Reviews: The Space Between and iBoy
It’s time for the long-overdue post on books I read this summer. However, I’m going to start with books I failed to finish reading.
Surprisingly, there were only two: The Space Between, by Brenna Yovanoff, and iBoy, by Kevin Brooks. I have my reasons for throwing both of them across the room in disgust. Trigger warnings ahoy.
Problems I had with the books:
iBoy:
I could have gotten over the premise, which is as dated as last year’s model of iPhone, and essentially the same “person becomes a cyborg due to random plot point” idea that has made the circles of science fiction short stories for years with a bit of modern lingo and a couple of side plots. The fact that the boy uses his newfound powers, caused by an iPhone shattering his skull and leaving bits of microchip in his brain, to run around playing superhero was, by this point in my reading career, boringly predictable. It’s a premise that seems tailor-made for the middle-school aged male, which is fitting as that’s the approximate age of the protagonist. Logic (and the fact that a shattered skull and electrical components are not good for your brain, nevermind that they won’t allow you to neutrally uplink to the internet because that’s not how a phone or a brain works,) need not apply to what is meant to be an escapist superhero premise.
The major problem I had with this book was the use of rape as drama. The protagonist’s crush is gangraped (What the hell do you mean, you’re writing for adolescents?) very early on in the book, behind the scenes, before the first few chapters are over. Though lip service is paid to the protagonist not being able to make things better for her, the thing that made me extraordinarily mad at the author was that her rape eventuated solely to give the “hero” a hero complex about her. And though I can understand that the protagonist is young and stupid to be pursuing a relationship with her (admittedly, a very g-rated one) after that, I cannot understand why the author thought it necessary to the plot, especially in what is throwing off outward signs of being a young adult novel.
If you have to deal with a subject like rape, go the route of Speak. (Laurie Halse Anderson) Don’t involve it for the drama, or for an object lesson about poorly researched “gangs” in a slum that somehow avoids all other potentially political issues such as socioeconomic equality between races, the breakdown of family in poverty and the resulting search for identity through gang membership, or drug abuse. The fact that the “heroes” of the book read like lower-middle class innocent suburban kids despite their lip service to the horrors of their neighborhood and school made the supposedly all-consuming power of the gangs and insipid impotency of the police laughable.
Other things I noticed:
The boy’s head glows for no apparent reason, supposedly a side effect of having a phone in the brain.
He’s had massive trauma, then massive surgery to his cranium and doesn’t have to wear a helmet or get a follow-up appointment, so I’m going to sue his surgeon for malpractice.
He has a “tragic past” of his grandmother raising him, which eventuated because she got knocked up young, had a daughter who she raised alone, and then watched said daughter become pregnant, give birth to her grandson, and die in a random accident while crossing the street when the boy was two. But because none of this really impacts the protagonist’s character, only serving to give him a guardian who is “too tired” to supervise him a lot, despite the fact that she works at home writing romance novels.
Which brings us to the grandmother supporting them both writing romance novels. She has a laptop. It’s mentioned that she bangs out a novel in some fraction of a year, but I find it hard to believe that, as young a mother as she was, she found the time in late adolescence or her early adulthood to polish her grammar or her writing skills. Regardless of that, how did she get discovered? When did this become the most logical way of supporting the family?
I also couldn’t be bothered to find a text sample from this book to give you an idea of how it’s written, because the subject matter is handled badly enough that I just don’t care.
The back cover promised me a “Wifi, WTF thriller.” I certainly said “What the Fuck?” a lot. (And note to writers and censors: if you’re dealing with rape, assume your audience is mature enough to handle the phrase “What the Fuck.” If they aren’t, you’re writing the wrong thing.)
The Space Between
This one I picked up on the assumption that not all supernatural romance novels can be that bad. It didn’t even look like a Twilight ripoff that much: sure, the cover was black and red, but someone had clearly spent much more time in photoshop to get the girl in white lying on the abstract, demonic scenery.
The premise of this novel is that the heroine, Daphne, is the daughter of the demoness Lillith and Satan. She lives in “Pandemonium” (the demons’ neighborhood in hell,) and has one brother and a bunch of demon sisters who do not figure into her emotional family tree, given that they’re the ‘soulless’ Lillim. Her half-brother (Lillith + Adam, in case you wanted to know,) Obie, is in charge of saving souls. He brings her souvenirs from the human world to play with, and she longs to go up there and be human.
The point is, these things eventuate so that she can fall in fascination (at least she didn’t call it love) with a human boy who attempted to commit suicide and run away to earth to find him. Needless to say, I didn’t get far enough to reach the running away part.
Why couldn’t I read it? Flat tone, flat characterization, and a story written in the present tense, wrongly as often as not. For future reference, this book has only reinforced my extreme hatred of fiction written solely in the present tense. It destroys all suspense because it removes the possibility of both future actions and past actions, and it kills the suspension of disbelief because you’re expecting me to accept that a person confronted with fast-paced events has the time to observe and narrate all the things that are going on. Additionally, the combination of first person and present tense means that your storytelling options are extremely limited: you can effectively write a past-tense narrator who knows more than she reveals to the audience, but that is very hard to do in present tense. Even thinking back or thinking forward is restricted.
There are some points at which the present tense becomes bearable, but they’re points where the interior monologue would have naturally shifted to the present tense anyway:
“In Hell, we tell our stories on the surface of things. The histories are forged a piece at a time, hammered on posts and pillars, pounded into the tiled streets. The spire building, where I’ve lived my whole life, is a celebration of the deeds of my family.” - The Space Between, Brenna Yovanoff
Of course, the “family” that Daphne has, aside from her brother, is not involved in her life to the least degree except for a bit of token manipulation from her mother to “spend more time with her sisters.” Still no word on why Daphne is supposed to be so different from the sisters, who are all iron-toothed demonesses who she disregards completely. Of course, all but six of them are half sisters - children of minor demons, because Lillith apparently gets around.
Remind me when it was discovered that Lillith the “demoness” + Lucifer = functionally human female spawn?
Other things I noticed:
This story is, according to be the back cover, supposed to be about Daphne learning to be human via falling in love, yet at the very beginning, she talks about what a sucker Adam was for believing that he could “change” Lillith. All indications are that Daphne’s human-infatuation-whose-name-I-didn’t-read-long-enough-to-find-out is a human who she’ll want to “change” in order to “save” him from himself. The fact that the possibility was brought up almost as soon as she met him annoyed me severely.
I always go into a book where angels and demons are advertized warily. I’m always waiting for the allegory to jump out of a dark alley and mug me.
I do have the advance reader copy, so some editing mistakes need to be forgiven.
Obie’s supposedly healthy relationship with a human female is a foot note. Actually, all the potentially interesting characters, including Beezelbub, whose appearance in the early chapters was the entire reason I continued to read them, are footnotes.
The heroine is featureless, with no past, no plans for the future, no real opinions (beyond a teenage contrariness that makes me parse her age as sixteen or so,) and nothing to do in life besides mooch around with her pretty little artifacts and long to be human. That worked for Ariel in the little mermaid - we knew that she was shirking her duties to do so and that she had a hobby in building up her hoard.
Name dropping movies and saying “the part where…” is as annoying as hell to me. I don’t know what movie you’re talking about, it’s not a clever reference at all, and its inclusion tells me nothing about the character. Also, newer movies are the surest way to stamp a bright, red date on your novel.
Where did the six functionally human seeress daughters go off to? They sound like more fun.
Daphne’s reactions to humans show that she identifies as one, and she somehow, despite being raised in hell, having demons for sisters, and having absentee parents, displays pretty empathy for her love interest.
I read the back cover. Her love interest’s name is Truman. Apperently they hunt down her missing brother together, which is at least a good premise for making them a team.
The concept doesn’t seem too terrible, if you leave aside the gratuitous “bible” mythology, and the question of where a girl raised in hell gets a concept of love, compassion, or family from. I couldn’t get past the featureless narrator or the present tense, though the descriptions wouldn’t be too bad written normally.
It’s certainly not “Breathtaking and Transcendent” like the back jacket claims.
TLDR: Here lie trees that died in vain, with bad plotting, bad characterization, and a general lack of stirring audience empathy. The more glowing the cover reviews, the worse the book is, as a general rule. Except when the reviews come from actual, respected authors. I’m going to have a very, very hard time finding a home for these two, and not for the usual reason.