My Top 5

Book 3 Review

At some time in English literary history, authors such as Jay Asher and Lucy Christopher are going to have to tug on their big kid pants and finally let their female leads become strong characters.  We expect resilient and powerful, well-rounded characters, but instead are bombarded with characters too frail to even face theirs problems and they both wind up failing miserably to solve any sort of difficulty.   Neither books’ lead grows as an individual or solves their problems or even tragically tries and fails to resolve an insurmountable obstacle.  While both could be classified as suspense novels or realistic fiction and both cast female leads, neither is exactly the same—even if they do both fail to develop good characters.

Let’s start with 13 Reasons Why shall we, I mean the chopping block indiscriminately executes everyone in time.  Hannah Baker: Suicide Victim (if victim is used correctly in this sense) and Clay Jenson: Cassette Tape Victim.  After Hannah’s suicide, 7 tapes with 13 sides of accusations as to what lead to her eminent death, are sent out to a string of blamed people who must listen to all the reasons and send them to the next person or let the tapes become public.  “Here everyone's a victim, an enabler, or a perpetrator, and some of the characters are all three, including Hannah Baker. Her tapes and reasoning are, at times, just as selfish and mean as those she accuses.” (Common Sense Media)  This book is comprised of her placing blame on others what she doesn’t seem to have the guts to take on.  Every blame, story, or experience she relays rings of self-righteous indignation of other’s faults. 

Clay Jenson, though, is the exception; he is the love of her life that she refused to let save her from her own-freakin’-self.  How he even ended up in the tapes in a mystery to even her, though she briefly mentions that if he had pushed just a little more, she would’ve opened up to him and probably saved her life laying blame on yet another person who didn’t even know they were doing something wrong.  “After finishing it, I wondered: Am I missing something huge?” (Jessica Warman)  I’ll digress, some experiences she suffered were cruel and degrading, but are they really that different from what every teenager is forced to face?  She baited others around her to pry their attention to herself and when the disinterested teens that surrounded her did not whole-heartedly throw themselves at her, she committed suicide.  Hannah Baker is not a girl who murdered herself; she is a girl that martyred herself.

Next up to the chopping block is Stolen, a novel where instead having the main character be desperate and self-destructive, she is desperate and idiotic.  Seriously here, we have Gemma, a 16 year old girl, who’s in an airport with her mother when she spots a man.  She realizes she’s seen him before and he seems to be staring at her intently; when she goes up to buy coffee, he pays for it and orders her to sit over at her table while he puts the sugar in her coffee.  What girl hasn’t heard the time-worn advice, “Never leave your drink alone with a man.” or even been told not to talk to strangers?  He drugs her drink and flies her to a secluded Australian desert house, miles away from civilization and tells her that she will live with him there forever.  The novel progresses at a snail-like pace and at the beginning you just hear her repeated imaginings of what her terrible fate is to be and why he chose her.

“This is one of those books that by the end you feel almost empty.” (I’m Loving Books) Slowly the story begins to make a fractured sort of sense when, Ty, the captor begins to reveal that he’s been stalking her from a young age and he fell in love with her years ago.  Not to mention the pedophilia involved on the scenario, is the fact that he’d been building the house in Australia just for her and had been waiting for the perfect moment to get her.  You begin to hear her giving up on the outside world as Stockholm Syndrome sinks into her, she begins to feel for Ty.  Talk of becoming one with the earth and other animals slowly takes its toll as she starts to see Ty’s ways.  When eventually she is discovered, she becomes conflicted as to what to do—lie to the police or continue on in her regular life knowing he’s locked up.

Neither book shows a hint of strength in the characters as you would expect them to and while both have unique plots, they hamper the quality of the story by train-wrecking their character development throughout the books. Jay and Lucy are highly regarded teen novelists, but they don’t deserve the credit they’ve been given.  An interesting plot in widely used genre does not make up for lack of quality when writing.  It’s time authors start realizing that to have a truly great book, they must be able to attack and tackle every aspect of their book.