Age: YA
So I read this book because ordinarily I like Meg Cabot, I really do--she's not the most fantastically literary writer ever, but what she does, which is light, fun chick lit, she does well. And I also read it because my library had it as an ebook and I don't have a kindle or anything but I've been sick lately and then recovering from being sick and just generally feeling too lazy to hold an actual book with my actual arms. I much preferred propping the laptop up on my legs and using one finger to scroll.
I think this may be the very silliest, fluffiest book I have ever read. And coming from me, that means something. Chick lit is one thing (much as I loathe the name--aren't "Chiclets" that horrible gum you used to get as birthday party favors in elementary school, with the pieces that were so tiny that if you ate just one, or even two or three, at a time, you would have so little to actually chew on that inevitably you would end up accidentally swallowing the gum and then panicking because everyone knows swallowing gum will kill you?). But this is so bad it doesn't even qualify as chick lit. This book is to chick lit like...okay, say you're PMSing, and you realize that it's chocolate time. And you turn the house upside down but you can't find chocolate to save your life--no Riesens, no peanut butter cups, no brownie mix, no chocolate chips, not even any cookies n' cream ice cream so you can try to convince your poor hormonal self that those little oreo bits count as chocolate. But you do find an old bag of leftover Halloween candy...just sugary stuff, no chocolate. "But it's candy!" you tell yourself. "That's just like chocolate! It's sweet, it's fattening, it will make me sick if I gorge myself on it as I plan to." So you eat the whole bag, and you make yourself horribly nauseous, and you're still absolutely miserable. Because it just doesn't do it for you, does it. It's JUST. NOT. CHOCOLATE.
No, this book isn't chick lit. It's a historical romance novel. I knew that about it before I read it, but it just didn't register. I thought it meant "historical," as in, set in a historical time period, and "romance" as in, something romantic happens. "Yay!" I thought. Nope, it means "historical romance" as in romance novel as in cheap and rushed and quite likely concocted by pushing brightly colored buttons on some primitive computer. You know, a button that says "dashing bad man" and another one that says "unexpectedly handsome good man who heroine always thought she hated but now finds herself strangely drawn to" and one that says "a dastardly plan will keep the lovers apart!" It's mostly stolen from Pride and Prejudice, with a bit of Vanity Fair tossed in, all stirred together with the heavy spoon of melodrama. "Tie me to the train tracks but I'll never sign the deed!"-style melodrama. The only thing it doesn't have is any sex. It is intended for teens and it is entirely clean. And okay, yes, clean books for teens is good, but in my opinion a romance novel should at least have a good make out scene or two.
And you know what? Even for a cheap romance novel, it's not very good. I've read my fair share of cheap romance novels and it was worse than many of them. The dialogue is AWFUL. I've done some research and it seems like most people agree that one of the cardinal rules of dialogue is "Read it out loud and see if it sounds even remotely like how people talk." Now, sometimes I come across a book with pretty lame dialogue, so I read it out loud, and if I give it the right sort of inflection I can find myself conjuring up in my imagination a person who might actually talk like that. Probably a person with whom I would limit my interactions, but a human being nonetheless. So I tried that with this book. And the only thing I could see in my imagination was Meg Cabot sitting at her primitive romance novel machine, smiling to herself and clapping her hands and going, "Ooh, that's good! That sounds so 1810!" and then rewarding herself with some horribly non-chocolate sugary treat. Meg, I've read books that were written in 1810, and those people didn't talk like that. Sure, they didn't say "LOL" all the time, and I'll give her credit for remembering to leave words like that out--but they were still sentient beings. It's not that the language sounds anachronistic, because it doesn't, but it has no flow whatsoever. Someone will say something, and someone else will respond with a total non sequitur, but not because they're the sort of person who jumps from topic to topic, just because none of it makes any sense at all and none of the characters even notice that it doesn't make any sense and I beat my head against my computer and scream, "How is this a conversation???"
I read some reviews on amazon, to see if maybe I was alone in feeling this way, that maybe I was just in a really bad mood when I read it--like I said, I usually like Meg Cabot, and I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Strangely enough, most of the reviews were positive. So I thought about the book some more and I came to the conclusion that for those reviewers this must have been the first book they ever read, and so they had nothing else (NOTHING else) to compare it to. One of them actually talked about how good and interesting and original the characters were. That's how I knew I was dealing with someone who'd never read a book before. The characters are like Pride and Prejudice paper dolls, and just that flat and flimsy. (Also, why is the main character named Nicola Sparks? It's like the author knows that if you need a romance fix you should be reading Nicholas Sparks instead, and she's trying to warn you.) Even the villains have absolutely no logical motive, and they seem to sense that and I think it makes them nervous. It read like a bad Disney movie--you know the kind--where Disney started with a decent book or a decent old film that they wanted to remake and then thought to themselves, "Nah, that's too interesting for our demographic. Let's see how far we can water this down." And what's left is a plot that doesn't make sense and a villain that's been absolutely stripped of anything remotely frightening and just turned ludicrous, but in a manner that's somehow devoid of any real humor. Disney, sometimes you rock, but sometimes I really really REALLY hate you.
All right, that's a lot of ranting. I'm going to try to be positive here for a moment. I did finish this book, and not just so I could blog about it. If I start a book and it really doesn't interest me at all, I don't finish it. So it was good enough to entertain me for a couple of hours. But I also watch The Real Housewives, so...yeah. Would the twelve-year-old on your Christmas list like this book? Quite possibly. Honestly I can't remember being twelve all that well anymore...I think I'm probably trying to block it out because I'm afraid of discovering just how silly and fluffy I was. But do that girl a favor and buy her Pride and Prejudice instead.
Other books to read instead of this one: Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Vanity Fair; Jane Eyre; A Great and Terrible Beauty; The Princess Diaries; A Countess Below Stairs; Philippa Gregory; anything else by Meg Cabot; any other romance novel
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