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A review by sherwoodreads
Kind of a Big Deal by Shannon Hale
This will be spoilery.
One thing I've noticed about Shannon Hale is that she strikes out in different directions with her books, instead of writing the same winning story over and over, with slightly differing trappings.
In this latest novel, teenage Josie Pie was a high school drama star who left school for a one-shot audition on Broadway, blew it, and ended up in Montana as a live-in nanny for a small girl. We never learn how anyone in their right mind would hire a totally inexperienced teen to be a live-in nanny, and it could be argued that that's really not what the story is about, but this kind of underscores what I felt went wrong here: there was a short story, or at most a novelette, worth of material stretched out into a novel, peopled with one-dimensional characters who played spear carriers to Josie's quest for stardom.
If this had been a short story, I would have loved it to pieces: early on, Josie visits a bookstore, and at the park, while her charge is playing, she falls into a book and finds herself in the story world of a historical romance complete with thieves and pirates. This section was absolutely hilarious--I kept laughing out loud, though I kept worrying about how long she was gone, leaving a small child effectively alone in a public park. But when Josie fell back into herself only two minutes later, I breathed with relief and looked forward to her growing up and getting on with her life . . .
To find the same experience repeated again, and again, the only substantive difference the genre of the story she falls into. And when Josie returns from each story world, she's right back to bemoaning her lost chance at stardom, and her non-communicating boyfriend, who she's convinced is two-timing her, and her bestie who is distancing her. (Can we blame her?)
I ended up putting the book down more and more frequently in favor of something else, until days turned into weeks, then months. When I returned to it at last, it was more with determination to get it finished than with pleasurable anticipation. By then the problems outweighed the pleasures, in spite of it being delightful on the sentence level: there did not seem to be enough story there to carry an entire novel.
Josie is whiny and self-absorbed, and though she appears to learn some home truths at the end, they felt a bit sermony, handed to her by the narrative voice instead of truly earned. The boyfriend shows up at last, true and blue for a happy ending, but still everything is all about her--we don't know him as a character any more than we did at the start. The nanny job is window dressing until we're told that Josie adores the kid at the end, but again it felt like the authorial hand firmly pushing us toward a rosy ending.
This book is aimed at a young audience, who might find the story charming in its present form. Hale's writing certainly invites enjoyment. It's the plot and the character development that failed for me. I reached the happy ending feeling mostly relief that at last it was done.
Copy provided by NetGalley
One thing I've noticed about Shannon Hale is that she strikes out in different directions with her books, instead of writing the same winning story over and over, with slightly differing trappings.
In this latest novel, teenage Josie Pie was a high school drama star who left school for a one-shot audition on Broadway, blew it, and ended up in Montana as a live-in nanny for a small girl. We never learn how anyone in their right mind would hire a totally inexperienced teen to be a live-in nanny, and it could be argued that that's really not what the story is about, but this kind of underscores what I felt went wrong here: there was a short story, or at most a novelette, worth of material stretched out into a novel, peopled with one-dimensional characters who played spear carriers to Josie's quest for stardom.
If this had been a short story, I would have loved it to pieces: early on, Josie visits a bookstore, and at the park, while her charge is playing, she falls into a book and finds herself in the story world of a historical romance complete with thieves and pirates. This section was absolutely hilarious--I kept laughing out loud, though I kept worrying about how long she was gone, leaving a small child effectively alone in a public park. But when Josie fell back into herself only two minutes later, I breathed with relief and looked forward to her growing up and getting on with her life . . .
To find the same experience repeated again, and again, the only substantive difference the genre of the story she falls into. And when Josie returns from each story world, she's right back to bemoaning her lost chance at stardom, and her non-communicating boyfriend, who she's convinced is two-timing her, and her bestie who is distancing her. (Can we blame her?)
I ended up putting the book down more and more frequently in favor of something else, until days turned into weeks, then months. When I returned to it at last, it was more with determination to get it finished than with pleasurable anticipation. By then the problems outweighed the pleasures, in spite of it being delightful on the sentence level: there did not seem to be enough story there to carry an entire novel.
Josie is whiny and self-absorbed, and though she appears to learn some home truths at the end, they felt a bit sermony, handed to her by the narrative voice instead of truly earned. The boyfriend shows up at last, true and blue for a happy ending, but still everything is all about her--we don't know him as a character any more than we did at the start. The nanny job is window dressing until we're told that Josie adores the kid at the end, but again it felt like the authorial hand firmly pushing us toward a rosy ending.
This book is aimed at a young audience, who might find the story charming in its present form. Hale's writing certainly invites enjoyment. It's the plot and the character development that failed for me. I reached the happy ending feeling mostly relief that at last it was done.
Copy provided by NetGalley