My Heart and Other Black Holes by Jasmine WargaMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
And in case you didn't notice, this REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
More like 2.5 stars, but such is life. I'm just such a nice person so I round up. 1.5 stars for research, believe-ability and setting, 3.5 stars for characters and dialog. Plot zig zagged so damn much not gonna rate it.
Here's one reason to disdain YA: The authors of said books more often than not seem utterly incapable of doing even the most basic research, check the easiest to check facts and ... gah. Their readers are gullible and uncritical enough to let them get away with it.
To wit:
If this book is to be believed, websites to arrange your own suicide pact are freely and publicly available. Even popular. Easily accessible even to those DECLARING themselves to be under 18. This is, of course, utter horseshit. No webhost would tolerate such content, mostly because it is as like as not illegal, even in the USA, to say nothing of the bad publicity they'd endure. And they'd endure a LOT of it.
If this book is to be believed, asphyxiation from carbon monoxide via vehicle emissions is an effective suicide method. Nope, nope, nope, not so. You're more likely to bore yourself to death sitting in a car these days than you are to do it via CO poisoning. Unleaded gasoline. Catalytic converters. Particulates per Million nowadays. Look them up, people. Warga, our former science teacher(!), was apparently too lazy to do so. Not only that, she even described the garage where said suicide attempt occurred as being "little better than a shack" (paraphrased) meaning that, yeah, the carbon monoxide, the small amount produced, would dissipate, meaning When In Roman is even less likely to have put himself in the coma that she ridiculously puts him in.
Oh, and a car running in a garage. Noisy. You notice, even if it is properly maintained, as I'm assuming MaMa Roman's vehicle was more likely than not not. Even if you're a hundred yards or more away. As AyyyLMAOsel and MaMa Roman were not. They were much closer.
If this book is to be believed there ain't no National Do Not Call Registry, and that being a telemarketer is an actual honest to goodness thing these days. Please. You can't even call cell numbers using auto-diallers in the USA. No Call List. Law of the land since 2003. And apparently Varga's never heard of that, either. Sigh.
Oh, yeah. The whole overnight boy-girl one on one camping trip? Proudly disclosed to the supposedly religious and presumably conservative MaMaRoman? Snort. Giggle. Ha.Ha.Ha. Yeah, that was believable. Not exactly a fact checking fail, I guess. More like a reality fail.
(Or maybe I'm just jealous? Back in my day my religious but also surprisingly liberal MaMaVacillateWildly would've shut that shit down toot-sweet, and maybe wacked me offside the head for my trouble in the bargain. If anyone had ever wanted to go on a co-ed one on one camping trip. Which, alas...)
And, yeah, the readers of this. Critical faculties not really there. I scanned a bunch of the other reviews before excreting this turd-bomb of a review. Nobody noticed ANY of the above. Really?
So. Moving past the patently nonsensical, what do we have here? As in, moving from the Realz to the Feelz? Things improve quite a bit, even as they remained rather generic. But, meh, I've run out of energy on that front/my carpet chewing annoyance has passed. Lemme link some reviews that say shit I agree with. 'Cuz I'm lazy.
edit: Can't find any. Oh, well. Too much weepy-time, too little reality time. Most even more irritating than I found the book, to be honest.
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