An ambitious trick too far
SISTERS Alyson and Sydney are as different as night and day. Alyson is sweet and naïve and sees the best in everyone. Sydney is a brilliant, straight A student who is also rebellious and likes to skateboard.
So it’s not a surprise when new boy next door Graham Copeland triggers two very different reactions from the sisters.
Alyson instantly feels she can relate to him – he’s a kindred spirit, shy and awkward like her – and develops a crush on him. But Sydney finds Graham disturbing – yet still finds herself drawn to him.
Some books leave you with more questions than answers after you’ve finished them – but in a good way. Unfortunately, Twisted Fate isn’t one of them. It leaves you with questions all right, but questions more along the lines of “what the heck did I just read?”
This book is such a doozy that it’s difficult to find words to describe it. But I will, because I spent a couple of miserable hours forcing myself to read it until the last page.
The blurb describes the story as a typical teen love triangle. But once you start reading, you realise it’s not that easy ( although I really, really wished it were, maybe then my head wouldn’t have hurt so much).
There are five points of view in this novel. Five. That’s a lot for 256 pages, and completely unnecessary. While POVs from Aly, Syd and maybe even Graham make sense,
POVs from Graham’s stepmother and the police chief are superfluous at best, annoying at worst. I suppose if author Norah Olson had used these different POVs to explain the story, it would have been a lot more interesting and a lot less tedious. And if those characters had been fleshed out better, they would have been more real and relatable, instead of just being one dimensional and sometimes just plain ridiculous.
The sisters are characterised and described very generically. Aly is the stereotypical definition of an American homebody: she bakes muffins, is shy, and even though she’s a senior in secondary school, still refers to her parents as “Mummy” and “Daddy”. And Syd wears all black, listens to heavy metal, and rides a skateboard – and is therefore emo. Of course. This kind of characterisation – and of the main characters! – is just plain lazy. There’s no depth to them, nothing to connect them to the reader, and this is a shame because if Olson had spent a little more time on making them more real, this book would have been a different read for sure.
Similarly, I found the lacklustre description of a lot of things disturbing. For example, Graham makes and edits films, but there are no details about this. The same with Syd’s skateboarding; we’re supposed to believe that she’s a super- duper skateboarder but we don’t see any talk of techniques. Did Olson not do any research on these activities?
And the big twist at the end? Is not much of a twist because it becomes very obvious early on in the novel. What is really confusing is that when you think about what the sisters do throughout the novel, the twist just doesn’t make sense. It just made me want to beat my head against the wall and moan “Why?”.
Twisted Fate has very big ambitions – it wants to be a psychological thriller, it wants to make you think, and it wants to be different. Unfortunately, the only thrill I got was when I finished it and realised I would never, ever have to read it again; and the only thinking I did was wonder how on earth anyone could buy the load of nonsense this book is selling. OK, I will grant you that it’s definitely different – but I wouldn’t say that’s a good thing.