snowynight

Seven teenagers get trapped in their high school during a blizzard when they miss the bus that evacuated the rest of the school.

This was easily the worst book I've read all year, and I've read some doozies. I read it because I'd bought a copy for the shop for the niche of "children's/younger YA survival books for kids who've already read all of Gary Paulson and "I Survived."" I am going to return it to the publisher (Scholastic, which should be ashamed of itself) forthwith, because it is AWFUL.

Why is this book so bad?

1. It's incredibly misogynist. The narrator, Scotty Weems, is constantly thinking of girls in a gross, slimy, objectifying way.

The two girl characters, who get trapped in the high school along with five boys, never do anything useful. One's entire personality is "hot" and every time she's mentioned, it's with a gross leering description of her body. The other girl's entire personality is "hot girl's friend."

2. The characters have exactly one characteristic each, and even that one often gets forgotten, to the extent that I kept mixing up "normal boy" with "mechanically inclined boy." The others are "dangerous boy" and "weird boy." The latter gets downgraded to "not actually weird, just funny" (as in makes one supposedly humorous comment once.) We get no insight into them, their backstories, their home lives, etc, because none of them ever really talk to each other about anything interesting despite being trapped together for a week!

3. SO MANY gross descriptions of pimples, peeing, and pooping.

4. The book is boring. No one does anything interesting on-page until the second to last chapter, when it FINALLY occurs to Scotty to make snowshoes. Most of the book is Scotty's inner monologue about pimples, pooping, peeing, and hot girls. The kids barely interact!

5. The kids keep saying that help won't come because no one even knows they're missing, but that makes no sense. Every single one of them was supposed to get picked up. It's never explained why SEVEN DIFFERENT FAMILIES wouldn't notice that their kids never came home.

6. The incredibly contrived scene where Best Friend Girl comes staggering in screaming and disheveled, repeating, "Les, Les!" This is the name of Dangerous Boy. One of Indistinguishable Boys assumes Les sexually assaulted her and runs out and attacks Les. Best Friend Girl recovers enough to explain that she went to a room and it was dark and cold and she got lost, and she was trying to say there was LESS light and heat there. Because that's what you'd naturally gasp out when freaking out, instead of, say, "Dark! Cold!"

I feel like the existence of this scene in a PUBLISHED BOOK lowered the collective intelligence of the universe by at least half a point.

7. No interesting use is made of the school setting. The kids open their own lockers to get extra clothes and snacks, find pudding and canned peaches in the cafeteria, and spend the rest of the time silently huddled in classrooms, occasionally checking their useless cellphones that don't have any signal. Toward the end, they start a fire, and then, OFF-PAGE, construct a snowmobile (!).

Things they don't do: Break into other kids' lockers in the hope of finding useful stuff. Attempt to cook the cafeteria food. Search the library for survival tips. Get mats from the gym so they're not sleeping on freezing floors. Search classrooms and the teacher's lounge for useful stuff. Have a pick-up ball game to keep warm. Find ways of entertaining themselves without cell phones. HAVE GETTING TO KNOW YOU CONVERSATIONS - WHAT IS THE POINT OF DOING THE BREAKFAST CLUB WITHOUT THIS?

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Truly terrible.

ETA: I just discovered that it went out of print soon after I purchased it (GOOD) and so is not returnable (DAMMIT).

This is one of the most unusual books I've ever read. And if you've been reading my reviews for a while, you know what a strong statement that is. Here's the buries-the-lede back cover:

The town's teenagers are dying. One by one they are mysteriously disappearing but Meggie Alexander refuses to wait in fear. She and her boyfriend Matthew decide to get to the bottom of all the strange goings-on. And they discover a horrible secret.

Now someone is stalking them - but who? There's only one thing that can save Meggie now - the stories a tarantula told her as a baby.

Bet you weren't expecting that, huh?

This was a Scholastic novel from 1988. I'd seen other Thomas novels in that period but never read them, because they all looked like depressing historicals about the black experience - the one I recall seeing specifically was Touched by Fire. I sure never saw this one. I found it in the used children's section of The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.

Any description of this book won't truly convey the experience of reading it, but I'll give it a shot. It starts with a prologue in omniscient POV, largely from the POV of a talking tarantula visiting Meggie soon after she's born, chatting and spinning webs that tell stories to her:

"I get so sick and tired of common folk trying to put their nobody feet on my queenly head. Me? I was present in the first world. Furthermore," the spider boasted, squinting her crooked eyes, "I come from a looooong line of royalty and famous people. Millions of years ago I saw the first rainbow. I ruled as the Egyptian historical arachnid. I'm somebody."

As I transcribe that, it occurs to me that she shares some DNA with The Last Unicorn's butterfly.

The prologue ends when Meggie's mother spots the spider and tries to kill her, believing her daughter is in danger. Chapter one opens when Meggie is fifteen. Briefly, it feels like a YA novel about being black and young in (then)-modern America, and it kind of is that, except for the very heightened writing style, including the dialogue. Thomas is a poet and not trying to write in a naturalistic manner. It's often gorgeous:

She ended [the sermon] with these resounding words falling quiet as small sprinklings of nutmeg whispering into a bowl of whipping cream.

The milieu Meggie lives in is lived-in and sharply and beautifully drawn, skipping from a barbershop where customers complain about women preaching to a quick sketch of a neighborhood woman trying to make her poor house beautiful and not noticing that its real beauty lies in her children to Meggie's exquisitely evoked joy in running. And then Meggie finds the HEADLESS CORPSE of one of her classmates! We check in on a trio of terrible neighbors plotting to do something evil to the town's teenagers! The local spiders are concerned!

This book has the prose one would expect to find in a novel written by a poet about being a black teenager in America, except it's also about headless corpses and spider guardians. It is a trip and a half.

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I am so glad that Thomas wrote this amazingly weird novel, and that someone at the bookshop bought it, and that I just happened to come in while it was on the shelf. It's like Adrian Tchaikovsky collaborated with Angela Johnson and Lois Duncan. There has never been anything like it, and there never will be again. Someone ought to reprint it.