Sunday, June 26, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Our Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert

 




 Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on June 28, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Our Crooked Hearts is a stand alone young adult fantasy novel by author Melissa Albert, who apparently is known for a trilogy that I haven't read.  It's a story featuring a pair of generations - a teen girl in the present who runs into a strange girl out of nowhere and who keeps finding weird signs that her mother is hiding a magical secret; and her mother in the past as she grows up poor, finds magic along with a pair of friends and gets into terrible trouble.  Multi-generational novels are a trope I've see a few times and they usually work pretty well - with the past is revealed to the reader and the protagonist along the way, leaving the present day character with a greater understanding of who their ancestors were, the protagonist growing closer and understanding more of who they themselves are.  

Alas, Our Crooked Hearts doesn't quite manage to make the trope work as well as it could, thanks to what feel like some shortcuts in the final act of what really isn't that long of a book.  Both main characters are very likable and their plots are easy to get caught up in, even if some background setting aspects are a bit cliched and shortchanged.  And the book moves at a very good pace through its first two acts.  But its third and final act is so short, and just doesn't really give the book time to really deal with its themes and impacts, which really makes this book feel kind of generic and disappointing in the end, even if it's never actually bad.  


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------
17 Year old Ivy has, as long as she's remembered, just sort of floated through her high school life - never having any dreams and always sort of just coasting without making much impact.  But when her soon to be ex-boyfriend swerves in the middle of the road to get out of a car accident, she finds something strange: a mysterious naked girl in the middle of the road who knows her name.  And that's not the only strange thing that she begins to notice happening: a bloody rabbit arrives outside her home, the neighbor boy she's never noticed before begins to take an interest, and strangest of all - her mom begins to act weirder and weirder....until she disappears.  Searching for answers, Ivy soon finds that there is something magical about her mother, a magical secret that threatens a disaster unless she can figure it out.

Years ago, in the City, Dana grew up without a mother, with an absentee father, and really only her best friend Fee to rely upon.  But she'd always had a seemingly supernatural ability to find or divine things, as if she had some sort of supernatural gift...and Fee seemed to have her own such feelings about the emotions others.  Yet when the two of them meet a third girl, they discover that those feelings/powers are just an inkling of what they can do, and soon they begin to delve right into a book of the occult.  

Yet both Ivy and Dana will both, generations apart, learn that magic can come at a price....and that sometimes that price is so dark that it may haunt one forever.....
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Our Crooked Hearts for the most part - except for a bit in its second half - takes place in two first person narratives, one in the present with Ivy and one in the past with Dana (Ivy's Mom), that slowly explains things as Ivy tries to figure it all out in the present.  It's notable here how much of these narratives is barebones and generic - the story's two settings are described as "the Suburbs" and "the City", without any attempt to explain what City or location these stories actually take place in, Ivy has a few friends who are occasionally referenced who make no actual appearances or have any personality, and a fourth witch in Dana's story seems like she should be a big deal when first introduced and then turns into absolutely someone pretty extraneous.  But the two first person narratives still mostly make it work, because what matters the most are Ivy and Dana's feelings as they learn more about magic and strangeness and how it has affected them.  

For Ivy, that magic and strangeness seems to indicate something of loss, something she clearly should have had but for some reason doesn't - reasons that are revealed as the book goes on.  She sees her Mom holding secrets and acting weird, sees the weird bloody rabbit and the mysterious girl, and notices the boy across the street who she should seemingly no more, and finds herself desperate to figure out what's going on.....a desperation that is only enhanced when she finds more and more things that suggest that her lack of understanding is due to something her mom did to her, which affected her memories.  

For Dana, that magic and strangeness at first seemed to be an escape from her poor isolated life, where the only person and support she had was Fee.  Having a third witch teach them (a girl named Marion) gives them the ability to do more and be more and that is just intoxicating to them, even as both Dana and Fee know that Marion is from another world and grow to kind of want to leave her out....but the promise of more power is just too tempting to the two of them given what little they have.  And so of course things go wrong, leading to Dana and Fee, especially Dana, scrambling to try and save themselves, and then to try and move past it all despite what they've done.  

And of course this leads to Dana's problems with Ivy in the present, as the mother who is desperately afraid of what her mistakes will do to her daughter whom she loves.  But secrets, like in many a story, have a way of coming out at the worst times, and the book does a pretty good job parceling them out to create a plot that really intrigues and keeps you involved.  

The problem however is that while the book does a good job doling out secrets and keeping things intriguing, it doesn't really know how to slow down and show those reveals' impacts.  So the book gets to a point at the end of act two, which really should be the 2/3 point in the book, where everything is revealed and the main character Ivy has to figure out how to handle the reveal of what her mother Dana seemed to truly do....except that point comes 85% of the way through the book so there's no time to actually deal with that, and instead the book rushes through to the climax and finale instead.  And so Ivy goes from learning something that should cause her to fully turn against one character and possibly make a wrong decision....to instead making the right decision even though she has nothing but a lucky coincidence to drive her in that direction and has spent no time thinking over what she has just learned that should instead turn her wrong.* It's like the book had a whole third act in which Ivy goes reeling from the revelations, starts taking a wrong turn, only to put together pieces that redirect her in the right place.....except that act was excised from the book entirely for no reason whatsoever.  And it just makes so much of the setup seem utterly pointless.  

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The result is a book that has a solid structure and decent elements, but just doesn't do enough with those elements, and also is so generic outside of the key points, with characters dropping in and out of the narrative the moment they're no longer needed.  It's not a bad book in any way, but it's just very frustrating in how it plays out despite some prose that very much drew me in, which makes it hard to recommend.  

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