Welcome back lovers and bloggers! I would love to take the time to update you on our lives here at Whiskey Before Breakfast, but I simply can't because I would like to dive right into the review of Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley. The reason being is that I think this will mark the first time a negative book review will be done by our blog. So let's get started.
As you know from my previous post on Looking for Alaska I am a fan of young adult fiction novels. If you didn't know that then you should go back and read that review. So, in the spirit of the genre I decided to purchase a lesser known work by John Corey Whaley who fairly recently came out with his debut novel Where Things Come Back. My process for purchasing said work was solely based on the cover and a brief reading of the inside flap. There was something about it that had an inviting and benevolent feel to it. And although it had piles of interesting and page turning material to work with, it utterly failed.
It's the story of Cullen Witter who lives in the godforsaken town of Lily, Arkansas where there is nothing to do and is described as a place that you would move to a short time before you die. It's the archetypal dull town of the south that most young adult fiction novels take place (such as When Zachary Beaver Came to Town) and the kids are forced to cope with the drudgery of life. The thing is, there is a lot happening in Lily ever since a massive woodpecker, known as the Lazarus woodpecker, was reportedly sighted in the backwoods of the town and not to mention that Cullen's younger brother, Gabriel, has gone missing. With the combination of these two events the reader should be pumped to dive into the story, but what they soon find is that they are wading into an ankle high pool of terrible writing and underdeveloped plot lines. It was like buying Gushers only to find that all the goo on the inside had been sucked completely dry.
Whaley tells the story in an interesting way where the chapters alternate between the first-person point of view with Cullen and the third-person point of view of a parallel story line that starts with a missionary boy named Benton Sage. To be completely honest, I was more interesting in the third-person point of view story than I was with anything Cullen had to say. Cullen's story line was too flat and repetitive. He is a seventeen-year-old boy who somehow gets laid twice in the book, but he himself claims to be awkward and no ladies man. Also, Whaley decides to start about 90 percent of Cullen's paragraphs with the phrase "When one is..." in order to escape the limited first-person point of view. Look, if you're going to tell a story from a certain point of view, at least stay true to its nature and don't try and find cheap ways to get around it so you can fill your reader in on other characters' traits or behaviors that you forgot to mention earlier in the story.
The writing was horrifyingly awful during the parts that Cullen was telling the story. Actually, I found myself skipping some of Cullen's sections in order to read more of the parallel story that was going on, not because it was written any better, but because it was actually interesting. Here is how I can sum up Cullen's parts for you: "My name is Cullen, not to be mistaken for Edward Cullen, and I'm sad because I had a great relationship with my younger brother that actually wasn't developed much in the story and you should be sad with me. Also, I'm kind of a dick to my best friend who tries to help me through the loss of my brother, but I would rather just hook up with two random girls who play no significant part to the story." You can now skip those parts.
Okay, so I might be laying into Whaley's debut book a little too much and must give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he hasn't been in the game of authorship long enough to know the "do's" and "don'ts" of young adult fiction. Yet, Mark Twain once wrote, "Show, don't tell" and apparently Whaley skipped that eighth grade English class. He left nothing up to the imagination or for the reader to figure out because when he would mention or allude to something that could allow the reader to develop his own thoughts, he would immediately explain what he meant in the next sentence or paragraph. You're not stretched in this novel because the author won't allow you to think outside of the world of his story.
One final note on the work was that Whaley had a tendency to fail with description or just word choice in general. At many times when characters would be speaking, Whaley would revert to the "hyphen tactic" as I like to call it. Here's an example: "'What happened?' I asked in that I-hope-it's-okay-if-I-talk-right-now kind of way." Oh really? As opposed to what other kind of way when you ask a question? Were you speaking in the way where you hope you don't talk about the question you just asked? Another case is when Cullen's best friend Lucas is trying to get him to run a race and is being insistent on the subject. Cullen describes Lucas' look as that "waiting-for-me-to-give-in-to-his-odd-request-and-just-go-with-the-flow sort of look on his face." Thank you John, I wouldn't have been able to guess the look on an insistent person's face unless you would have hyphenated sixteen words together. Believe it or not, this is a common occurrence.
Overall, this novel just didn't have any gusto. The message was lost in the stagnant and flat writing of Whaley. It was sad when I finished the work, not because of the ending (which, actually was one of the strongest parts), but because there was so much material to work with, but never developed. I think Cullen actually summed up this novel perfectly when he said that "all I felt like doing was fading into the background." And the background is where this work shall fade.
-- Zach
