James, Rebecca: Beautiful Malice
Beautiful Malice (2010)
Written by: Rebecca James
Genre: YA/Suspense
Pages: 256 (ARC)
I'd seen this book in the stores and had been attracted by the cover, but didn't pay it much mind until I read Dirty Sexy Books's review here. She sums up the book best with this single paragraph: The reader is made aware within the first couple of pages that two very bad things are going to happen in the course of the story. If you’re like me, and you’ve read a few thrillers, you’ll easily be able to guess what’s going to happen. That right there is unusual, because normally a suspense is all about surprising the reader, but Beautiful Malice used a different technique that is common in interrogations (or torture), which is to let the person scare themselves by imagining how horrible it will be.
That paragraph, right there, is what made me what to read this book. I mean, seriously, a thriller/suspense that makes me squirm over how bad it'll be? I couldn't wait! Of course, you should read DSB's full review, because there were other things that attracted me to this book, like the level of violence and all that (sue me, I'm demented), so when Rebecca offered me her ARC of the book, I was tickled pink!
The premise: ganked from BN.com: Who is Katherine Patterson? It is a question she hopes no one can answer. To erase her past, Katherine has moved to a new city, enrolled in a new school, and even changed her name. She’s done the next best thing to disappearing altogether. Now, wary and alone, she seeks nothing more than anonymity. What she finds instead is the last thing she expected: a friend.
Even more unlikely, Katherine’s new friend is the most popular and magnetic girl in school. Extroverted, gorgeous, flirtatious, and unpredictable, she is everything that Katherine is not and doesn’t want to be: the center of attention. Yet Alice’s enthusiasm is infectious, her candor sometimes unsettling, and Katherine, in spite of her guarded caution, finds herself drawn into Alice’s private circle.
But Alice has secrets, too--darker than anyone can begin to imagine. And when she lets her guard down at last, Katherine discovers the darkest of them all. For there will be no escaping the past for Katherine Patterson--only a descent into a trap far more sinister . . . and infinitely more seductive.
Review style: There's quite a bit to discuss here, from structure to style to whether or not this thriller makes it easy for you to guess the truth. And horror of all horrors, I will be discussing the ending, so consider yourself SPOILED. If you want to remain pure, just skip to the "My Rating" section at the bottom of the review and you'll be just fine.
When I first started reading this book, I was pretty engrossed. We know, right away, that Alice has somehow ruined the heroine's, Katherine's, life, and you know that whatever happened was so bad that Katherine now wishes she'd gone to Alice's funeral just so she could laugh her ass off that the girl was finally dead. That's hate, and that's what makes you want to keep reading: to find out why this very young, single mother hated Alice so much that even though she didn't go to Alice's funeral, she wished she had just to laugh. Well, not just to laugh: she wishes she'd seen Alice buried, so that she didn't have this fear that Alice wasn't really dead.
The structure of this book is interesting, and you can describe it in two ways that essentially say the same thing.
1) You have a frame story that begins, ends, and punctuates various middles in the book, and that frame story literally frames Alice's and Katherine's friendship and it's journey, and that main story includes flashbacks to Katherine's past.
2) You have a main story that includes both flashbacks to Katherine's past and flashforwards to Katherine's future.
Or you could be really simple and say the book weaves three timelines together to make one complete picture of Katherine's life. Whatever works for you.
On one hand, this is a pretty interesting technique. The author is very careful in how she doles out information, and that particular brand of manipulation is easy to do and not as obvious when you're jumping between three timelines. For example, we start out knowing that Katherine's baby sister is dead and Katherine is somehow responsible, and the easy conclusion is that Rachel died in a car accident, and that Katherine was the drunk driver or something. So when you learn that Alice has a mystery brother whose name we don't know but we learn he's in prison, we don't think too much about it other than how it's part of the mystery of Alice.
It's not until we learn that Rachel was murdered that we start to wonder if there isn't a connection between that murder and Alice's interest in Katherine's friendship, a suspicion that becomes increasingly obvious when Alice makes remarks to Katherine about how Katherine doesn't know how special she is, how important her friendship is, etc. There's the overtones of a threat there, and the overtones are there because we've been trained to distrust Alice from the start, so of course we suspect her motives whereas the narrator won't.
But the problem with the knowing, at least for me, is that in the process of imagining how horrible everything would be, my imagination ran away with me. I'm not going to tell you some of the stuff I came up with, but it was pretty horrible. I even started thinking that the future timeline, the one where Katherine is a mother to little Sarah, would be tainted by Alice as well, because Katherine wishes she'd been to the funeral just to see Alice put in the ground, so she'd know Alice was dead. Which of course had me wondering if we wouldn't see Alice in this future timeline, coming to get revenge on Katherine by doing something to Sarah. If this were a horror movie, that'd be the very end, you know?
But that's not what happened, which was both a relief and a disappointment. A relief because I'm not sure I could handle so much crime and hate in that future thread, because it ended up permeating the present story and and the flashback.
A disappointment because as soon as I started putting the clues together, I knew what was going to happen, which turned a suspense book into a predictable one. Sure, I was wrong in my naming of Alice's brother, but I wasn't wrong that her brother was one of the group who raped and murdered Rachel. I knew that Alice was actually involved with Robbie's father the moment she talked about dating someone older, I knew that Alice would try and proposition Mick for sex because she's that kind of rotten person.
Now, maybe I was supposed to guess all of this, but whether I was or not, I started disliking the book.
Maybe dislike is too strong a word. Disinterested is better. I was frustrated though by seeing everything coming together like a train wreck, in both the past and the present storylines, because unlike the heroine, I had the gift of hindsight and she didn't. I never saw her as someone who was stupid, just someone who was going through life like a normal person and happened to make some bad mistakes. We all do that. Some mistakes are deadly, like what happened with Rachel's murder, and some mistakes shouldn't be but are, like befriending Alice and falling under her spell.
The interesting thing about Alice is that I don't think it mattered what Katherine did. If Katherine had brushed her off from the start, Alice would've started spreading rumors and terrorizing her then, rather than waiting until Katherine broke off the friendship. And if you look at the end, it's easy to say that if Katherine and Mick hadn't gone after Alice to save her, then they would've lived happily ever after.
But I don't think that would've been the case. If Mick hadn't tried to save Alice, Alice would've still drowned, and then that cloud would've hung over Mick and Katherine their entire lives. What they could've saved her? What if they could've helped? They would be feeling worse survivor's guilt than Katherine did for running to get help when she saw her little sister get raped. Worse because you don't assume rape will lead to murder, and getting help is the right idea. Worse because Alice was clearly doing something that WOULD lead to her death, and if you ran from that, you're willingly abandoning her to her fate.
And that, in the end, is what's so frightening about this book and it's set-up and everything. Short of Katherine being able to get Alice locked up for life for stalking (which doesn't happen), it didn't matter what happened: Alice would've found a way to ruin her life. In this case, Mick died trying to save Alice, but even if Mick had succeeded and saved her, Alice wouldn't have thanked him for it. If Mick hadn't died (am I the only one who thinks that Alice actually killed him with something, not that he drowned?) and Alice did, I can't help but think that would've clouded Katherine and Mick's future.
Maybe it wouldn't have. But Mick and Katherine were a little too perfect for my taste, so maybe my brain is trying to instill some reality to their situation. I mean, the author handled it okay, but short of Alice, everything was going better than perfectly considering the heroine's underaged and pregnant. I can understand her parents' reaction, but I wonder if Mick's parents would've reacted so graciously to the pregnancy if Mick hadn't died?
I don't know. I wasn't fond of how quickly Katherine and Mick fell into bed together (aka, the night they met) because it smacks too much of love at first sight, and while sure, that can happen in real life, it doesn't guarantee happiness, and I'm more inclined to write that stuff off to lust at first sight. Maybe if Katherine had been older, or at least eighteen, I wouldn't have had such a jerk of a reaction, but she wasn't, and I did. That doesn't mean I'm a prude either: it just really makes me wonder about the message it's sending to teens: "You too can have under-aged sex and get pregnant and everything will be FINE and everyone will LOVE you, JUST SO LONG as you don't have a psychotic best friend who wants to ruin your life."
Well, maybe that is the message? There used to be a joke about the show Lost in the early seasons, about how every female who had sex on the island (who wasn't married) ended up dead shortly thereafter, and we wondered what kind of message the writers were trying to send. One could apply similar questions to this book: is the author trying to say something about deserved happiness, and that if you're too young for it, your life will be ruined somehow?
Okay, okay, even I know when I'm reaching: but more so than adult fiction, I always wonder about messages in YA and what its target audience might take away from it, and this book, dark as it is, confuses me a bit. Yes, we learn we shouldn't accept rides from strangers, that we shouldn't get shit-faced drunk when we go to parties, that we shouldn't accept a drink from anyone but ourselves, and we learn that friends don't always have our best interests at heart. We also learn, thanks to the future timeline, that you can't live your life a coward, that life is meant to be lived and regardless of what you've gone through, you have to take chances to find that happiness. I do rather like the implication that Katherine's going to have a chance with Robbie, but going back to messages, I'm not sure what to take away with it.
Then again: I'm an adult reader. I'm not supposed to take anything away, am I?
Some things of note: I rather liked how the author utilizes the second person POV (you did this, you think that) when Katherine is facing a situation that's both dangerous and life-changing. She distances herself, and that makes sense: when something truly horrible and irrevocable is happening, it feels like it's happening to someone else, not you.
That's what I've heard, anyway, so kudos to the POV choice.
But I have to say, this is one of the WORST edited ARCs I've ever read. Typos GALORE, let alone grammatical errors and all kinds of things. I truly hope the published book is cleaner than this, because from a purely technical standpoint, reading this book was a chore, especially when words were used that made you go back to re-read the sentence to see if it meant what it says it meant.
My Rating
Find a Cheaper Copy: it's a good, suspenseful read, and it's also quite dark and violent in some regards, which is praise in my book, not a detriment. Beautiful Malice is almost "worth the cash," but I kept wondering how I would've felt about paying hardcover prices for it instead of reading the ARC. I'm quite pleased with my experience reading the ARC (short of its typos and errors) but I'm thinking I would've wanted to find this book cheaper than at full hardcover prices, if not in some kind of paperback format. Still, it's a suspenseful read that has you guessing from the start, because you know something horrible will happen, and from that point on, your imagination starts running away with you. I know I took a day-long break from the book when I reached the chapter where we learned what really happened to the narrator's sister, because I knew I wasn't ready to handle the truth, even though by that point, I already knew what would happen to her. I just didn't want to confirm it by reading it. At any rate, it's a good read. Just not sure it's worth the full price of the hardcover, especially if it has half the number of typos and errors as the ARC. I can't speak to that part though, so it doesn't affect my rating.
Cover Commentary: This cover is really appealing to me. The girl peering out a rain-splattered window is fabulous, and every time I see it in stores, I can't help but notice it. This isn't a cover that blends in with the YA around it, but maybe that's just me?
Next up: Dreadnought by Cherie Priest