NOW I Get It

Last week my neighbor was sharing with me that her granddaughter finally finished the book she had been writing.  While telling me about the process of finding an editor and working to get it published, she mentioned that, for the lowest fee, most editors will read two pages of your manuscript.  And I thought to myself, two pages?  How in the world can anyone know if a book is going to be any good in two pages? 

Remember my page 69 test a few months back?  That didn't go so well.  Trying to predict how good a book would be from reading one page was extremely unreliable, so how could only two pages possibly be much better?

Well.  I guess I just had to start reading the right book while the conversation was fresh in my mind.  Because after just two pages, I was like, now I get it.  The book I'm talking about is First We Were IV, by Alexandra Sirowy.

It started for pranks, fun, and forever memories.
A secret society – for the four of us.
The rules: Never lie. Never tell. Love each other.
We made the pledge and danced under the blood moon on the meteorite in the orchard. In the spot we found the dead girl five years earlier. And discovered the ancient drawings way before that.
Nothing could break the four of us apart – I thought.
But then, others wanted in. Our seaside town had secrets. History.
We wanted revenge.
We broke the rules. We lied. We told. We loved each other too much, not enough, and in ways we weren’t supposed to.
Our invention ratcheted out of control.
What started as a secret society, ended as justice. Revenge. Death. Rebellion.

I just grabbed this off the new releases shelf at the library and read the blurb inside the cover.  And I thought, Okay. This might just be good.  So I took it home and when I read the first chapter, which is only two pages long, I was like yeah baby, that's what I'm talking about (ha, ha, not really, but I was really impressed and super excited to read the book).

You can read those two pages here.

See what I mean?
This first chapter was absolute perfection.  It had so many things to draw the reader in and make them say give me more!  I actually read it twice.  Maybe even three times?  That's how much I loved it.  But did the rest of the story deliver the goods, so to speak?

Absolutely.

Funny thing is, the farther into it I got, and the more I thought about it afterward, the more and more I liked it.

First, you have a concept that is pretty darn original - four friends, sort of social out-castes, each very different from one another, but who have a tight bond.

You have a mystery for a back-story.
You have these four friends forming a secret society.
You have this society, which creates mischief and mayhem for a whole variety of reasons.
You have lots and lots of secrets.
You have everything, somehow, going horribly wrong in the end.

I loved that concept!

Then you have the characters.  For the most part, those characters were so vivid!  Their personalities were so distinct and bold. Only the narrating character seemed to be less, but that is because she is the one remembering and thinking about and commenting on her friends and her history with them, which is a big part of how they are developed.

I loved those characters!

And then there is the dialogue.  It was incredible.  Not only were there deep comments and witty banter, but the things that came out of those characters' mouths were so them.  Their personalities were illustrated as much by what they said as by any of the other myriad ways an author can define a character.  And did I say deep comments? And did I say witty banter?  It's the kind of dialogue that is written in The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer.  You just can't get enough of it.

I loved the dialogue!

Then, of course, the writing.  Because that is was pushes a book into the four and five star category for me.  The writing was pretty awesome.  The author just had a way of describing things that was so creative and unique.

Here are a few examples:

"He beat the air with a wooden figurine."  

"...the stench crawling up my nostrils..."  

"Graduation stood on my chest..."    

The character is not just waving the doll for them to see; he is upset. The smell is coming gradually, maybe stealthily, and is definitely unwelcome.  The prospect of graduation is a weight; it is causing distress.  The words that the author chooses convey so much more than if she had just said, he waved the doll in the air, or I was dreading graduation.  She interjects emotion with her writing, saying so much more so creatively with so many less words.  (Not to mention that she is using that good old literary device, personification, which makes things so much more interesting.)

The author also does a great job of sprinkling metaphors throughout, both simple and complex:

"We were together, tripping with words and laughter, giddy to play mad scientists to our monster." 

"The members of the Order of IV had been thrown off the stage and into the audience ..."

In fact, she uses an extended metaphor throughout the entire book to describe the relationship the four friends have with one another, and how it has and is still evolving.  Heck, she even throws in a motif here and there to help make her point!

What else?  At first glance this doesn't seem to be a book with some deep truth.  But after a while you realize that it is teaching a valuable lesson:  Sometimes you can get too caught up in something and things can spiral out of your control.  And sometimes you don't see the signs until it is too late to do anything about it.  The author really hits this home with the cryptic foreshadowing comments that come at the end of a lot of the chapters. (Which is not uncommon for writers to do, but she does it so well!)

Needless to say, I loved the writing!

Was there anything I didn't like about this book?

Well, the only think I really disliked were a few instances of disappointing PC, as I am really not a fan of political correctness.  Luckily, those comments were few and far between enough to not ruin my enjoyment.  And probably nobody under the age of twenty would even notice, so for the target audience this is unlikely to be an issue.

The book does have some interludes between the chapters in which the non-narrating characters get to tell things from their perspective via supposed video clips recovered from the police after everything happened.  Which is nice, because you get insight into why they made certain choices, but is not nice in the sense that I don't really like the device.  And I have come across it often enough in other books that it sort of spoiled a bit of the originality that I loved so much about this one.

Also, I did do some eye rolling about the teenage thought process of the narrating character, because, no longer being a teenager myself, I can look back at my own teenage thought processes with a roll of my eyes as well.  Her dumb ideas and decisions became less and less of an annoyance as the book went along, though, because the whole point was that she and her friends were getting in over their heads and it was affecting their decisions.  Which is also why the bits of bad behavior didn't bother me at all in this book.  (See my previous post here if you're wondering what I mean.)  But as the author has the narrator comment in her hindsight, "The good ideas were falling from the sky."  Which just about explains the whole thing, and is one of those fantastic comments that I like to copy from books and stick on my refrigerator (which I will be doing presently).

It actually took me a whole week to read this book.  Not just because I spent a lot of time running errands and working on my blog, but also because I didn't want to rush through it.  I wanted to savor it.

So now I get it.  Sometimes a book comes along where the writing genius shows up in the first two pages.  Sometimes that book, like this one, will be great from beginning to end.

Come to think about it, now I also get why so many books seem to crash and burn after the beginning.  It's the first few pages that get you noticed, and then it's up to someone to make sure the rest of the novel follows through.

 And sometimes, of course, the first two pages will really be nothing special, but by the time you've finished the book you realize it doesn't even matter because it was something amazing regardless.

Check out my upcoming post, NOW I Get It, part 2, to read about some other books that have great beginnings and find out if they keep the good stuff coming as well as this one did.


Rating:  4.5 Stars
Reading Level: not available
Age Appropriate: Upper Grades
Page Count:  448
Genre:  Thriller/Suspense, Mystery
Keywords: friendship, murder mystery, family secrets, secret societies