I have long professed my dislike for the Twilight series. I don't like it. I've tried it, and I just don't like it. In fact, my dislike of the Twilight series ran so deep that for awhile, I gave up YA literature. Well, that was a stupid decision, and I've since amended it, and I've read a LOT of YA fiction this year. When I heard the Meg Cabot had a new book out, Abandon, I decided to pick up a copy and give it a try. Years ago, I ate up her Princess Diaries series. I figured I'd like this too.
Wrong. So wrong.
Abandon markets itself as a darker tale of Hades and Persephone -- the Greek god of the Underworld and the young girl he kidnapped and made his queen. Our heroine, Pierce Oliviera, has been to the Underworld before. She died a year and a half earlier in a freak drowning accident. And while she was there, she met John, who gave her a beautiful necklace to "protect her from evil." Pierce, frightened, ran away from John, managed to escape the Underworld ,and returned to the land of the living. But her life didn't go back to the way it was before the accident, and after too many incidents, Pierce is forced to return to her mother's homeland of Isla Huesos, the "Island of Bones", Florida, where darkness and evil seem to follow her wherever she goes. Pierce knows that she escaped death once, but Death wants her back, and she isn't sure she'll be able to escape again.
*sigh* Okay.
First. The character of Pierce (the name, OMG, I realize it's supposed to be a throwback to "Persephone" but dear God). If you like Bella Swan, or any other "heroine" who gets herself into stupid situations and suddenly finds herself rescued by an overbearing male suitor, congratulations, here's Pierce Oliviera. It really makes me want to cry that this generation of teens "relates" to this type of literary character. Pierce died. I get it, that sucks. I think it would especially suck to be fifteen years old and find out what happens when you die. But for the first half of the book, Pierce's mental meanderings (I can't call them "thoughts") went along the lines of What does it matter? Why do all these other peons think that anything they do in this life means anything? We're all just going to die anyway. In short, Pierce is that teenage emo wannabe goth that sat in the corner of the cafeteria not talking to anyone and cried during classes in high school. Why are we glorifying this again?
When she's not talking about how useless life is or emo-ing about her trip to the Underworld and back, Pierce is incredibly shallow, narcissistic, and stupid. She doesn't know who Homer is (the Greek writer, not Simpson) and she doesn't know any Greek mythology, which most of us learned in elementary school (Pierce is supposed to be 17 and a senior in high school). But it's okay, because John's mysterious necklace will protect Pierce from evil, so naturally, anything terrible that happens to anyone else is obviously HER FAULT for not stopping it. So when she thinks she can "help" somebody, she puts herself in danger (so John comes swooping in yet again all Edward Cullen-like to save her AGAIN), and causes damage that WOULD be irreparable, except that Pierce's daddy is a multi-billionaire (what?). So Daddy can just write a seven-figure check and get her out of all of it! Tee-hee! *headdesk*
Then we have John, our brooding and devilishly (pun intended) handsome male lead, who is just...too Edward Cullen. Except that Cabot exchanged ten million references to bronze eyes into ten million references to silver eyes. Sweet. And unlike Edward Cullen, he spends the majority of the story trying to bring Pierce back to the Underworld, instead of pushing her away. Admittedly, I thought in the beginning that this would be a nice change of pace. But the two characters have zero chemistry for 90% of the book, and that 10% is supposed to make the reader believe that they are meant to be? I realize that teenage relationships are supposed to be rushed and insipid, but come on.
All of the other characters (besides John and Pierce) are flat and one-dimensional. And I couldn't get it up to care about any of them. Close to the climax of the book, one of the characters dies. And not a single fuck was given that day. Seriously.
Second. The writing. I understand that Abandon is supposed to be Book One of a trilogy. But there is no story arc. This is the first book of a trilogy that I ever read that couldn't stand alone at all. Nothing is resolved at the end of the book. Everything is left hanging. There are so many side-plots that it is impossible to follow everything. Everyone in Pierce's family has a hidden agenda -- but you don't find out what any of them are, or how any of them relate to the main plot of the story. The climax is truly unbelievable, and didn't make me excited to find out what was going to happen next. The story fizzled out at the end.
The chronology of this book is one gigantic tangle. The narrator, our "heroine" Pierce, jumps around so many times it's like reading a story written by someone with untreated ADHD. The story jumped from present-day, to past-tense, to present-day, to WAY-past-tense, and back again. It didn't give me time to really wrap my brain around what was going on. Cabot doesn't give the reader a chance to really envision what is going on in the story, what the setting is, any subtleties. It's just a whack on the head and THIS IS THE UNDERWORLD. Okay.
I'm irritated that I spent the money on this book. I'm mad because it's yet another YA novel glorifying the emo, nancing teenage heroine and the brooding, overprotective male hero. The starting premise was interesting and showed some promise; I'm tempted to say that Cabot could have salvaged this book with another read-through and some heavy editing. But I don't think that's going to happen with the sequel, Underworld, and I have doubts that I'm going to read it and find out.
Rating: *
