Thalia @ Pictures in the Words

This book started off pretty good. I really liked the voice of the main character, Oliver. However, the further I got into the novel, the more I disliked it. There were a lot of individual issues that supremely bothered me—everything from grammar to irresponsible medical diagnoses—and that’s just the beginning! I wavered back and forth between one and two stars for quite awhile before finally settling here. In all honesty, the extra star is mostly for the shock value I got when I read an event that occurred at the end of the novel—and as much as that event pissed me off, I couldn’t ignore how surprised I was, and I feel like a book deserves credit for throwing me a curveball.

An ARC of this book was provided for me by the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. (All grammatical comments should be compared to a finished edition of the work, which I don't have.)

What I Liked: Spoilers!

• Like I said, there wasn’t really much of a reason for this to have two stars. There are some books that you just can’t give one star because one stars are reserved for truly heinous books. This wasn’t heinous, as irritating as it was (and I don’t doubt that my separate “What I Didn’t Like” parts will seem really long and make it look like I hated everything about this book, but I promise that I didn’t!), and it doesn’t deserve that sort of label. Plus, the shock value I talked about in my brief review added to why I gave this book two stars—any book that can truly surprise me deserves at least that much.

What I Didn’t Like:

• There were a lot of little things that bothered me about this book, so please bear with me as I go through them. The first thing I’ll address is the grammar. The writing was just…amateur and unedited. Run-on sentences, grammar that made absolutely no sense, sentences that seemed to go absolutely nowhere. Things like, “I was that desperate that this moment wasn’t happening,” “…waiting to jot down even more scribbles of the first poor soul that started to talk,” or “I could smile at the person I was sneaking around from and they would know exactly.” Barely any of what Oliver said or thought made any sense at all, and I felt like I had to decipher the true meanings of the sentences. It was extremely choppy and irritating to read if you care about grammar at all. These were errors I could not forgive, since simply reading any of them aloud would have told you they weren’t grammatically correct.

• There was a surprising lack of medical awareness for a book about a kid in a psych ward. Oliver randomly tells his parents he wants to kill himself (even though he doesn’t)—immediately downplaying the severity of such a statement and its implications, especially when Oliver’s father really does take him seriously and Oliver spends the whole novel trying to make up for that “one stupid sentence.” The word “depression” is thrown around like it means nothing, and perhaps what made me angriest what the diagnosis of Dr. Tiwari, the ward’s psychologist. Tiwari literally listens to two sentences about Oliver’s problems before diagnosing him with bi-polar disorder. I’ll admit, I was a little ignorant about what it takes to diagnose bi-polar disorder before I took a psychology class last semester, but now I know that it takes at least two (I think) depressive states (that last for several months or years) and one manic state (none of which Oliver had) before bi-polar can be considered an option. She doesn’t even say which form she thinks he has, and then puts him on meds for it—which is extremely dangerous, because Oliver does not have bi-polar. Any idiot with half a brain would know that. On top of all that, Oliver says that sometimes the snowy days stuck inside the hospital almost convince him that Seasonal Affective Disorder is a real thing—because he never believed it was real before, apparently. For a novel that is supposedly about bringing awareness to the difficulties teenagers deal with, there was an astounding amount of ignorance portrayed. (And then the never-failing suicide-without-a-purpose. Yeah, that never fails to thrill me.)

• Oliver is ridiculously sexist. He has tons of passages about the differences between men and women and how things “should” be. Women always win arguments, he should let Lacey win in a game because it’ll make him look “manly” and “that’s how movies and magazines portrayed it,” women are never straightforward about their feelings and men always are, it’s better for Lacey to sneak into his room because the nurses will assume that if he goes to her room, he wants sex, and if she comes to his room, then they just want to talk, it’s a miracle Lacey was at breakfast before him because “she was a girl.” On a related note, Oliver is crazy possessive of Lacey. He punches a guy in the face just for flirting with her (and fights with Lacey about the fact that she apparently couldn’t handle the situation), he tells her that will “fix her” “whether she likes it or not.” He refers to her as “his girl” constantly, and even goes so far as to tell her that he “knew she had to be his” the first time he saw her. “You will be mine if it’s the last thing I do.” “I knew Lacey would say yes to me.” It left a rotten taste in my mouth, and it made me dislike Oliver a lot. There was nothing comforting or protective about his manner toward Lacey and all women in general—he was possessive and judgmental. Not to mention he was generally ignorant and stupid. He says of a Christian girl that he would “rather date some Nazi cult member than someone like Molly again.” Because I guess a racist organization bent on killing and destroying innocent people would be way better than dating a girl who is just exuberantly Christian?

• Okay. The end of this book frustrated the most. This book is written in a first person, past tense narration, from Oliver’s point of view. At the end of the book, Oliver is walking down the street on his way to a date with Lacey (outside the psych ward, of course). I could tell I was getting really close to the end of the book by the percentage on the bottom of the screen. But I kept pushing forward, because I had no idea how it was going to end. Suddenly, though, Oliver gets hit by a car—at full speed. He’s lying on the sidewalk. He talks about his breathing getting shallow and his heart slowing. And then the book ends. So I close it and I pretty much scream, because what? You can’t kill the main character in a first person, past tense narration! Who is he narrating to and where? It’s in the past tense. That makes absolutely no grammatical sense! I mean, I have to give it points for shock value, but at the same time, I kind of need to take away points because that is not at all logical.

Overall: I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone. I was irritated way too often, and if you care about grammar at all, you’ll probably feel like pulling your hair out. However, it wasn’t entirely terrible, and maybe if Byrne got an editor, I would be willing to read another one of his novels. It just wasn’t worth the time or energy it took  to read it.

(http://thaliasbooks.tumblr.com/post/85854236552/a-million-little-snowflakes-review)