids, while also enjoying the love-to-hate villain who poses for portraits and flaunts his self-proclaimed awesomeness to everyone. It's immature in its execution, and really, more kid-like than anything else.
Besides, when I was a kid, I read Choose Your Own Adventure books - do you remember those? The main character, usually a kid, would die all kinds of ways, some of which are quite morbid or freaky. Game over. While that's not nearly the same as a book that has a character die permanently as part of the story, it's still child death in a book. I could handle it, and I think many kids can. We adults tend to want to protect kids from this kind of content, to be freaked out that it exists in a product aimed at kids. But I played Life is Strange in front of my 7-year-old nephew and even explained the story to him. I don't like the idea of sheltering kids from the bad things that can happen in the world, and you just know that they'll learn about it anyways via other kids or the internet.
Anyway, for everything this book does right, it does something wrong. Or did I previously say that for everything it does wrong, it does something right? Either way, it has a mixture of flaws and successes. It works, and it doesn't. But when it does, I really enjoy it.
I have to wonder if B. B. Hunt has never written a book before, and this is their first book ever. Likely it's their first published book, at least. I once tried to find out who this author is, and an internet search years ago found a B. B. Hunt on Myspace - a black man who lived in New Orleans. Considering this book's New Orleans setting, and the description of Samantha and her family as dark-skinned Caribbean, I think I may have found the author. I didn't contact him, though. I wish I had. The book ended with a teaser for a sequel that never came. I'd have been interested in reading a sequel, as long as it brought back the things this book did right.
The book feels amateurish in the sense of being written by someone who didn't know quite how to make a story flow, how to have it make sense, and yet he did an admirable job with the things that did work. Sure, he stumbled on continuity, lost his flow, and made a world that feels bizarre, generic and random all at once. But overall, I enjoyed myself, even as this liveblog poked fun at the book and made many jokes at its expense. It was broken at times, but shined at others. It worked and it didn't work. It was enjoyably fun, and fun in a "What on earth?!" kind of way. But it was fun. And honestly, isn't that the best compliment one can give a novel?
Comments
