A couple months ago, in a fit of apparent insanity, I decided to accept a few review copies again. And for some reason, I accepted this book without reading the first few pages online, even though I usually research and screen review copies offered me rather meticulously. But I’d heard good things about Garret Freymann-Weyr’s earlier novel My Heartbeat (which was a Printz Honor book)…and, all of this is my way of saying that I didn’t like After the Moment at all. In fact, after sixty pages, I realised it was too much effort to read the rest of the book. So I skimmed it, getting the salient details, and e-mailed the author to explain that I couldn’t write a positive review. In the past, when I’ve done that, the author has agreed that I should just not review the book at all. But Freymann-Weyr said that she still wanted me to review it. So, um, this is going to be quite a negative review, which I find awkward in the extreme. So know that I’m only writing this because the author wanted me to, and I would normally never analyse every single shortcoming of a book into exhuastion. But I can’t in good conscience recommend it. And let me tell you why.

The first problem for me was the clunky writing style.

Millie’s letter to Lillian arrived the next day. When Leigh got home-late, as he’d spent the afternoon at a swim meet, watching Astra destroy her competition-Lillian handed it to him, saying, “This is really for you.” It was two pages long. Millie thanked Lillian for coming to Seth’s service. She said she wanted to ask Leigh a huge favor, but first wanted Lillian’s permission. Or, rather, she wanted it to be very clear that this was all her idea. Neither her mother nor Clayton knew anything about it.

Have you noticed that almost all of the sentences are exactly the same length? And that there’s something stilted about them? Yeah-it’s like that throughout the whole book. I couldn’t connected with any of the characters, in part because the writing wouldn’t allow me to fall into the story. I wanted to pull out a red pen and start correcting, even rewriting, whole passages. (Oh, and Lillian is Leigh’s mom-he refers to his parents by their first name, which I found really odd.)

Of course, the other reason why I couldn’t connect with the characters is that they didn’t feel real. The story is told through limited third-person, from Leigh’s point of view (he’s a boy, btw). There’s a prologue when he’s 21, and then most of the book is told as flashback to when he was 17 (which I found absurd anyway, because doing a flashback to four years ago isn’t nearly enough time to make the idea of a more evolved, aware narrator work). But this is the most preternaturally aware high school junior I’ve ever heard of. He’s constantly telling you exactly what he’s feeling, as well as the feelings of everyone around him. I hate it when authors don’t trust me to figure out what’s going on, when they have to spell out every single little thing…it makes the story feel instantly fake, and if it’s one character’s voice doing the observing, that character becomes unconvincing. Here’s a tiny example (I’m trying not to spoiler anything yet, which is why I’m not picking more central bits) :

Astra’s father had invited her up to his house in Vermont for half of July and all of August, and Astra was beside herself with excitement. Her father lived in London and came back only in the summer, during which he might see Astra for a week or two. This summer, he said, he wanted her to meet his new girlfriend and to spend time with them. Leigh was glad for her, and happy she was happy.

There’s also this weird thing about the US war in Iraq running through the book (at least, the bit I read)…Leigh seems to actually be afraid he’s going to be drafted, and his parents discuss his options in moving to Canada. WTF?!?! I was in high school when the US invaded Iraq, and no one I knew was afraid that a draft was going to be reinstated. And the political observations of Leigh are painfully simple, which since I was a high schooler then, I feel comfortable saying sell the intelligence of 17-year-olds way short. Like this:

No matter how you got your news, it was pretty clear that most people did not feel the way Lillian and Astra’s parents did about the war. Most people were for it. Not in the world-the British Web pages told you that the world thought Americans were deranged cowboys-but at home. Leigh hated the idea of disagreeing with most of the people who lived in his own country, and so he read and listened. And kept his mouth shut.

But my biggest problem with the book is that it’s an ‘issues’ novel. You see, Leigh falls in love with a troubled girl, Maia. (I know at this point, this sounds rather like a John Green novel, but I LOVE both of Green’s books that I’ve read, because he’s a wonderful writer who creates living, breathing teens who are intelligent and funny and confused all at once. So don’t go there. lol) It’s not spoiler-y to say that Maia’s a recovering anorexic, because we know that right off the bat. It’s not handled the way it is in, say, Wintergirls, though…it just feels tossed in there to make Maia more interesting (although, like every other character in the book, she felt like a cardboard cutout). Oh, and have I mentioned that Leigh comes from a ‘modern’ family, whose parents are divorced and whose father is remarried, but his mom tries not to blame his dad for having an affair, because he’s ‘emotionally autistic’ and his new wife was a nurse who helped him connect with his emotions?!?! But we’ll leave that alone. Because after I realised I couldn’t read every page of the book, and began skimming, I discovered that the plot is like a Lifetime afternoon movie special. This will involve spoilers, though. So I’m starting a new paragraph.

So Maia and Leigh start dating, but then one night Leigh’s out of town visiting his ex-girlfriend and decides to stay there and comfort her (the ex). This upsets Maia, so she goes out drinking with a bunch of guys. Things get a little blurry, and she’s date-raped. And they film it. So Maia tells Leigh, but she decides she doesn’t want to prosecute because she wants to pretend it never happened so she can stay in her school. But then Leigh gets angry and beats the guy who raped her into a coma one day in the cafeteria. And Maia never speaks to Leigh again, because she trusted him with her secret and he ‘outed’ her so publicly.

This makes me SO MAD. I can’t even begin to tell you how upset I was to see such a horrible topic used for no apparent reason. There are wonderful novels out there, that handle rape victims with dignity and grace, where the rape is essential to the story and the authors are obviously exploring the issue in an attempt to help (Tender Morsels and Speak come to mind). This is not one of those stories. This felt exploitative and wrong. Maia’s nothing but an object.

There we go; that’s my thoughts on After the Moment and why I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. There are marvelous YA books out there, that deal with important, difficult topics. That create real characters and make the reader live in their mind, inhabit their world. This isn’t one of those. You’ve got better things to do with your time. And I’m sorry again for writing such a negative review; usually, I try to keep my less-than-positive reviews much shorter, and I always point out the good things in a book as well. But honestly? I didn’t see any good things in this one (I take that back; the cover is a really pretty light jade). Take that for what it’s worth. If you’ve read this book, and disagree, feel free to explain what you liked about it in the comments. But if you say anything mean about me, I’ll delete it without a second thought.

How do you handle reviewing books you didn’t like? Are you like me, relegating them to ‘blurb’ reviews? Or do you prefer to do a longer review, so you can look at why a book didn’t work for you?