Fashion trends come and go - as do book trends. Over the past years we have seen a plethora of fiction works about the holocaust. Then we moved on to stories about rich kids doing bad things and their rich parents in denial. Grumpy old men stories came next, and those men always seemed to have a precocious child neighbor and an animal loaded with personality roaming through the neighborhood. Young adult novels, too, follow trends....vampires (thank goodness those have been struck dead), dystopian, near future, and now we seem to be in a dark spot with books about teens filled with angst and obsessed with death.
All the Bright Places started out fine - interesting characters, OK, but not plausible- opening scene., But in short order, the story, and the writing, flatlined. To avoid spoilers, I will only say that a boy and a girl meet at the top of their school building, each presumably thinking about jumping. I had hoped for some insight into what brought them to the tower, but that promise faded quickly. So much angered me about this book. So many questions. So much that was hard to believe about these kids and the people in their lives.
Let me give you some of the most obvious examples; covering the big ones would take pages. First. what teenage kid can quote Virginia Woolf? If anything, they should be quoting Salinger, or Curt Cobain. How did they get past a school filled with people, and pick a lock to gain access to the roof - on top of which hardly anyone saw them up there on the ledge. That's just the beginning of my disappointment.
Perhaps worst are all the dumb adults in these kids' lives. They fail the kids because they are dumb. The author made them dumb. For example, the principal questions one potential jumper asking if suicide was his plan...because if it was, the parents would have to be notified. Of course, the boy denies it, and the principal allows him to leave with the half-hearted order that they meet each week to talk. Jeez Louise.
I won't even go into how limp the writing is. Young adults deserve better than this. They deserve books like Eleanor and Park - a story and writing the rings with truth, passion, and empathy. Characters are well developed and the writing infused with energy. More about that one next week....just wanted to get this one out here since the holidays have kept me from blogging, and this is our book discussion title for next Friday.
Sure, I get why teenagers might be drawn to this book; there are certainly provocative points to discuss here. Perhaps the author intended for these question to arise- places to begin an open dialogue about challenges faced by today's teens. Perhaps Jennifer Niven painted a fairly generic canvas since each teen's story is different. Perhaps her bland style mimics the apathy she sees in the world. Perhaps we need to stop shaking our heads and moving on. The number of books popping up with this theme means something, doesn't it?
What's our next move?
