The Mussorgsky Riddle by Darin Kennedy
Mar. 9th, 2016 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroPsychic detective Mira Tejedor is called in to try to find Anthony Faircloth, a boy lost in his own mind and nearly catatonic to the outside world. Nearly immediately, the riddle of the mysterious music in Anthony’s head becomes intertwined with a local missing persons case, and it’s up to Mira to solve them both.
This falls into the category of, “I probably should have liked it more, but didn’t.” It’s a supernatural procedural/mystery and bears the hallmarks thereof. But something about it rubbed me the wrong way: Maybe that was just that this felt like something I would have written as a pretentious teenager. The language gets very highfalutin’ inside Anthony’s head, and not in a good way. The awkward interactions between characters that just aren’t quite…right, but I can’t say why. And the trying-too-hard music wankery, of course.
Anthony’s age, despite his “condition”, seems to be highly variable. Supposedly he’s 13. He attends high school, but was jumped two grades; he knows an insane amount about music and pop culture but prefers to play with toy trucks when he finally comes to. They can’t seem to decide if he’s a child or a teenager. This is handwaved with a “he seems autistic because he’s a really powerful psychic,” but that feels like an excuse to resolve inconsistencies.
(Also, everyone knows he’s a special needs kid, but despite being jumped ahead in grades and being pseudo-autistic, the teachers all just acknowledge, “Oh, he gets beaten up a lot, and would get beaten up more if his brother wasn’t around.” That’s the mom’s cue to shove a lawyer up the principal’s ass, thank you very much. If somebody is beating up special needs kids, that’s when you need to start handing out expulsions until the problem improves.)
The mysteries feel stretched, and I feel like constantly hearing about Mira needing to sleep late and take a bath to recover from her experiences—and the constant repetitive conversations where no new information is exchanged—feels like filler. I appreciate that Mira calls home every day and that she has a life separate from the mystery (and two separate romantic interests), but by the same token, my interest is the mystery, and unless it figures into the main story somehow, I don’t really care that he ex-husband is an asshole who cheated on her and is trying to buy their daughter’s favor.
Oh, and Mira discovers new psychic superpowers pretty much as the plot demands. “I’m not really telepathic, except when I totally am.” “Hey, I’ve never done any psychometry before, but look, it works just when I need it to!” “I only know one other person outside my immediate family who has psychic powers. Oh, hey, here’s two more I’ve just coincidentally happened upon!” I liked that her empathic sense was presented as smells that she translates into emotional information, but you could have built a perfectly good detective story around that, rather than making her power levels (and everyone else’s) happen to be exactly what was necessary to make each scene work, but never enough to solve the mystery prematurely.
Overall: There are some clever ideas here, and the mystery does hold together (with the ending…mostly working, even if the foreshadowing could have been better). I’ll call it “middling”—it’s not a bad book, but I wasn’t crazy about it either (as evidenced by all my nitpicking).
This falls into the category of, “I probably should have liked it more, but didn’t.” It’s a supernatural procedural/mystery and bears the hallmarks thereof. But something about it rubbed me the wrong way: Maybe that was just that this felt like something I would have written as a pretentious teenager. The language gets very highfalutin’ inside Anthony’s head, and not in a good way. The awkward interactions between characters that just aren’t quite…right, but I can’t say why. And the trying-too-hard music wankery, of course.
Anthony’s age, despite his “condition”, seems to be highly variable. Supposedly he’s 13. He attends high school, but was jumped two grades; he knows an insane amount about music and pop culture but prefers to play with toy trucks when he finally comes to. They can’t seem to decide if he’s a child or a teenager. This is handwaved with a “he seems autistic because he’s a really powerful psychic,” but that feels like an excuse to resolve inconsistencies.
(Also, everyone knows he’s a special needs kid, but despite being jumped ahead in grades and being pseudo-autistic, the teachers all just acknowledge, “Oh, he gets beaten up a lot, and would get beaten up more if his brother wasn’t around.” That’s the mom’s cue to shove a lawyer up the principal’s ass, thank you very much. If somebody is beating up special needs kids, that’s when you need to start handing out expulsions until the problem improves.)
The mysteries feel stretched, and I feel like constantly hearing about Mira needing to sleep late and take a bath to recover from her experiences—and the constant repetitive conversations where no new information is exchanged—feels like filler. I appreciate that Mira calls home every day and that she has a life separate from the mystery (and two separate romantic interests), but by the same token, my interest is the mystery, and unless it figures into the main story somehow, I don’t really care that he ex-husband is an asshole who cheated on her and is trying to buy their daughter’s favor.
Oh, and Mira discovers new psychic superpowers pretty much as the plot demands. “I’m not really telepathic, except when I totally am.” “Hey, I’ve never done any psychometry before, but look, it works just when I need it to!” “I only know one other person outside my immediate family who has psychic powers. Oh, hey, here’s two more I’ve just coincidentally happened upon!” I liked that her empathic sense was presented as smells that she translates into emotional information, but you could have built a perfectly good detective story around that, rather than making her power levels (and everyone else’s) happen to be exactly what was necessary to make each scene work, but never enough to solve the mystery prematurely.
Overall: There are some clever ideas here, and the mystery does hold together (with the ending…mostly working, even if the foreshadowing could have been better). I’ll call it “middling”—it’s not a bad book, but I wasn’t crazy about it either (as evidenced by all my nitpicking).
