I'm middle aged but due to illness am no longer sharp enough to read books for grownups, so I read youth books. I had previously read 3 other Callender books: Felix, Epic and King, all very good, but I Felix was my favourite. This one, I had to force myself to get through it. Total dud.Spoilers ahead.It had a lot of red herrings, you might say, or just sideplots that never went anywhere. Like why make the mom bi then never mention it again? Why was our protagonist mistreated so badly by the teacher and students at this school, when the principal was so nice- why didn't she do her job and control the misbehavior of those under her? How was a butch unmarried woman, presumably gay, able to become head of a school in a community that's portrayed as homophobic? I was expecting the mom and pricipal's past together and their personal journeys to be elaborated on further after we got just enough info about them to be curious. But it never went anywhere.Same with the visions or ghosts or whatever they were. Just another red herring that ended up not mattering to the story. It made me worry the girl was mentally ill, but since many youth novels use dragons and such silliness, I was partly expecting the shadow people to be real. In the end, when the protagonist decides they are not menacing but perhaps guardian angels, it seems they were there as part of some sort of metaphor that went over my head, about choosing to see things beyond our understanding as positive so life will be less scary? Could have left the whole facet off of the story and been just as good or better. Would have allowed room to expand on the stories of the secondary characters.The use of dialect to portray the protagonist was nice, though it took a few pages to get used to. It helped give her a unique voice whereas all the characters in Callender's other books just expressed themselves in what I assume is the author's own speaking style. A cheap gimmick to make this protagonist unique I guess but nonetheless it was somewhat effective imo.My biggest complaint is that the whole story is driven by the protagonist's desperation to know what happened to cause her mom to ghost her, so when they finally reunite and there wasn't an adequate justification, it ruined the whole book. Oh sure, the point may have been that people often do make mistakes that have no good explanation, especially when under stress, and if they matter enough to you, you could consider cutting them slack for being imperfect as we are all imperfect too blah bah blah. But to write an entire book that's basically a mystery, then never really solve the mystery, nope, I'm just not into it. And it doesn't make sense for the characters either. If they were real people the dad would have given his daughter a vague gist of what went down, or even violated his ex's privacy and told the kid everything, rather than just go along with the mom's choice to make her absence as painful as possible for the kid. Just watch the kid crumbling and lashing out and clearly falling to pieces and still just ignore it as if it was nothing to do with him? I guess it's in character for someone so selfishly uninterested in his own family members. Yet he's not ever portrayed as the Bad Guy, despite his indifference and poor choices nearly destroying his wife and his kid. The kid doesn't hate him, his ex doesn't even seem to hate him, and them deciding to play nice with him is shown as a happy ending. Why? Seems the kid would be better off in foster care, or if the mom's now recovered enough to handle reminders of her past, she could take the kid. Why keep this useless guy in the picture at all? If you want us to like and forgive the guy, show us some examples of him being good for something. Or some hints at past traumas that could explain his behavior the way the mom's running off is justified by her pain.I'm sure that the irrational behavior of everyone in the book was not written out of incompetence but intentionally planned to demonstrate how irrationally people often do behave, perhaps to encourage more rational choices or to ask our patience with irl impulsivity and thoughtlessness, but bottom line is, I found it unpleasant and unenlightening. A bit like the infamous records of Yoko Ono... you make art that's chaotic and frustrating as some sort of statement, fine, no law against that, but the fact remains that most people prefer art that's enjoyable.All that said, I'm not condemning the author just this one work. Do give Felix Ever After a chance!Adding to my dissatisfaction, the copy I got (from amazon themselves) was badly printed and should have been shredded. Every eighth (iirc) page was almost unreadably pale.
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