Ok, I am really curious what other people thought of this book because I was extremely disappointed.I LOVED Hate List but this story read like a sappy After School Special. The characters seemed two dimensional and predictable and the whole story line felt contrived.
Alex has just lost her mother and is flailing. Then she meets Cole, the handsome new student. They start dating, he fills her need to be loved and then he gets controlling and creepy. She brushes it off and the abuse escalates until he's beating the crap out of her in a dark parking lot. The whole thing read like a bad horror movie. I wanted to scream at her the whole time. NO, don't have sex! The monster will KILL YOU if you're not a virgin!
Her father was too tangled up in his own grief to notice that his daughter "tripped in a parking lot" and ended up with a black eye and broken tooth? And that the creepy guy was leaving roses on his daughter's car and screaming outside the house in the middle of the night?
I think the weird combination of self-aware on an adult level and adolescently oblivious really struck a bad chord for me. While I like the idea of dating violence in YA fiction, this isn't doing the trick. The whole thing seemed like a cautionary tale written by overzealous caretakers. I wouldn't be surprised to see this one made into a Lifetime movie.
Alex has just lost her mother and is flailing. Then she meets Cole, the handsome new student. They start dating, he fills her need to be loved and then he gets controlling and creepy. She brushes it off and the abuse escalates until he's beating the crap out of her in a dark parking lot. The whole thing read like a bad horror movie. I wanted to scream at her the whole time. NO, don't have sex! The monster will KILL YOU if you're not a virgin!
Her father was too tangled up in his own grief to notice that his daughter "tripped in a parking lot" and ended up with a black eye and broken tooth? And that the creepy guy was leaving roses on his daughter's car and screaming outside the house in the middle of the night?
I think the weird combination of self-aware on an adult level and adolescently oblivious really struck a bad chord for me. While I like the idea of dating violence in YA fiction, this isn't doing the trick. The whole thing seemed like a cautionary tale written by overzealous caretakers. I wouldn't be surprised to see this one made into a Lifetime movie.
I really would have liked to hear more about how she got rid of him, too. Hanging up on him didn't seem like a particularly good end to me.
2 comments:
Now I just loved this one. I thought that her voice was spot on and that I really liked how she was able to acknowledge her relationship to herself but wouldn't admit it to anyone else because she did not want to be "that girl".
Yeah, but the inner dialogue wasn't authentic at all. I felt like she almost too self-aware for a 17 year old.
Post a Comment