Glow : Book I, Potency, by Aubrey Hadley (Ruby & Topaz
Publishing)
This book began
auspiciously with a homeschooled teenager who loves soccer and rebels against
her mother’s demands for a curfew as a mysterious “sleeping syndrome” reaches
epidemic scale. Not only that, but she starts seeing mysterious glowing
creatures, invisible to everyone else. Before we can catch our collective
breath, she’s kidnapped by an alien race bent of cleansing the Earth of human
evil. What a great set-up!
Unfortunately,
that’s where the story began to sag. The suspense dissipated into long, long,
long stretches of characters explaining the obvious to one another. Action
submerged under the weight of description and dialog that didn’t advance the plot,
reveal character, or heighten conflict. Even when something important was
happening, it felt distant and flat, without emotional engagement.
On a prose level,
the many scientific impossibilities or rather extreme implausibilities are
dismissed with “unknown reason,” or “somehow this happens.” I was able to
ignore most of the medical errors, until “Unless he’s bipolar and can change
his mind without a trace of his old emotions” just threw me out of the story,
since my husband has bipolar disorder and that’s not how it works. Awkward prose includes bits like, “My ears comb
the silence,” and “The seconds of silence that followed lingered in the air
like a pungent smell.”
I want to say
something about first person, present tense, when handled by an inexperienced
writer. Both choices give the illusion
of dramatic intensity and emotional immediacy but are actually hurdles to
achieving them. Just because action happens inside the protagonist’s head and “in
the now” does not automatically engage the reader more deeply. First person is
commonly used in Young Adult fiction today (although this was not always true
and might fall into disfavor in the future) because the focus is so often the
personal growth of the central character. This creates difficulties in
conveying information that’s necessary for the reader to understand but that
the narrator herself does not know or that there is no logical reason for her
to think about. You end up with dialog whose only purpose is the edification of
the reader, or in which two characters tell each other what they already know,
or ask idiotic questions at inappropriate times, which happens entirely too
frequently in this book. Present tense in particular requires skill in order to
not be flat and passive. You end up with passages of verbal flab like:
We go through the
net, the garden, and then come to the base of the structure. There is no
visible divide between the inside and outside. We enter the building by walking
through an invisible force field. We enter a massive lobby with towering white
walls that elegantly slope down from the ceiling and rise up from the floor
like white sand dunes. We go to the wall straight ahead.
If you’re in need
for a cure for insomnia, look no further. (Snarky aside: three out of four
sentences begin with “we,” and two of those “we enter” — what editor let this
slip through?)
I think in the end
the length and tedious pace bothered me so much because I didn’t connect with
the central character. She kept asking annoying rhetorical questions, and the
choice of present tense conferred an unfortunate emotional flatness. Another
reader might love the book. For me, though, the fact that this is only the
first book in a series made it ¾ of a book too long. The story is imaginative
and should have been compelling. I don’t know whether the author or the editor
bears the greater share of blame for the result.
