Winter Town

 by Stephen Emond

Another strike off my book list. And that's pretty much the only reason I kept with it; so I could take it off the list. Read the entire thing in one day. Between classes. That's how simple a read it was.

Summary: Evan - Leave it to Beaver family, upcoming Valedictorian, spineless. Lucy - broken home, comes back to her hometown and Evan for Christmas, comes back one year with a nose ring and black hair.

There are your protaganists - cardboard as they come.

And that would have been fine; tropes are tropes because they work. Yet here they do not work in this instance because the writing is terrible and the characters have no character. Good lord, could this book have been any more monotone? You can have a peaceful, easy atmosphere without being boring. The first chapter is the sort of thing I'd feature as a DLD, maybe, but is not what I want from a professionally published piece. Allow me to open the book at random and type the first paragraph I see:

Lucy came home to a cluttered living room that seemed to be missing a floor. You know, those things for walking on. (Interruption; yes, the narrative actually said this.) In place of the floor were a million tiny fragments of computer guts. In the center of them was Lucy's father, with the shell of the computer opened like a book. Only the living room was lit, and sparsely. The house was barely decorated for the holidays. There was one small Christmas tree that fit on a tabletop Lucy tiptoed through the computer parts to the couch, which she fell onto heavily, flat on her face. She moaned to herself a moment.

Riveting, isn't it? I can just hear the end-stops screaming for relief. All the details are like this; tell, tell, tell, cardinal sin of description.

I wanted to enjoy this book - the summary sounded cliche, but sweet; something nice and familiar for a few hours. But it's just plain old boring. Evan doesn't do anything and Lucy is content to be a bitch to the one person that goes out of the way to be kind to her. Am I getting older, or are teen books just getting worse? Or do I just keep picking up bad adolescent literature of late?

I'm leaning towards that third option because I still really identify and enjoy "teen" books, even if good ones are coming few and far between of late. Though given that my book list is nearly 50 pieces long, there's got to be something on it for me to enjoy in the near future.

In short: don't waste your time. The cover is the best thing about this book.

No really, just look at this gorgeous cover <3