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A review by angelakay
The Gates of Evangeline by Hester Young
3.0
Soon after the death of her 4 year old son, New York journalist Charlie travels to a small Louisiana town in order to investigate a decades-old cold case in which a small boy from a prominent family mysteriously vanished. As it happens, Charlie also gets visions from the future involving children coming to harm, as well as visits from children long gone.
There were things I liked about this book. The story had promise, and the writing itself was mostly pretty good. But a lot of other things about it really grated on me, like:
* The tropes. Don't get me wrong; tropes can be used effectively, but there were too many in this story that felt heavy-hand. (Grandma has a supernatural gift which she has passed on to a troubled granddaughter, the gift having skipped the ambivalent intervening generation; the character who could easily clear up everything if only she were mentally whole; a few others that also happen to be spoilers.)
* The stereotypes. They were painful, and there were a lot of them (particularly the ones pertaining to Southerners, as a Southerner myself). In particular, a lot of the Southern people were depicted as simple, bumbling, or shallow.
* The main character. Not only are we supposed to identify with her as the protagonist, but her kid just died so we're also suppose to feel sympathetic for her on that count. Unfortunately, she comes across as such a snobby, classist, unlikable person that it's hard to root for her.
* That thing where you don't trust the readers to pick up on subtlety so you spell too many things out, the result being that the reader's figured everything out 75% of the way through and wonders how the hell the main character is so dense.
* That device where you don't outright state something, but imply it so heavily and have the main character go along with it so quickly and unflinchingly that the reader kind of accepts it as having been stated outright. This can work brilliantly, but when you do it over and over and over, and the main character turns out to be wrong every.single.time, the result is that you start to notice when things have been heavily implied but not stated, and if the main character goes along with it, you immediately assume the opposite. By 2/3 of the way through the book, this started to make Charlie sound at best sort of dumb and at worst paranoid and/or crazy.
Still, I like a good mystery, and it was an interesting enough story that I hung in all the way to the end.
There were things I liked about this book. The story had promise, and the writing itself was mostly pretty good. But a lot of other things about it really grated on me, like:
* The tropes. Don't get me wrong; tropes can be used effectively, but there were too many in this story that felt heavy-hand. (Grandma has a supernatural gift which she has passed on to a troubled granddaughter, the gift having skipped the ambivalent intervening generation; the character who could easily clear up everything if only she were mentally whole; a few others that also happen to be spoilers.)
* The stereotypes. They were painful, and there were a lot of them (particularly the ones pertaining to Southerners, as a Southerner myself). In particular, a lot of the Southern people were depicted as simple, bumbling, or shallow.
* The main character. Not only are we supposed to identify with her as the protagonist, but her kid just died so we're also suppose to feel sympathetic for her on that count. Unfortunately, she comes across as such a snobby, classist, unlikable person that it's hard to root for her.
* That thing where you don't trust the readers to pick up on subtlety so you spell too many things out, the result being that the reader's figured everything out 75% of the way through and wonders how the hell the main character is so dense.
* That device where you don't outright state something, but imply it so heavily and have the main character go along with it so quickly and unflinchingly that the reader kind of accepts it as having been stated outright. This can work brilliantly, but when you do it over and over and over, and the main character turns out to be wrong every.single.time, the result is that you start to notice when things have been heavily implied but not stated, and if the main character goes along with it, you immediately assume the opposite. By 2/3 of the way through the book, this started to make Charlie sound at best sort of dumb and at worst paranoid and/or crazy.
Still, I like a good mystery, and it was an interesting enough story that I hung in all the way to the end.