Review: A Hot Mess From Start to Finish
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 17, 2014
Well, this is awkward.  My first read of 2014 – one I was anticipating because I felt sure it would be AH-MAZING – ended up alternately boring me, and making me put my rage face on.  Over and over again, I see-sawed between wanting to yawn, and wanting to punch the characters right in their immature faces.  Me After You was a TOTAL failure for me in just about every single way.  It gets one star because I finished it, and because there was ONE side character that was pretty awesome.I guess I should start with the characters.  As mentioned above, I liked Aiden, the only character with ANY redeeming qualities: he was sweet, supportive, and honest.  The others were varying degrees of douche-canoes and failbombs.  Sawyer, our main female spent the entire book a) whining, b) lashing out at EVERYONE around her, or c) refusing to go after what she wanted for lame reasons.  Dean, our main guy, was a class-A JERK, who had a few moments where I ALMOST liked him….but then he’d ruin whatever progress we were making.  Dean is a cardboard “bad boy”, who treats the women in his life like poo, then can’t believe they don’t want to be with him.  We know how I feel about THAT type of character.  But so Dean rides a motorcycle, and is “bad” and goes around randomly ruining lives.Seriously, though.  I tried SO hard to like Sawyer (or “Soy,” as her brother inexplicably calls her), or Dean.  (I hated Sawyer.  I just can’t even with her.  I TRIED, but when she shut her brother out of her life for EIGHT MONTHS, the brother that called her all the time to check on her….no.)  Or even her parents, but they weren’t fleshed out at all.  Their daughter was grieving (and then at times NOT grieving) and they never really did much other than say “there, there,” and draw her baths.  Bad parenting, yo.  Her dad was in the book for maybe two pages, and her mom was sweet but basically neither of them had personalities.  (I actually felt BAD for her parents, because Sawyer was a total shrew to them so many times.)  Although I preferred them to Alix, Sawyer’s best friend.  Alix is a stone-cold WITCH.  Let’s take a look at Alix’s FIRST entrance into Me After You, shall we?“If I’d known getting rid of your husband was the way to finally get you back here, I’d have done it myself.”And that’s just ONE example of the vitriol that regularly spews from Alix’s mouth.  This woman stabs Sawyer in the back, insults poor Aiden who just wants to date her, is a witch to Dean regularly (which granted, he deserves some of that), and is an all-around horrible friend.  I guess Hayes wanted Alix to be a “tough-love” type character, but it backfired, and badly.All the relationships in Me After You are unhealthy, too, and that was another 1000 points against it.  I HATE unhealthy relationships – be it unbalanced friendships, or romantic relationships.  They aren’t attractive, and they don’t make me happy to read about.  And in Me After You, we have several gems like this…I wasn’t planning on talking to Sawyer.  I wanted to see her face.  That girl is a freaking drug, and I’m going through withdrawals trying to keep away.And Sawyer was forced to “quit” Dean “cold-turkey.”  NO NO NO.  LOVE IS NOT A DRUG.  SAY IT WITH ME.  LOVE IS NOT A DRUG.  Time after time, these two referred to each other as a drug, hurt each other with words and actions, made decisions for the other without asking, and were SO unhealthy.  My favorite part was when we learned (at the very end of the book) why Dean initially left, and it’s the BS trope of “I did it for you/her/their own good.”  I will say, I did give Sawyer credit for telling him how wrong he was.  Because he was.  And?  He did it as coldly as he could, and for a LAME reason.  Instead of sticking it out, he RAN, and AMEN SAWYER:“You should have let me make that decision.  I don’t know why everyone thinks they know what I want or need better than I do!”AMEN.  Leaving and ending a relationship to “save” the other person?  Does the opposite.  It hurts them.  It leaves them with unanswered questions and unresolved feelings.  You end up damaging the other person, not hurting them.  And this makes the relationship – even the ending – EVEN MORE UNHEALTHY.  Why do authors write about this?  Whyyyyyyyyyyy.  It’s a) unrealistic, b) annoying, c)a cop-out, and d) lazy, lazy storytelling.The characters, obviously, were all a hot mess, and the “romance” was emotionless, except for the RAGE FACE I put on every time Sawyer and Dean were in the same room.  Seriously.  They kept insisting they belonged together and I never got WHY.  Sawyer was all “YOU’RE SO SPECIAL, DEAN,” and from what I could tell, “special” = “hot.”  They were very insta-love-ish in high school – apparently she mildly stalked him to get to know him, and he asked her out even though they’d never spoken, then from there we had a series of flashbacks showing them falling in LURVE.  (Oh and don’t even get me started on the fact that he asked her out ON A BET.)And that was something else I hated: the flashbacks.  Stuck in the middle of almost every chapter, they were WAY over-done, and most of them were unnecessary.  The odd thing was that a lot of them were out of order, but we didn’t KNOW that.  You’d just start reading, expecting it to be where the other flashback left off, and it was in the past/future but out of the timeline.  So weird.There were some moments of potential for the story and writing, and I think a LOT of the issues comes from the fact that Hayes needs to hone her writing style.  There were some REALLY awkwardly worded passages, and things like how time passed wasn’t handled well.  In the middle of one chapter, we skipped forward several weeks, for example.  Me After You would have greatly benefited from an editor.Finally, I just had too many issues overall.  A lot of the dialogue was really naked – nothing around it to tell me anything about how the characters are acting, and too many dialogue tags.  I didn’t care for the ending, or the way it all clumsily came together.  The MOST emotion in the whole damn book was the epilogue, and I will say, if the whole book had been as good as the epilogue?  I would have loved it.  But nope, no luck there.  Me After You was a hot mess from beginning to nearly end.