Review: “A Way Back Into Love” by Veronica Thatcher

I don’t have any particularly strong feelings on plagiarism. I’m from India. Some of our most famous songs and movies have been directly “inspired” from the works of others, to the extent that we just change the names of the characters and the setting to something that is “Indian” and release it. While it is true that it is insanely difficult to be truly original when it comes to artistic endeavours, creators should be aware of the thin line that divides an homage from a rip-off. Sadly, Ms Thatcher, a debut author, and an evident Grey’s Anatomy superfan, was unable to do so in her book, A Way Back Into Love.

Emily Stevens and Derek Thorpe (yes, Derek) have been best friends since childhood and it is blindingly obvious to the reader that they are both madly in love with each other. Of course, neither is sure of the other’s feelings even though they have no trouble in understanding every other innermost desire of their friend. After a drunken night and a busload of misunderstandings, Emily leaves California for Boston, heartbroken. Five years later, she returns to do her internship at the hospital where her parents are big-shots, carve an identity of her own and face Derek again. Derek, in the meantime, is engaged to Emily’s bitchy half-sister, Emma, and there seems to be no love lost between them. The big question is: Will Emily and Derek find their way back into love with each other?

To clarify, I don’t think it’s wrong at all to want the characters you create to resemble the characters you love. Hell, if I ever publish a book, I will strive to ensure that my hero is a mixture of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rhett Butler, Chuck Bass and any Nora Roberts male protagonist. But when the similarities also extend to the family structure (Derek grew up in all-female household), the backstory (Emily’s mother is an accomplished surgeon but a cold mother), the secondary characters (Renee resembling Cristina and the nerdy guy contracting syphilis from a nurse) and an instance where Derek’s womanizing best friend, Carter, is accidentally referred to as Mark, it all becomes a bit too much. In addition, I found the banter between the protagonists very juvenile considering the fact they are surgical interns. The shifting POVs in the midst of the plot and the unconventional story structure that seemed to go on and on after what I thought should have been the Happily Ever After made this a very difficult read for me to like.

I would like to end my post by saying that I don’t hate the book. Despite its many shortcomings, I saw some potential in Ms Thatcher’s writing, especially in the moments when Derek and Emily are finding their way back to each other. I wish her all the best for her future.

I was provided a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. The views expressed are personal and not meant to be derogatory in any respect.

Review: “The Twelve” (The Passage #2) by Justin Cronin

These are confusing times to be a vampire. In the early days, things were clearer: you were a filthy, exsanguinated revenant, doomed to wander graveyards after dark, feeding on the blood of living humans, sleeping in coffins, biting necks and hiding your face from sunlight, mirrors, and God. You were a rat whisperer. You were neither rich nor sexy. And you definitely didn’t sparkle.

But then the Romanians discovered you, and you went from an underground word-of-mouth legend to a supernatural star of page, stage, screen, and, not surprisingly, dildos. The newly industrialized culture was mesmerized by you. No longer a mere monster, you ascended to metaphor.

But transformation is as much a staple of the genre as bats and bloodsucking. Every new vampire story absorbs and reconfigures the tradition, as Justin Cronin aptly demonstrates in The Twelve–the second installment to a vampire trilogy that began in 2010 with Cronin’s blockbuster novel The Passage.

The Twelve feels like a post-apocalyptic cover novel. Justin Cronin lifts liberally from the classics–a little Margaret Atwood, a touch of George Orwell, a lot of Stephen King–in a way that vacillates between homage and cheeky theft. The book is odd,  ponderously structured, flitting through time in decidedly bizarre ways and putting so much pressure on the upcoming final book in this trilogy to make the story tie together elegantly that Cronin has essentially left himself no room to stick the landing.

Yet the book is compulsively readable. And while it struggles in some places where The Passage soared, that seems to be because Cronin took some of the more pervasive criticisms of the earlier book to heart. The Passage was an odd hybrid of character-driven and plot-driven fiction; The Twelve tips more toward the latter, but Cronin has become a much better writer of this kind of story. The plot is always chugging forward, and while the overall contours are mostly predictable (as they were in The Passage), the specific moments and events driving the narrative aren’t.

The Passage began in a world where a military-created virus turned one professor and 12 death-row prisoners into super-vampires, who escaped and plunged North America into chaos and darkness. The book then abruptly lurched forward nearly a century, putting the residents of a tiny human outpost in the California desert in touch with the young girl who was afflicted with the virus without turning into a vampire. The book ended with a semi-cliffhanger, leaving several characters’ fates in question. (For more information, you can read the book or my review of The Passage here.)

The foremost thing about The Passage was just how weird it was.  For me, I believe I was able to get on to its wavelength, and it proved to be an oddly structured delight, one that didn’t give a fuck about leaving the plot behind for several hundred pages for what amounted to a quirky small-town novel awkwardly intersecting with a post-apocalyptic vampire novel. Lots of people I know pushed it away, but The Passage excelled in Cronin’s ability to evoke tenderness and loss, and to sketch in his characters in just a few sentences, then deepen them as the epic tale took root. The Twelve keeps both of these skills largely intact, but it also feels more focused, and that focus draws attention to some of Cronin’s less-worthy qualities, like a tendency to lean too heavily on sentimentality that turns some of the passages of the book into sugary-sweet sludge, or the fact that avid fans of post-apocalyptic literature will have read this all before, probably many times over. Cronin also can’t stop himself from embracing several stereotypes, including a mystical black man and (sigh) an autistic twentysomething who just wants to drive a school bus.

For better or worse, The Passage reads like a novel written by someone who isn’t afraid to try all new things, even if not all of them work. It’s derivative, but also deeply personal, and the two tones work together in spite of themselves. On a technical level, The Twelve is much better written, but also feels slightly more soulless, as if making the whole enterprise several hundred pages shorter left Cronin without rabbit trails to follow off into the plot’s hinterlands.

Yet even with all of this working against him, Cronin remains adroit at approaching his structure and characters from interesting angles. Instead of plunging forward from the cliffhanger, The Twelve initially sends readers back to the era when the virus was first sweeping the continent. The hope is both to establish a new set of characters and to give a better view of the events only glanced at in The Passage.  These 250 pages are mostly terrific (even though they feature that bus driver), and the rest of the novel–which follows more directly from The Passage–does a much better job of tying past to present and making all the plotlines matter. In particular, there’s a beautiful symmetry to the way Cronin leaves behind the world of the newborn “virals” and the way he leaves behind his future world; he uses the past to inform the mysteries he’s teasing in the present. It’s skillful stuff, though it creates an expectation that the third book will now have to wrap up storylines in multiple time periods.

The surviving characters of the original novel all follow believable arcs, and Cronin is great at coming up with new characters who invigorate the story for a few pages and are ripped away from the readers shortly  thereafter. Plus, he’s greatly improved his action sequences, and while the middle of the book occasionally strains from constant viral attacks, the last 200 pages expertly build tension and bring several mysteries to a head.

The Twelve has its flaws, but Cronin’s writing continues to lift it above what could easily become a morass of easy contrivance and eye-rolling vague spirituality. And even if the book had none of that, it would have Lila Kyle and Amy, two characters linked through strange circumstances, who drive the novel’s best portions. The heavily traumatized, deeply maternal Lila pushes the best parts of the mid-apocalyptic sections, while Amy continues her role from The Passage of being simultaneously a symbol and a recognizable young woman finding her way in a terrifying world. For all The Twelve‘s struggles to act as a bridge between its predecessor and whatever’s coming next, whenever the book turns to these two women, it succeeds.