Young Adult Novels – Mayhem and Slingshot
Welcome back everyone! It’s been over 2 weeks since my last post, but I was still reading books, so we have a lot to catch up on. Let’s start with two young adult novels I read, but found them to be lacking. Both of these reads I gave two stars to (wow – the number 2 keeps popping up! Two weeks, two books, two stars!)
Mayhem by Estelle Laure
It’s 1987 and unfortunately it’s not all Madonna and cherry lip balm. Mayhem Brayburn has always known there was something off about her and her mother, Roxy. Maybe it has to do with Roxy’s constant physical pain, or maybe with Mayhem’s own irresistible pull to water. Either way, she knows they aren’t like everyone else. But when May’s stepfather finally goes too far, Roxy and Mayhem flee to Santa Maria, California, the coastal beach town that holds the answers to all of Mayhem’s questions about who her mother is, her estranged family, and the mysteries of her own self. There she meets the kids who live with her aunt, and it opens the door to the magic that runs through the female lineage in her family, the very magic Mayhem is next in line to inherit and which will change her life for good. But when she gets wrapped up in the search for the man who has been kidnapping girls from the beach, her life takes another dangerous turn and she is forced to face the price of vigilante justice and to ask herself whether revenge is worth the cost. From the acclaimed author of This Raging Light and But Then I Came Back, Estelle Laure offers a riveting and complex story with magical elements about a a family of women contending with what appears to be an irreversible destiny, taking control and saying when enough is enough.
Slingshot by Mercedes Helnwein
An exciting debut contemporary young adult novel perfect for fans of Rainbow Rowell and Mary H. K. Choi. Grace Welles had resigned herself to the particular loneliness of being fifteen and stuck at a third-tier boarding school in the swamps of Florida, when she accidentally saves the new kid in her class from being beat up. With a single aim of a slingshot, the monotonous mathematics of her life are obliterated forever…because now there is this boy she never asked for. Wade Scholfield.
With Wade, Grace discovers a new way to exist. School rules are optional, life is bizarrely perfect, and conversations about wormholes can lead to make-out sessions that disrupt any logical stream of thoughts.
So why does Grace crush Wade’s heart into a million tiny pieces? And what are her options when she finally realizes that 1. The universe doesn’t revolve around her, and 2. Wade has been hiding a dark secret. Is Grace the only person unhinged enough to save him?
Acidly funny and compulsively readable, Mercedes Helnwein’s debut novel Slingshot is a story about two people finding each other and then screwing it all up. See also: soulmate, friendship, stupidity, sex, bad poetry, and all the indignities of being in love for the first time.
MAYHEM
Right off the bat, let’s get the content warnings out of the way. Domestic and child abuse. Extreme violence. Kidnapping. Murder and off page suicide. Having read a book about SA, I was sent a copy of this book from the publisher (thank you Wednesday books!) Given the subject matter though, I wasn’t in the right head space and put it off until this year’s weekend of reading.
Imagine my surprise to find out the book takes place where I went to high school. Good ole Central Coast town of Santa Maria. Santa Maria – where your BBQ is tasty, your Future Farmers are on the rise, and there is no beach in sight. Because it’s not on the coast. It’s inland. I was disappointed when I was reading about Santa Maria’s great beaches, and it felt like the author had never stepped foot there.
Putting that aside, I was excited about the Lost Boys and Craft mash-up elements that the book promised to have. But…it’s basically the plot of the Lost Boys verbatim but instead of vampires, it is magic more in line with The Craft. No new takes. Just straight from the movie.
While Mayhem is a character that you can root for, the kids that are living in the Brayburn house were not as well fleshed out. I felt nothing for them and didn’t care about their being in the story at all. I was curious to find out who the kidnapper was, and what would happen with Mayhem’s stepfather, but that was it for me. Nothing else held my interest, and I found myself skimming through the book.
Slingshot
Cartoon cover with a blurb about true love? Summary that says it’s acidly funny? Yes and yes! Unfortunately, neither of those things happened for me.
Gracie starts the story off by finding out the teacher she is in love with is getting married, so she confronts him and it’s just off-putting right away. Were they in a relationship? No. The teacher had no clue. But she’s crying in her room for hours. Right away, this is not a character I’m here for. But onward I read. Angst. More unnecessary drama. More angst. While very realistic, it doesn’t make for a compelling story. Also, nothing she said was funny. It was just bitchy. Followed up with “I know I am being a bitch but…” There’s only so many times I can read that line before I want to put the book down forever.
Then we meet Wade, the whole heart of the story. One minute she hates him and the next minute she loves him. More angst. We don’t find out his secret until close to the end of the story. And then that’s it. It leads to a weird ending that I just didn’t care about. But I should have. It should have been an ending that I felt more upset about.
Another book I just skimmed through to see how it would all end. For the realism of how melodramatic teens can be, I’ll give it an extra star. Unfortunately, this book just didn’t do it for me.
