Review: Norah the Destroyer
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 25, 2013
This wasn't necessarily a bad book. I did finish it, so there's that. Nobody sang. Most of the author's song selections were pretty decent. I didn't feel like I was being manipulated to cry at every twist. And maybe with a bit of editing and a major overhaul of the main characters, it wouldn't be half as bad.That being said, there's a scene near the end of this book where Tess, Norah's tequila enabler, gave a very succinct summary of what has happened thus far in the story.That was 71% in. Which took me two days to get to.I kinda wish I started this one at 71% and miss out on:✵ Norah trying to seduce her best friend Josh in a party✵ Norah falling in lust with Clint in the very same party✵ Norah detailing the intricacies of her hair and make-up as she goes from this party to the next✵ Norah name-dropping the designers of her clothes and shoes as well as those around her✵ Norah getting fought over by Josh, Samuel and Clint by coming to blows against each other in different permutations (ie. Josh vs Clint, Clint vs Samuel)✵ Norah, the most beautiful girl in the universe. An angel. A diamond. A badass because she goes to shooting ranges for fun. A sexy artist because she likes to paint her art with her naked body (imagine her covered in paint squirming this way and that over the canvass-covered floor). She's rich. She never gets fat even if she eats half the pizza in the world. She's perfect."I stared at my reflection in the huge Victorian bath mirror. With the softness of the dress and my long black hair slightly wet and flowing, I looked like I belonged in an English rose garden."She may poop rainbows and shed pixie dust but I really had a hard time liking Norah from the first scene. I can see the effort to make her brazen and edgy but since everything was written from her POV she just came across self-centered and shallow. And since the story pretty much revolved around her, she definitely weighed Josh's, Clint's and Samuel's characters down, limiting their own depth as only relative to hers. As a narrator, she has a habit of spoon-feeding the reader what the other person is feeling at a specific scene which was really annoying.It's strange because I think this book suffered from too many things happening and yet, since everything else was tied to Norah it still fell flat and one-note. Which makes for a very difficult read when you can't root for the heroine because even her supposed burdens were enviable and the leading men were more cardboard than swoon material.Oh and this:"Dinner was four courses, the first being a green salad with duck confit, caramelized apples and macadamia nuts with some kind of ginger vinaigrette. The second course was sand crab in a tiny puff pastry shell and the main was roasted rabbit with fig sauce. By dessert, I was completely stuffed and could only admire the chocolate mousse in the French vanilla cup."Endless ramblings about the minutest details. Instead of devoting pages of the specifics of what Tess is wearing in Norah's party (one of five in this book I think, because these people are rich and that's ALL that rich people do, really) or the boring sex between Norah and Clint, I wish the details went to the actual foundations of Norah and Josh's friendship or Clint's personal and family issues (he seem to only have existed here to have sex with Norah) or Norah and Samuel's past beyond Singaporean Orchids. These are the things, I as a reader would be interested in. Not the dessert in party number 4, FFS.It felt all fluff and circumstance, to be honest. The thin subplot of The Lappell even came off laughable because of the ambiguity of their "evil misdeeds". What exactly do they do? Did they manufacture a virus that can wipeout mankind? Are they the ones who post the snarkiest comments in imgur? Are they friendly with North Korea? What? There were a lot of editing issues as well, with flashbacks coming and going without preamble, typos and strange turns of phrases:"My face pushed up against the glass window of the limo to peer out."Whut?This ended on a mysterious note, with someone apparently having some nefarious, hidden agenda leaving the conflict between Josh, Samuel and Clint open for the next book... yet I couldn't bring myself to give a flying duck.