Up until about four months ago, I had a no DNF (did-not-finish) reading rule. Every book I picked up was a binding commitment; if I started it, I would finish. This was based upon the concept of thinking that everything you read will teach you something, or something like that. Maybe that was a weird moment of overly accommodating nicety in believing that the author would be telepathically wounded if I quit their novel. Also up until about four months ago, I bulled through so many bad books.
Naturally, my summers are some of the best times for me to read. Hours upon hours stretching ahead in front of me, plenty of parks and bus rides to host my private times tucked away into literature. I have the time and the space to delve into new works, as compared to the stifling rhythm of the academic year. This summer was no exception, but unfortunately it was soured by the curse of the Bad Book. I’m not sure what was in the air at my local library, bookstores and epub source sites, but I decided I had suffered enough, and broke my aforementioned rule.
Sometimes when I read something exceedingly bad, I can laugh it off and cast it away without a thought. This summer, more often than not, I was unable to brush off the atrocities that came across my desk and was left with residual rage instead of annoyance at wasted time. This reminds me of a common saying my mother uses when she hears of my sister and I watching/listening to/reading something trashy: “Do you know how many brain cells you’re wasting with that?” I feel that I only now comprehend the true meaning of her words, while reflecting on how much time and brain space I wasted on lost causes in literature.
There’s a difference between a book one does not like, a type of book one does not like, and the contents of a book one does not like. I don’t swear off young adult literature as a whole, of course, nor do I coming of age novels. On the contrary, I find myself gravitating towards these types of stories whether in search of a new one to fall in love with in regards to craft or some reflection of myself in fiction. I don’t think these are wildly unreasonable asks, or ones out of line with what any other teenage girl would want to read. Unfortunately, I do think the results of my searches are becoming scarcer by the year.
I do enjoy a good impassioned rant, but I’ll try to limit myself when I describe some of these books to you. I aim to make an example, and to ward off others from wasting their time in the future. There’s nothing I can say about Sally Rooney and contemporary white MFA style novel authors that hasn’t been said before, but I would like to reiterate some of the points made by others and point to how this phenomenon has rippled into young adult literature as well. For years, white female readers have headed the young adult literature sphere. These fangirls charged, they promoted, they extolled the virtues of literacy above all else, and they defended themselves against ridicule by shielding themselves with John Green covers. Without delving into the “let teenage girls have fun” argument, it’s safe to say that this group was an overwhelmingly represented majority. Unfortunately, this has persisted, despite the voices of teens and authors of color ringing loud and clear for decades now. Through the sensational echo chambers of booktok and litblr, the cycle repeats and everyone is subjected to boring stories about boring white characters by boring white authors. I haven’t even tapped into my full exhaustion regarding this yet.
Dead Queen’s Club by Hannah Capin
I won’t be the one to tell you we have too many historical modern retellings, but. This book did not work. This book was bad. On every front it attempted to breach, it fell on its face. Readers are placed right in the middle of a Tudor-style (literally) high school drama with lazily replaced names, diverging timelines, a suspicious lack of social dogma, and a cardboard protagonist. The tale of King Henry and his many wives is pulled this way and that, twisted and torn, and made to be an amalgamation of tropes that is an embarrassment to all of those who were involved in bringing it to this very page.
We don’t know anything about “Cleves”, our main character and narrator, other than the fact that she’s sassy and whitewashed. The former can be read: she tells awful 2014 tumblrina comeback jokes. The latter is portrayed with horrifyingly little tact or attention given to herself and her sister’s adoption; Cleves cracks jokes about her family making up the United Nations and disparages her African sister’s goals of following her parents into academia. She literally calls the only black character in the book “The Princess of Darkness”. We know nothing of Henry himself other than that he’s an insecure overachiever and obviously evil. The settings and pacing are vague enough to confuse the reader, but not vague enough to be disregarded.
If there’s one thing in particular about this book I cannot stand, it’s the heavy handed attempts at making the contents of this book socially relevant. Reductive spiraling girl-power monologues from Cleves lead to no genuine conclusion, innovative concept or addition to her character. Making her out to be a “truth-seeking” journalist is a joke, a bad one too. In attempting to distinguish the numerous girlfriends in this novel, Capin reinvents the same Madonna-Whore trope over and over again with different names. This “feminist” attempt at restoring power to the women of the Tudor narrative is a failure, and a poorly written one at that.
Little Universes by Heather Demetrios
Both on paper and the cover, this book has promise. It plays to many hot topics, pastel designs, loopy prose and a good old sister duo. It fails, miserably so, and bulldozes every “reference” it claims to supplement itself with in a shameful display of appropriation and pacing. Also, please pardon any language or unsavory ideas in these excerpts, but I feel the need to include them to wrap my mind around the absurdity of this book. I’m not making this stuff up.
To paint some examples for you: an adopted white affluent teenager laments for pages to an Asian American man about her ethnic identity and the struggle it presents for her. She cites her ancestry dating back to the actual Mayflower as a reference.
“‘Everyone’s talking about race and culture all the time,” I say. “Owning what you are, who you are. Shouting it from the rooftops. More and more, it’s all about your heritage. But what does that mean for someone like me? I love avgolemono. And My Big Fat Greek Wedding. And, even though I don’t believe in it, I really liked all the evil eyes my yia-yia hung around the house. And I want them to be mine—my culture, a part of me. But they’re not. The problem is, if I got a DNA test and found out I was Norwegian or something, I wouldn’t be that, either. Because blood isn’t culture. I don’t have any connection to Norway at all!’
‘You’re American. That’s a culture.’ He smiles. ‘Playing devil’s advocate, by the way. I get what you mean.’
‘No, you’re right. I am American. But. American culture is immigrant culture. Everyone has these culturally identifiable last names. These stories about ancestors immigrating. Family recipes and language and all that. Everyone! Only Native Americans don’t have immigration stories, but they have their own stories. Migration stories, obviously. They have tribes. My dad’s family loves talking about the Mayflower and showing us graves in the old cemeteries here—we have Revolutionary War soldiers in the family, Civil War soldiers. There’s this line—of people and stories—that connects everyone in the Winters and Karalis families, and I don’t have any of that.’”
This very same character later compares her struggle to that of her black friends adopted by white parents, and envies her token black friend’s sassy comebacks after experiencing racism in a grocery store unprompted. Another white affluent teenager (the sister of the former) monologues sarcastically about how she resents the concept of white privilege because a misguided-someone in therapy told her “she couldn’t be sad” because of it, disparaging her personal comfort and battle with mental illness. Italics added for emphasis in the following excerpt are my own.
“And, okay, boo-hoo or whatever, privilege, first-world problems, all the things I’m supposed to say, but here’s the point: I’m fucking sad and I feel like a goddamn ghost, okay, and I’m sorry if that’s politically incorrect, I’m sorry if my invisibility comes with my own savings account and matcha lattes, but it’s mine, okay, it’s mine and it’s real to me, so just let me freaking have it. I know, I know that other people, so many other people, are invisible in ways that can get them killed or never have a good job or a seat at any table. I know this. But invisibility is a spectrum, like anything else. And I’m on it. So when some white kid in my Circle of Sad was all, white fragility, white tears, check your privilege after my turn, I was like, DUDE. Really? Really? So sad is just off the table for me. Like I can’t feel it. Or express it. I’m in a freaking therapy group, what the fuck? I’m just trying to explain, to explain how the entire cosmos is like flashing these neon signs about how I’m a worthless piece of shit and don’t you ever wonder what’s the point of you and maybe there’s no point at all?”
I’m so disgusted by this supposed honest profession of mental illness that I’m going to step back and digress. The aforementioned Asian American man’s first entire page of his introduction is spent being compared to, fetishized as, and equated with the former white affluent teen’s favorite manga character. I’m not kidding, an entire page of the book is dedicated to this.
“When I reach the bottom of the staircase, a boy I’ve never seen before is sprawled on the couch next to Nate, staring intently at a laptop on the coffee table...The boy next to him looks, and I think I maybe gasp a little because MY FAVORITE MANGA CHARACTER IS IN MY NEW HOUSE. It’s as if Ichigo Kurosaki from Bleach decided to come over for dinner. This boy specimen even has the same messy orange hair...He looks exactly like Sota Fukushi, who plays Ichigo in the live-action movie. If I saw him on the street and had no self-respect, I would ask him for an autograph. On my bare chest. I am losing my mind.”
To top things off, this man expresses extensively that race and social identity constructs aren’t necessary, he resents them, and also happens to enjoy being compared to said manga character to microaggressive strangers.
“‘You’ll figure it out,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to label yourself. I don’t go around being all, I’m Japanese American. I’ve never been to Japan. I’m from Brooklyn. I’m just me. You’re you. Fuck labels and the people who insist on them. If a label society wants to give you is helpful to you, makes you feel connected to the world—gender, race, religion, nationality, whatever—cool. Use it. There can be awesome community there. But if it’s not, if the label makes you smaller inside: Fuck it. My lab partner refuses to share their gender with anyone. They told me that they’ve decided what they are, but it’s no one else’s business. They’re like, Fuck all your assumptions about what or who you think I am if I say I’m male, I’m female, or even nongendered. I’m just me, and that’s all you need to know. Hello, nice to meet you. You feel me?’
I cannot wipe the smile off my face. No one, no one has ever made so much sense to me in my whole life, not even Dad explaining his dark matter quintessence theory.
‘Wow, Ben. WOW.’”
This incorporation of the most piss-poor summation of race theory or socialization being spoon-fed to a white girl by a man of color is abhorrent and reprehensible, and makes me angrier the longer I think about it. This obvious self-insertion from a professional author into the two protagonists of this book does a disservice to its quality and integrity. I’m not even halfway done yet.
The only black character in this book is a walking Dharma text. Her absolute only backstory is finally shared to progress a white protagonist’s journey in a moment of need; she is a caregiver and she is the most side of side characters. Speaking of that white protag: Demetrios has the absolute gall to say that she was named Mae after the first black woman in space as a prophecy for her to become an astronaut. I was so sickened by these equivocations, and the fact that the author had the nerve to try and thinly veil these racist themes with social consciousness and “learning moments” for her protagonists.
It is, simply put, an embarrassment to see how this author made the following concepts (or amalgamations of them warped away from their previous context) personality traits or development plots for the mentioned two affluent white teens: meditation, dharma, tarot and various spiritual practices such as smudging. She stops at nothing to supplement the culture that the protagonists belong to in order to have them leave something behind, and doesn’t give more than a second thought to develop those ideas or explain where they came from with due credit.
With no allusions to autistic coding or otherwise implied socioemotional boundaries, Mae as a character is insufferable. If Demetrios wanted a mad-scientist-nerd trope, she could have had it. Instead Mae uses literal astrophysics equations to “work the problem” of her sister's opiate addiction, which is repeatedly used to prop up her own development, which is none. Hannah’s addiction is a central focus of the book, but swamps other elements of plot in an imbalance that leads to several triggering passages and violently excessive trauma. If a reader had not been comprehensively prepared by reviews or warnings for the latter third of this book, I would be concerned for their state of mind entering those passages with no precedent. Even if you ignore the casual racism and embarrassing characters, this book is a thinly veiled disaster in pacing and plot. I will be blacklisting this author for the future, and highly recommend that you all do the same.
There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins
I will refrain from claiming to be an experienced horror fanatic, but I feel that most consumers can discern and identify the classic themes and elements of a slasher. Professionals versed in teenage media should have just as much knowledge, if not more. What I am unable to decide is if Perkins’ work here can be credited to negligence in reference work or lack of skill in genre switching. The YA romance to YA horror pipeline is derelict, rusty, and filled with tetanus, apparently.
If there’s one thing I know about slasher media, it’s that the killer is crucial. Whether the big reveal has personal ties, or a betrayal close to home, it reflects on the victims that they chose and the environment they prey in. The cardinal sin of this novel is that the killer is completely random. Like random-extra-in-the-background-not-previously-given-a-name random. Any red herrings were thrown together in obvious strokes, and by the time the reader is allowed to know the identity of the killer, we have no compulsion to care about him or his story. His motive is flimsy and has basically no correlation to the protagonist and final girl until she interferes with his murder spree. If you’re going to break genre “rules”, at least do so well!
Regarding our protagonist, I feel sad that she was handled by an incompetent author that couldn’t do her justice. Half black and half indigenous Hawaiian, Makani is the new girl next door with a dark past. We are kept in the dark until very late in the novel, when it is revealed that Makani suffered a graphic, detailed, described in length hazing assault from her swim team in Hawaii before moving to a small town in the Midwest with her grandmother. Beyond hating her new digs and making out with her newly acquired boyfriend, Makani is given little other development or traits. Her race is mentioned often, but rarely discussed in a complex way that contributes to the story. The hazing scene (which stretches on for pages, describing at length the violating acts done to her) offers nothing to the plot, the current setting or the killer, and the fact that trauma is Makani’s only backstory is extremely telling of how Perkins developed her character.
My back cover flap says that this author lives in North Carolina, and as someone who has lived there as well as the Midwest (where the book is set), this is possibly the worst site specific text I’ve read. The insulation of a small-town-slasher is a classic, but given the fact that the setting is integral to the killer’s motive, it lacked its own presence. The most we know about this town is that it is (1) small (2) boring and (3) small. This isn’t to say that settings can be small for the sake of being small, but the way the characters and narrator discuss their surroundings is exceedingly repetitive and unrealistic.
The typical tooth-rotting romance expected of Perkins is present here, with little buildup or tension. Makani, supposedly a loner outcast, is intrigued by Ollie, another loner outcast. His vampire skin and pink hair are apparently huge draws, and by the first quarter of the book they are already together. The multiple opportunities for Ollie to be revealed as the killer were bypassed, and yet he received more background than the rest of our characters put together.
Finally, the ending of this novel was extremely unsatisfactory. In a final fight scene, Makani takes down the killer after being chased through a corn maze, the corpses of her friends left behind as she establishes herself as the final girl. Moments after the supposed death of the killer, most of her friends mysteriously revive themselves, and all is well with the world again. The victims of the killer who hold actual emotional weight remain dead, but those close to Makani make it out alive. This lack of resolution when paired with the flat killer reveal makes this book drone on, to the point where one is merely glad to finish it.
The lesson to be learned from these books is a simple one: When white authors try and crowd as many themes, buzzwords and references into their work as they can without possessing the craft or skill to do so, they fail. Without necessary homage and credit being given to the authors of color and creators of cultures, these authors tried to cram worlds of significance into their own personal creative boxes. I now feel much more comfortable with my DNF rule breaking, because for every bad book like these, there are many more meaningful stories crafted with passion and care to engage with waiting for me. Until next week, I love you! Be safe and be well.