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(Behold! A cute new ghost librarian icon for spooky reading specifically. I've uploaded some new horror movie themed icons, too. Gotta get the most out of my paid account.)
Seventeen-year-old Jade Daniels is a half-Blackfeet girl living with her abusive father in a small lakeside town in Idaho. Alienated and lonely, she retreats into slasher movies, fantasising vividly about a real-life slasher villain someday appearing to tear up the town she hates. But then a community of uberwealthy developers and media moguls move into a new luxury settlement in the national park across the lake, bringing with them a daughter Jade's age who turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the slasher genre's Final Girl archetype; bodies start washing up, killed in mysterious ways, and Jade becomes convinced that her fantasy is at last coming true.
This is - oh, man. I LOVED this book. Jones does not for one second allow the fact that he is a middle-aged man to interfere with the overwhelmingly authentic troubled-teenage-girlness of Jade as a protagonist. I know this girl. I'm friends with this girl. I literally went to school with this girl, or at least, a few different girls who add up to her. Her viewpoint is blinkered by all the petty adolescent foibles you'd expect as well as the much darker stuff, and it's a big source of poignancy that we as adult readers can see the very different version of events being experienced by the few adults who care about Jade and are trying to help her, but she cannot see it at all. She remains fervently committed to the world she has constructed for herself in a way only kids of this almost-worldly, I-know-it-all-now age can be - which makes it all the more impactful when she and the adults both turn out to be completely right, in ways that should be fundamentally incompatible but somehow aren't.
So, yeah. The character work and overall handling of narrative themes in this novel are among the best I've read in ages. I am therefore all the more inclined to nitpick its structural flaws, because (to reduce things to a simplified Goodreads rating system) I really badly wanted this to be a five-star book but could only in good faith award it four. Which still puts it well inside my "heartily recommend" bracket by any measure! If you haven't read it but think you might like to, please add my name to the list of people who've recced it to you and stop reading here. What follows will be both spoiler-riddled and comparatively far less important than the book's strengths.
( Major spoilers under the cut )
On the other hand, I don't know it's just because I acclimated myself to Jones' prose last year with The Only Good Indians, but I found this an easier, more aesthetically pleasing read. And the cover design is gorgeous in this very simple, distilled way that breezily outperforms many more elaborate confections. If I ever spot a copy of this book secondhand, I'm snapping it up because it will look lovely on my shelf, and also because I know it's one I'm going to want to read again down the line. I just love Jade so much.
Seventeen-year-old Jade Daniels is a half-Blackfeet girl living with her abusive father in a small lakeside town in Idaho. Alienated and lonely, she retreats into slasher movies, fantasising vividly about a real-life slasher villain someday appearing to tear up the town she hates. But then a community of uberwealthy developers and media moguls move into a new luxury settlement in the national park across the lake, bringing with them a daughter Jade's age who turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the slasher genre's Final Girl archetype; bodies start washing up, killed in mysterious ways, and Jade becomes convinced that her fantasy is at last coming true.
This is - oh, man. I LOVED this book. Jones does not for one second allow the fact that he is a middle-aged man to interfere with the overwhelmingly authentic troubled-teenage-girlness of Jade as a protagonist. I know this girl. I'm friends with this girl. I literally went to school with this girl, or at least, a few different girls who add up to her. Her viewpoint is blinkered by all the petty adolescent foibles you'd expect as well as the much darker stuff, and it's a big source of poignancy that we as adult readers can see the very different version of events being experienced by the few adults who care about Jade and are trying to help her, but she cannot see it at all. She remains fervently committed to the world she has constructed for herself in a way only kids of this almost-worldly, I-know-it-all-now age can be - which makes it all the more impactful when she and the adults both turn out to be completely right, in ways that should be fundamentally incompatible but somehow aren't.
So, yeah. The character work and overall handling of narrative themes in this novel are among the best I've read in ages. I am therefore all the more inclined to nitpick its structural flaws, because (to reduce things to a simplified Goodreads rating system) I really badly wanted this to be a five-star book but could only in good faith award it four. Which still puts it well inside my "heartily recommend" bracket by any measure! If you haven't read it but think you might like to, please add my name to the list of people who've recced it to you and stop reading here. What follows will be both spoiler-riddled and comparatively far less important than the book's strengths.
( Major spoilers under the cut )
On the other hand, I don't know it's just because I acclimated myself to Jones' prose last year with The Only Good Indians, but I found this an easier, more aesthetically pleasing read. And the cover design is gorgeous in this very simple, distilled way that breezily outperforms many more elaborate confections. If I ever spot a copy of this book secondhand, I'm snapping it up because it will look lovely on my shelf, and also because I know it's one I'm going to want to read again down the line. I just love Jade so much.
