Slide by Jill Hathaway

Title: Slide
Author: Jill Hathaway
Publisher: HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray
Release Date: March 27, 2012
Pages: 256 pages (hardcover)
How I Got the Book: Found an ARC

Vee Bell is certain of one irrefutable truth—her sister’s friend Sophie didn’t kill herself. She was murdered.

Vee knows this because she was there. Everyone believes Vee is narcoleptic, but she doesn’t actually fall asleep during these episodes: When she passes out, she slides into somebody else’s mind and experiences the world through that person’s eyes. She’s slid into her sister as she cheated on a math test, into a teacher sneaking a drink before class. She learned the worst about a supposed “friend” when she slid into her during a school dance. But nothing could have prepared Vee for what happens one October night when she slides into the mind of someone holding a bloody knife, standing over Sophie’s slashed body.

Vee desperately wishes she could share her secret, but who would believe her? It sounds so crazy that she can’t bring herself to tell her best friend, Rollins, let alone the police. Even if she could confide in Rollins, he has been acting off lately, more distant, especially now that she’s been spending more time with Zane.

Enmeshed in a terrifying web of secrets, lies, and danger and with no one to turn to, Vee must find a way to unmask the killer before he or she strikes again.

Review:

Everyone thinks Sylvia "Vee" Bell's fainting spells are just instances of her narcolepsy acting up, but they don't know the truth. In reality, she ends up in other people's heads when she passes out and sees like through their eyes for a few minutes. She rarely sees anything good, but she ends up in a killer's head one night as they hold a knife over the dead body of her sister's best friend. Vee races against time to find the murderer as she struggles with her own issues, the body count increases, and her sister appears to be the killer's next target.

Vee's story is a sympathetic one considering what she goes through every day as a result of her power and what happened to her that made her go from being a blonde cheerleader to a quiet pink-haired girl. At first, I thought I thought I was going to love her; when a character comes up with quotes like "If she's the pink glitter on your valentine, I'm the black Sharpie you use to draw mustaches on the teachers in your yearbook (Slide, ARC p. 5)," I'm easily won over as long as the rest of their personality isn't particularly offensive.

Unfortunately, some parts of her personality were pretty bad and I couldn't ignore it. Her choices in detail and description when describing other girls did not endear her to me. She reviled the cheerleaders for being judgmental of other girls and mean to them? I often found Vee to be only mildly better than those girls. Almost as bad, she couldn't make up her mind about whether or not she wanted to get close to Rollins again. She kept saying she missed him, but she never tried very hard to strengthen her friendship with him to its former strength.

The only other remarkable characters were Vee's younger sister Mattie and her father. Rollins had potential, but little was done with him and it seems like he will be more thoroughly explored as a character in another book. I want to give Slide credit for trying to give the minor characters depth, but the attempts largely failed and get no credit at all, especially for forcing me to deal with more negative female stereotypes gathered into one book than I can feel comfortable with. The badly done love triangle and cliches do an especially good job weakening what is a fairly decent, if not good, novel.

The mystery element of the novel was a mixed bag. I perceived a few of the more important twists well ahead of their reveals, but I was caught off-guard and surprised by the twists more often. The tight writing, liberal use of red herrings, and perfect narrative choice (first-person present usually annoys me, so that is true praise right there) kept me reading despite my annoyance.

I think the strongest element of the novel is the way it takes time to touch on a few different issues. Bullying, suicide, date rape, the death of someone close to you--for such a short novel, Slide makes rooms for a lot of issues and does it well. Anyone looking for a lot of concentration on them will be disappointed; Slide is mainly focused on the mystery with a slight detour of "oh my God, this guy's so hot I forgot I'm investigating a murder." Still, the time it does dedicate to them is well-spent.

Slide sets up a brand-new series well, answering all the necessary questions for it to feel complete as a book yet leaving a few questions unanswered and allowing for expansion into new territory. Its sequel Impostor will be out in March 2013(!), but I'm not sure I will put it on my to-read list for 2013 just yet. The blurb is tempting, but I will wait to hear more about it.

3 stars!

What am I reading next?: The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson 

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Title: Coraline
Author: Neil Gaiman
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release Date: July 2, 2002
Pages: 162 pages (paperback)
How I Got the Book: Bought it.

The day after they moved in, Coraline went exploring...

In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close.

The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in another house just like her own.

Only it's different...

At first, things seem marvelous in the other flat. The food is better. The toy box is filled with wind-up angels that flutter about the bedroom, books whose pictures writhe and crawl and shimmer, little dinosaur skulls that chatter their teeth. But there's another mother, and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go.

Others are trapped there as well, lost souls behind the mirrors. Coraline is their only hope of rescue. She will have to fight using all her wits and any means she can find if she is to save them--and herself.

Review:

Coraline the movie is one of my all-time favorite movies. There is no need for me to argue it. One of the few good things my brother's then-girlfriend did for me was to make me sit down with her and my brother to watch the movie. I'm not a huge fan of Dakota Fanning, but I thought she was fantastic while voicing Coraline and both the animation and plot of the movie wowed me. After that fantastic cinematic experience, I wanted so badly to read the book, but I had such trouble finding it in stores. Now I have my own copy to cherish and I won't be letting it go anytime soon.

At first, I found the writing a little simplistic even for a children's book. She did this, he did this, she did this, she said this or that--I like it when a book is direct, but there is a difference between that and telling us everything instead of showing it. As I kept reading and saw Coraline make statements like this:

Coraline sighed. "You really don't understand, do you?" she said. "I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn't mean anything. What then?"  (Coraline, p. 120)

I realized the book was not simplistically written; it was merely understated. Some sage words of wisdom are in these pages (one piece in particular is especially relevant to another book I am reading right now) and the choice to keep the novel so sparsely described lets the truly extraordinary moments and phrases of Coraline's shine.

The other mother is a thoroughly creepy character and I love her for it. My friends may or may not share this opinion, but it is often the creepiest characters in a novel that I love the most. Wait, I should revise that because I don't love all creepy characters (the idea of me even tolerating the creeptastic Patch Cipriano of Hush, Hush fame and similar characters is both laughable and frightening). I love the creeps that are not romanticized and are allowed to shine in all their creepy glory. When it is shown as it is, I find it interesting; when it is romanticized and I know it most certainly should not be, I find it infuriating. The other mother ends up on the good side.

(And that was me seeing how many times I could say creepy or some variation of it before it stopped sounding like a word anymore. It still sounds like one, so I haven't used it nearly enough. I'll do better next time!)

In a way, my love for both the movie and the book is affected by nostalgia for a long-lost time. Being able to sit on the top bunk of my brother's bed, watch a movie, and feel like nothing bad could happen--I'll never have that back. My brother and his girlfriend broke up; the bunk bed was later broken during a home invasion that has become one of the defining moments of my life due to the trauma. Coraline takes me back to a time where I could sit on the ancient, creaking bunk bed and feel safe. Two and a half years of fear, paranoia, and the inability to feel safe is a very long time indeed.

So should you read Coraline? Yes. I don't hand out five-star ratings lightly these days and this book deserves one. For the echo of safety it can take me back to and its subtle charm, I love it.

5 stars!

What am I reading next?: The Alchemy of Forever by Avery Williams