Monday, 4 October 2010

Review - The Deadly Sister / Eliot Schrefer

Abby Goodwin is sure her sister Tabitha isn't a murderer. But her parents don't agree. Her friends don't agree. And the cops definitely don't agree. Tabitha is a drop-out, a stoner, a girl who's obsessed with her tutor, Clyde Andrews...until he ends up dead. Tabitha runs away, and leaves Abby following the trail of clues. Each piece of evidence points to Tabitha, but it also appears that Clyde had secrets of his own. And enemies. Like his brother, who Abby becomes involved with...until he falls under suspicion.

Is Abby getting closer to finding the true murderer? Or is someone leading her down a twisted false path?


Review - (SPOILERS) Schrefer's novel should be retitled 'An Exercise in Frustration' due to its lack of teen girl authenticity, poorly formulated plot line and clanger of an ending.  Its entire existence serves to make the concluding note somewhat valid and extremely underwhelming.

Some readers might dismiss the jerky plot points as the end packed a punch, but not me.  I caught onto the mystery pretty quickly - the title even gave it away to a degree.  The story at no point felt cohesive, jumping around like a toddler dodging a bee.  Most of the time there was no authentic justification for the character motivations in any of the random situations.

As its core it is meant to be a story revolving a pair of polar opposite sisters.  Two sisters brought together by a heinous act.  Two sisters who the author failed to construct in an interesting way.  Two sisters that in no way way reflect the polarities in sisterhood - the love, the loyalty, the pettiness, the envy, the sense of belonging.  He attempts to detail it on a surface level but it is clear that there is no real sense of understanding.  Their relationship didn't possess the layers that are inherent in family dynamics. Schrefer attempts to craft Abby and Tabitha with a strong tie, specifically Abby's need to protect her little sister, but it never really evolves to anything beyond ink on a page. It is shallowly explained away as typical older sister behaviour plus parental separation but that didn't gel for this reader.  (I love my sister, I am protective of my sister and our parents broke up but there is no way I would lie for her if she murdered someone.)

Until the almost end point I was bored by this novel, it in no way reflected anything real about the teenage experience, sisters or a sense of intrigue.  It felt like a series of plot points that failed to accentuate the character arc and invest a reader's attention.  Then the anvil dropped...  The surprise ending wasn't so much the mysterious unveiling but in the odious way it was presented.  The author chose to have a character explain their motives, seemingly at odds prior to the anvil drop, through a series of retroactive expositional passages interspersed with dialogue taking place with another character.  It didn't work.  The only way it was successful was in finally eliciting an emotion from me - anger.  In fact it infuriated me.  Not because it surprised me but due to my ongoing hope that what I suspected would occur, did.  It was endlessly frustrating as it ultimately attempts to reason away all the jumps and character continuity issues.  Why?  Because in disguising the concluding character note, Schrefer made the protagonist's motivations malleable in order for his plot line to work logistically (and not all that successfully) instead of character integrity and good storytelling.

Twist or not, the characterisation of those teen girls (and most of the people the reader learns about) are tepid at best.  As this is the centrepiece of the story, everything crumbles around this huge misstep.

Blech.

Published: May 1, 2010
Format: Hardback, 352 pages
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Source: purchased
Origin: USA

4 comments:

Katie (Bookishly Yours) said...

I couldn't even finish this book. I figured it all out about 10 pages in, went to the end to confirm it, then shut the book and took it back to the store. It just didn't sit right with me.

your neighborhood librarian said...

Oh thank you thank you for taking this bullet! This book has been on my stack since I met the author in May. I love the cover, I thought he was great, I just hadn't gotten around to it.

And now I can shuffle it out of the stack and start reading Violence 101 - and not feel guilty about it!

:paula

Pam said...

Have you seen my review for The School of Dangerous Girls? I almost died of WTFkery.

Carla said...

yeah, I think i'm gonna give this one a miss.