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A review by hashtag_alison
The Mara Dyer Trilogy by Michelle Hodkin
2.0
I started this series because the author was at Dragon Con a few years ago and I went to like every YA panel that year so I tried to look up as many of the authors as possible afterward.
The premise of the series is interesting. The main character was in a mysterious accident where her best friend and boyfriend died, and she’s dealing with the trauma and memory loss from that night. When her family moves to try to help her cope. But some of the nightmares feel more like memories and as her enemies starting dropping like flies she has to figure out if she’s crazy before she goes crazy. It promises all the comfortingly predictable catharsis of a YA novel with a darker twist than usual, and with a humanizing insight into PTSD. And for the most part, it was pretty good.
The love interest is where it first goes off the rails. He is every cliche in (excuse me) the book. Bad boy, leather jackets and 80s music, super player that is widely agreed to be the most attractive teenage boy in the county, foreign and secretly insanely rich, and the most important quality for a Brooding YA Hero - one dimensional. I’m not big on romantic subplots in the first place, but having a heroine that I respected up to this point become slavishly devoted to a hot dude she just met was extra disappointing. They even do the thing where she doesn’t like him at first because she’s sassy and independent but he keeps pestering her and she eventually falls for him. And at some point he does something she should find unforgivable but she forgives him anyway because she just…really wants to bang him? It’s set up as this huge internal struggle and then shut down in the same paragraph. I get that it’s supposed to be relatable to teen girls full of hormones and all but it’s also a TERRIBLE role model. And maybe the author didn’t want to write a role model, but I think you can write a flawed but relatable character that ultimately teaches the reader a positive lesson and that it’s especially important in media directed towards the young. So that was kind of disappointing.
Another thing in the series that got kind of weird toward the end was the main character herself. Mara spends most of the books struggling with the dark and dangerous nature of the powers she may have and how that darkness is affecting her own self-image. But at some point in the last book she just gives it all up and basically goes full serial killer. She apparently loses that struggle. It was bizarre, and not in a way that matched the overall gothic overtones of the books.
All in all it went from passable if predictable fantasy to something I was just not on board with. I’ve thought about it a lot because I really thought it was gonna work out so I was kind of angry when it got cliche and then uncomfortable. So, the way I’ve felt about a lot of guys in the end.
What I’m saying is I really wanted to like this series but in the end I didn’t.
Oh my God and I forgot the weird conspiracy theory denouement at the end, what was that? Like seriously?
The premise of the series is interesting. The main character was in a mysterious accident where her best friend and boyfriend died, and she’s dealing with the trauma and memory loss from that night. When her family moves to try to help her cope. But some of the nightmares feel more like memories and as her enemies starting dropping like flies she has to figure out if she’s crazy before she goes crazy. It promises all the comfortingly predictable catharsis of a YA novel with a darker twist than usual, and with a humanizing insight into PTSD. And for the most part, it was pretty good.
The love interest is where it first goes off the rails. He is every cliche in (excuse me) the book. Bad boy, leather jackets and 80s music, super player that is widely agreed to be the most attractive teenage boy in the county, foreign and secretly insanely rich, and the most important quality for a Brooding YA Hero - one dimensional. I’m not big on romantic subplots in the first place, but having a heroine that I respected up to this point become slavishly devoted to a hot dude she just met was extra disappointing. They even do the thing where she doesn’t like him at first because she’s sassy and independent but he keeps pestering her and she eventually falls for him. And at some point he does something she should find unforgivable but she forgives him anyway because she just…really wants to bang him? It’s set up as this huge internal struggle and then shut down in the same paragraph. I get that it’s supposed to be relatable to teen girls full of hormones and all but it’s also a TERRIBLE role model. And maybe the author didn’t want to write a role model, but I think you can write a flawed but relatable character that ultimately teaches the reader a positive lesson and that it’s especially important in media directed towards the young. So that was kind of disappointing.
Another thing in the series that got kind of weird toward the end was the main character herself. Mara spends most of the books struggling with the dark and dangerous nature of the powers she may have and how that darkness is affecting her own self-image. But at some point in the last book she just gives it all up and basically goes full serial killer. She apparently loses that struggle. It was bizarre, and not in a way that matched the overall gothic overtones of the books.
All in all it went from passable if predictable fantasy to something I was just not on board with. I’ve thought about it a lot because I really thought it was gonna work out so I was kind of angry when it got cliche and then uncomfortable. So, the way I’ve felt about a lot of guys in the end.
What I’m saying is I really wanted to like this series but in the end I didn’t.
Oh my God and I forgot the weird conspiracy theory denouement at the end, what was that? Like seriously?