Citizen Girl, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus (2004)
I lost interest at page 55. This book seems to be about nothing except exaggerated workplace despair; there's no entertainment here, no reason to be interested in anyone's life. And the protagonist is named "Girl"--that's distracting and weird.
Quietus, by Vivian Schilling (2002)
Within a few pages I knew this book had a problem: the author had a good idea for a plot, but she was not much of a writer.
It's hard to know where to begin. The problems that plague this book are the small, cumulative kind: tired/overused/repeated adjectives, awkward word choices, and romance-novel details. There's a wince on every page.
I'll start with the good part, which is the plot. As in several recent movies, the idea is that a few people survive an accident they weren't "meant" to survive, and so Death's deputies appear to pick them off one by one. An interesting complication is that the spirit (or whatever) sent to dispatch our heroine, Kylie O'Rourke, is the spirit of someone scary/compelling from her past. Kylie and the spirit form a relationship which prevents the spirit from doing his job, so Kylie's death is postponed.
Now let's turn to the adjectives. Certainly I've learned in English classes that a writer should avoid using "too many" adjectives, but I had never understood how many was too many. Now I understand: if every noun in the sentence has an adjective, that's too many. This author compounds her problem by incessantly reusing the same adjectives: the tenth time in a row she tells me that something is horrific, horrible, horrendous, horrid, or horrifying, I start noticing that I'm not as horrified as the author intends me to be. When the word "bittersweet" is applied to the third smile, I start wondering what exactly that's supposed to mean.
On to awkward word choices. Here are a few samples:
As for romance novel influences, we can begin with our main character, Kylie Rose O'Rourke, who has a lion's mane of red hair, clover-green eyes, long dark lashes, full lips, and tawny freckled skin. Kylie inspires love in every man around her, including the dead ones. Kylie is 34 but calls her father "Daddy" with almost every sentence she says to him. (He calls her "love" similarly often.) Kylie has a "forever friend," Amelia, who is of course from the opposite family background as Kylie and is also opposite in appearance and personality. Amelia is endlessly described as "dainty" and "delicate." Kylie is married to Jack, who is long and lean with high cheek bones; he's strong and muscular, but with curly blonde hair, blue eyes, and pouting lips. Of course he is troubled, and the marriage is volatile. Jack has a brother named Dillon, similarly handsome but less volatile, and unknowingly in love with Kylie.
The love scenes are comical. Words like "bare loins" and "suckling." And at one point, Jack admires Kylie as she "enjoyed the pleasure." Then she "lost herself in the senses." And of course, of COURSE, everyone is "spent."
Finally, despite her willingness to use adjectives over and over again, the author is unwilling to either repeat nouns or use pronouns. So coffee is first "coffee," but thereafter "the brown liquid," "the hot caffeinated beverage," and so on, even when it would be perfectly natural to refer to it as "it." Two people are referred to as "the couple," "the loving couple," "the naked couple," ANY kind of couple, just to avoid referring to them as "they."
Now, do we have any Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans out there? Get this: Vivian Schilling is the same woman who wrote Soultaker. Oh, yes! The same movie that starred a lion-maned redhead adored by the living and the dead, pursued by spirits when she was "meant" to have died but didn't! The same movie Vivian wrote for herself to star in! This puts Quietus in a whole new light: suddenly I understand the character of Kylie. She would be played by Vivian, of course. An older, more beautiful and complex Vivian, "often mistaken for younger than her thirty-four years."
I'm having trouble wrapping it up: 600 pages is a LOT of cumulative annoyance. But to recap: adjectives are used way too often; the characters are shallow and romance-novelish and they have names currently trendy with preschoolers; the love scenes will make you wonder why anyone has to have sex at all when it's so gross; the word choices are peculiar, as if someone had a thesaurus but no actual understanding of the words; pronouns are underused; Vivian Schilling thinks of herself as not only an actress and screenwriter but also a real catch.
Read the book if you want, but if I were you I'd instead get a copy of that Mystery Science 3000 episode where they do Soultaker. You'll get the basic essence of this book, but without having to read anything the author wrote.
Vanishing Acts, by Jodi Picoult (2005)
Delia works with her dog Greta to find missing people. As it turns out, Delia herself is a missing person: Delia's father told her that her mother died when Delia was four, but what actually happened was that Delia's father took her and ran, moving across the country and changing their names.
Obviously, it's a great plot. I read the book nearly straight through. But afterwards, I found myself dissatisfied, as if I'd eaten candy corn instead of my dinner. The plot is great, yes, but the execution is sugary, cheap, lightweight. Delia is beautiful and beloved by all. Her two admirers love her unselfishly; they're always "there" for her, even if she chooses the other guy. Her father was a flawless parent, except for the lying/kidnapping thing. The court scenes and plot resolution are right from TV, and the jail scenes are the nightmare we've heard about a million times. Delia's memories are overly convenient: first she remembers nothing, and then just at the right time it all comes back to her; I couldn't trust her. Andrew's testimony is irritatingly irregular: he withholds information, then blurts it out; this would be a good plot device one time, but when he does it again and again and again I start getting irritable.
I hate--HATE--the "different fonts for each narrative voice" thing. It's a dumb gimmick, and it yanks me out of the story every time. I also hate the way we have to keep following the author down sticky paths of treacle: "...with cornsilk hair and eyes the color of thunderstorms. ...She smelled like lazy summer Sundays--mowed grass and sprinklers..." Whatever.
So why, if I hate the way this author writes, am I first in line at the library whenever a new book of hers comes out? You might well ask. I certainly do, every time I finish one of her books. It's like wondering why oh why you ate all that candy corn AGAIN, when you KNOW it makes you queasy. It's because it's so good DURING, it's easy to forget AFTER. And geez, the plot ideas are AWESOME.
French Women Don't Get Fat, by Mireille Guiliano (2005)
This charming book is the latest in an endless line of diet books that scoff at previous diet books. This one falls in the "don't diet; make a lifestyle change" category. Since we all know perfectly well that the only good way to lose weight is to eat less, exercise more, and continue doing that forever, this is not breaking news. Saying "it's not a diet" doesn't change the fact that it is a diet; but what I believe this and other authors mean is that it's not a "eat only grapefruit and hard-boiled eggs" diet, not a "lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks" diet, not a "$40 bottles of dietary supplements" diet, not a "never eat fat/carbohydrates/protein/fruit again" diet.
I haven't been to France so I can't verify this information myself, but the author claims that French women don't diet, don't exercise, and don't get fat. The key, evidently, is cultural indoctrination: women learn from early childhood to eat small portions of fresh seasonal foods, to choose quality over quantity, to savor small pleasures, and to take the stairs instead of sweating in a gym. This is the "glass of wine and piece of dark chocolate" school of eat-less-exercise-more, and it has its appeal. Little French phrases scattered throughout don't hurt either.