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A review by elenajohansen
Second Position by Katherine Locke
1.0
DNf at 25%, partially for angst without enough story to back it up, but honestly, mostly for nonsensical dialogue and complete lack of setting.
The book is divided between the POVs of its two main characters, Aly and Zed. Aly's chapters irritated me to no end because it was literally nothing but dialogue with her therapist. No dialogue tags, no fidgeting, no facial expressions, nothing but the words they said--the worst example of "talking heads" in a story that I've ever seen. So they just sit in a blank room with no furnishings, completely isolated from any noises outside, Aly's phone never rings because she forgot to set it to silent, the receptionist whom I assume exists never has to interrupt for an emergency...nothing. They sit in a blank room and talk at each other.
Zed's chapters are actual story, in the sense that things happen other than dialogue. Of course, most of it is angsty internal monologue. But when things do happen, at least there's physical space around the characters for them to happen in.
However, the dialogue is still a major issue in Zed's POV, just in a different way. I couldn't follow it, sometimes. I mean, quite seriously, that one character would say something, and the other would reply, and I would have no idea what it meant, because it seemed completely disconnected from what was said first.
For example, Zed's teasing the barista at his local cafe. Zed's friend Dan walks in and says, "You torturing the staff again?" Zed replies, "Only for you."
What? What does that even mean? And I can't use the rest of the scene to try to put it in context. Nothing comes before it that would help--this happens the moment Dan walks in. Immediately after, a more normal conversation happens, starting with "How're you?"
Nothing earlier in the book helps, either. I don't recall ever seeing Dan at that cafe before, just Zed and Aly at various times. Dan hasn't revealed elsewhere that he enjoying pestering the employees of whatever establishments he frequents. So how does it make any sense that Zed is "torturing" the barista "for [him]"? If it's a joke, why isn't it funny? If it's an inside joke, when was I, the reader, clued in? (Never.)
This isn't even close to the only example, just the one nearest to where I stopped reading. In Zed and Aly's numerous rambling conversations, they spoke elliptically of their history in ways I simply couldn't piece together. Zed would often ask a question, then go off on an internal monologue for a page and a half, then Aly would answer and it would make no sense, even if I paged back to reread the question.
All of this, put together, means I couldn't get invested in the characters, because I didn't have a single hope of understanding them. The whole narrative felt very stream-of-conscious with a startling lack of continuity and no real definition between past and present, exacerbated by some places where (to the best of my understanding) the verb tense of the story got mixed up so that I honestly didn't know whether I was in the present or yet another internal flashback.
The book is divided between the POVs of its two main characters, Aly and Zed. Aly's chapters irritated me to no end because it was literally nothing but dialogue with her therapist. No dialogue tags, no fidgeting, no facial expressions, nothing but the words they said--the worst example of "talking heads" in a story that I've ever seen. So they just sit in a blank room with no furnishings, completely isolated from any noises outside, Aly's phone never rings because she forgot to set it to silent, the receptionist whom I assume exists never has to interrupt for an emergency...nothing. They sit in a blank room and talk at each other.
Zed's chapters are actual story, in the sense that things happen other than dialogue. Of course, most of it is angsty internal monologue. But when things do happen, at least there's physical space around the characters for them to happen in.
However, the dialogue is still a major issue in Zed's POV, just in a different way. I couldn't follow it, sometimes. I mean, quite seriously, that one character would say something, and the other would reply, and I would have no idea what it meant, because it seemed completely disconnected from what was said first.
For example, Zed's teasing the barista at his local cafe. Zed's friend Dan walks in and says, "You torturing the staff again?" Zed replies, "Only for you."
What? What does that even mean? And I can't use the rest of the scene to try to put it in context. Nothing comes before it that would help--this happens the moment Dan walks in. Immediately after, a more normal conversation happens, starting with "How're you?"
Nothing earlier in the book helps, either. I don't recall ever seeing Dan at that cafe before, just Zed and Aly at various times. Dan hasn't revealed elsewhere that he enjoying pestering the employees of whatever establishments he frequents. So how does it make any sense that Zed is "torturing" the barista "for [him]"? If it's a joke, why isn't it funny? If it's an inside joke, when was I, the reader, clued in? (Never.)
This isn't even close to the only example, just the one nearest to where I stopped reading. In Zed and Aly's numerous rambling conversations, they spoke elliptically of their history in ways I simply couldn't piece together. Zed would often ask a question, then go off on an internal monologue for a page and a half, then Aly would answer and it would make no sense, even if I paged back to reread the question.
All of this, put together, means I couldn't get invested in the characters, because I didn't have a single hope of understanding them. The whole narrative felt very stream-of-conscious with a startling lack of continuity and no real definition between past and present, exacerbated by some places where (to the best of my understanding) the verb tense of the story got mixed up so that I honestly didn't know whether I was in the present or yet another internal flashback.