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Midair by Kodi Scheer
Vanessa is a deeply unpleasant person, though her terrible attitude and suicide ideation might be the result of her brother’s recent death, her mother’s self-medicating with sedatives, and her being accused of cheating on her ACTs (which dashed her college hopes). So now she’s flying to Paris alongside three other girls from her school, and she’s planning to jump from the Eiffel Tower.
This was a free “Kindle First” book, and well into the realm of “you get what you pay for.” Among other things, I would have sworn that Scheer was male from her obsession with the characters’ bra sizes, but the internet assures me otherwise. This book is impressively dated by musical references (and later by an actual date in a cemetery); Vanessa is apparently my age and the majority of the story takes place in 1999.
Vanessa’s “voice” is actually moderately realistic for a know-it-all, unpleasant teenager. A modern-day Holden Caufield, but less eloquent. She tends to pound exposition into the ground (nary a chapter goes by that we don’t hear about her plan or how much she misses her brother) and give blunt asides about her opinions on religion and sex. Of course, either this means Scheer is excellent a capturing voice, or that Scheer is a mediocre writer who can’t help but exposit like a teenage know-it-all.
Amongst the many, many nitpicks: Four girls are alone in Paris without a chaperone. Two of them don’t speak French. One of them actually lied to her parents about where she was going; they think she’s in a different country. What on earth were the parents thinking?
There’s also the massive fridge logic about how the ACT cheating thing settled out, but fine, it’s an alternate universe where standardized tests are run differently and no one expects the valedictorian to ace one.
There are interspersed mini-chapters that are clearly flash-forward, years later a woman talking about her daughter and the terrible thing she did in the past. It’s Vanessa, of course—I had hoped from early on that we’d learn that it was someone else talking in flashback, to give the story something resembling a twist. (Okay, the girl who dies isn’t necessarily the one you’d expect, but still.) The dénouement just irritated me: Vanessa makes a few more bad choices, then goes home and lives a perfect life as a wife and mother and constantly contemplates screwing that up by presenting the events of this story to her daughter as “her horrible secret” rather than “the poor choices she made out of grief and depression.”
I’m trying to decide what this book was trying to be. Part memoir, part cautionary tale aimed at teenage girls, maybe? Plenty of sex and drugs and forbidden freedoms to make it interesting?
Overall: Middling coming-of-age drama with an unlikable narrator. In a world where Mean Girls exists, the book doesn’t really need to.
This was a free “Kindle First” book, and well into the realm of “you get what you pay for.” Among other things, I would have sworn that Scheer was male from her obsession with the characters’ bra sizes, but the internet assures me otherwise. This book is impressively dated by musical references (and later by an actual date in a cemetery); Vanessa is apparently my age and the majority of the story takes place in 1999.
Vanessa’s “voice” is actually moderately realistic for a know-it-all, unpleasant teenager. A modern-day Holden Caufield, but less eloquent. She tends to pound exposition into the ground (nary a chapter goes by that we don’t hear about her plan or how much she misses her brother) and give blunt asides about her opinions on religion and sex. Of course, either this means Scheer is excellent a capturing voice, or that Scheer is a mediocre writer who can’t help but exposit like a teenage know-it-all.
Amongst the many, many nitpicks: Four girls are alone in Paris without a chaperone. Two of them don’t speak French. One of them actually lied to her parents about where she was going; they think she’s in a different country. What on earth were the parents thinking?
There’s also the massive fridge logic about how the ACT cheating thing settled out, but fine, it’s an alternate universe where standardized tests are run differently and no one expects the valedictorian to ace one.
There are interspersed mini-chapters that are clearly flash-forward, years later a woman talking about her daughter and the terrible thing she did in the past. It’s Vanessa, of course—I had hoped from early on that we’d learn that it was someone else talking in flashback, to give the story something resembling a twist. (Okay, the girl who dies isn’t necessarily the one you’d expect, but still.) The dénouement just irritated me: Vanessa makes a few more bad choices, then goes home and lives a perfect life as a wife and mother and constantly contemplates screwing that up by presenting the events of this story to her daughter as “her horrible secret” rather than “the poor choices she made out of grief and depression.”
I’m trying to decide what this book was trying to be. Part memoir, part cautionary tale aimed at teenage girls, maybe? Plenty of sex and drugs and forbidden freedoms to make it interesting?
Overall: Middling coming-of-age drama with an unlikable narrator. In a world where Mean Girls exists, the book doesn’t really need to.