Review: Flawed but not a failure.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 5, 2014
What I liked about the book:Realistic ending. I don’t want to spoil the plot, so all I will say is that this story ends both realistically, but also unexpectedly. Excellent pace; the plot moves along at a good clip, integrating the main character’s (Rain’s) back story without stopping up the action. The descriptions of the characters, sights, and settings are also nicely done and well placed within the story, keeping the action smooth and uninterrupted. I did not get bored. Lastly, for being a kind of modern day morality tale, it didn’t bog me down with preachiness.What I didn’t like:Unnatural dialogue throughout. One example: Ben is a gangster who started selling drugs at a young age and never finished high school, but talks like a clean cut, white bread, young republican. This could be attributed to who his boss is, but I can’t quite buy it.Also, the author uses the dialogue to tell us about the characters– which is usually a good strategy– but in this case takes it to rather extreme lengths. The information given (through the character’s– about themselves) becomes just that: information given. Why would drug dealers answer any and all question some random teenager has, and not only that, but go into great details about their lives, choices, and intentions? And vice-versa, the main character spills out her story to anyone who will listen. This brings the presence of the author and reader too much into focus, the reader is being told what the author wants them to know, and all too obviously. Getting to know a character too quickly (by either what the narrator says about them or, in the case of this book, what they say about themselves) produces not only forced dialogue, but artificial characters. A well developed character cannot be forced on the reader, it must emerge naturally, developing into flesh and blood through their actions and dialogue. In this book it was the side characters (the drug dealers, especially Vin and even Ben) that came across flat and forced.The last and biggest problem is that I didn’t get the feeling the author really knew what he was talking about. By then end of this book, I had the distinct feeling the author not only had never so much as met a real gangster (or even a “biker” for that matter), but hadn’t even bothered to do any serious research on how the drug trade works. Even some basic knowledge on guns and wounds would have helped as –I don’t want to give away anything– but someone gets shot in the gut at the end of the book and dies instantly, do you know how long it takes to die from a gut wound? A basic google search would have told the author that being shot in the gut is one of the most slow and painful ways to die.Overall, I wasn’t left disappointed by the book, but there were enough problems to keep me from finding the read satisfying.