Once upon a time, back at Darrow-Harker School, Beatrice Hartley and her five best friends were the cool kids, the beautiful ones. Then the shocking death of Jim their creative genius and Beatrice s boyfriend changed everything. One year after graduation, Beatrice is returning to Wincroft the seaside estate where they spent so many nights sharing secrets, crushes, plans to change the world hoping she ll get to the bottom of the dark questions gnawing at her about Jim s death.
I really wanted to like this. I've enjoyed her writing since "Special Topics in Calamity Physics," and was delighted by "Night Film." The premise of "Neverworld Wake" is interesting enough - it's the execution that pained me. This book felt more like a YA novel than her others, though that's not the problem - I like YA novels. My challenge with this book with the character development. Each of the main five was a two dimensional archetype, so I didn't really invest in any of them. Again, premise = interesting, plot = potentially fun, characters = lacking. I still enjoy Pessl and will pick up her next book. This one just felt like an early draft as opposed to the final version.
I so loved the beginning of this book because I felt I was back in the world of Calamity Physics, a world I had been missing. Bea is like Blue in some hard to define way and her friends were like the crowd Blue hung with. Then came the calamity and it became more like the Wizard of Oz, only the wizard died under mysterious circumstances. Later it would turn out that Bea had been the man behind the curtain--you know, the one you're supposed to pay no attention to. Since I'm not a young adult, I may be the wrong reader for this book but being wrong has become what I do best. (I'll leave it to you to decide exactly in which way I fail the YA designation.)
I want to start with what annoyed me most, which I understand is totes the wrong way to write a …
I so loved the beginning of this book because I felt I was back in the world of Calamity Physics, a world I had been missing. Bea is like Blue in some hard to define way and her friends were like the crowd Blue hung with. Then came the calamity and it became more like the Wizard of Oz, only the wizard died under mysterious circumstances. Later it would turn out that Bea had been the man behind the curtain--you know, the one you're supposed to pay no attention to. Since I'm not a young adult, I may be the wrong reader for this book but being wrong has become what I do best. (I'll leave it to you to decide exactly in which way I fail the YA designation.)
I want to start with what annoyed me most, which I understand is totes the wrong way to write a review. Yet here it is: It's the mystery novel cliche of the secrets revealed one by one in that puzzle solving way. In and of itself, I don't have trouble with that technique, but it was too mechanical/predictable in this novel. Everyone had to have a secret and even the first person narrator kept a secret from us which felt to me like a betrayal -- like a secret in service to the plot rather than to the character. And it was good secret in a feminist way. A woman who has to subordinate herself to her man, propping him up (even as a narrator, but that needed to be made clearer) yet yearning to break free. And then, finally doing so. The second worst secret was Martha's and again it wasn't the fault of the secret itself. The problem was that the reader has to understand early on that the unreliable narrator is not picking up the clues. Instead we discover her unreliability and the secret at the same time.
I can pick on other annoyances. If you had to have time travel (and I don't think you did) it needed to be better integrated. Instead it was a feature found in the Bender's manual (and probably done more artfully in that non-existent book) If you can go to the future, couldn't you find out how the book would end? Who would survive the accident? Maybe you could get unstuck by going to the future one day/wake at a time. If you did, would only the last version of the previous day count?
The formal vote bothered me too which is why I loved that they reached consensus without unanimity. It wasn't even clear how that happened or why it turned out that there was consensus on our narrator at that point. Wasn't Bee's winning a foregone conclusion, though? I would have tried to undercut its inevitability were I writing this book. Also, am I supposed to understand why finding out how Jim died is relevant to getting out of Neverworld?
If I seem too negative it is because, like a YA with a crush, I expected perfection from Ms. Pessl. There's a lot to like in this book. Even when Dorothy gets back to Kansas and realizes the people she met in Oz were with her all along. I read it pretty much straight through--something I rarely do. (I may have also done that with Night Film.) The writing in the small, the individual scenes, are compelling. The relationships though not globally motivated are always locally so, even as they waver from moment to moment between intimacy and rejection, like real life relationships, especially among YAs. I retain my crush and await her next book.
