‘Some of this story is com­pletely true. And some of it isn’t. Like truth, evil comes in all sorts of fla­vors. Some bit­ter. Some decep­tively sweet. Some­times it comes with a heavy price. Most peo­ple don’t invite evil into their lives. The dirty lit­tle secret is that an invi­ta­tion isn’t nec­es­sary. Locked doors don’t mat­ter. Nei­ther do fancy secu­rity sys­tems. Evil is kind of amaz­ing when you think about it. She knows how to get inside.’

Author’s Note

My main issue with Envy is that I really didn’t get on with the style of writ­ing. I found it painful to read, awk­ward, plod­ding, and melo­dra­matic while attempt­ing to be omi­nous. Olsen tries very hard to cre­ate a strong sense of ten­sion, sus­pense and mys­tery by over dra­ma­tiz­ing every. lit­tle. thing, through rep­e­ti­tion, bul­let points and italics.

‘Nei­ther girl knew it right then, but the night Kate­lyn Berkley died was the begin­ning of some­thing that would change everything.

Every­thing.

Every. Sin­gle. Thing’

~ page 16

‘And finally, not far away, one per­son got online and started deleted the con­tents of a file folder marked KATELYN. Inside were copies of emails, mes­sages and pho­tographs that had meant to trap and hurt her so hard. Each item had been designed as payback.

Delete.

Delete.

Delete.

~page 22

It’s not the least bit sub­tle, was irri­tat­ing, and frankly as a reader, I felt a lit­tle talked down to. I believe this is the author’s first YA book (he has, accord­ing to the back of the book, writ­ten sev­eral best-selling adult nov­els), and the way in which he over-emphasizes so much tells me he doesn’t yet under­stand or trust his younger audi­ence. Instead of allow­ing the reader to draw their own con­clu­sions, he bashes us over the head with it.

The editor’s note (which may or may not appear in the final pub­li­ca­tion), had a sim­i­lar effect,

‘Young Adult read­ers beware: there are no cup­cakes, ponies or rain­bows in this book. Life is messy. Death hap­pens. Evil is all around you – and right within these pages. Envy is just the begin­ning. Don’t wait for Gregg to push you… jump in.’ 

The whole thing is just try­ing too hard.

Aside from the style of writ­ing, the para­nor­mal aspect felt weak. Tay­lor and Haley, twin pro­tag­o­nists who don’t believe Kate­lyn killed her­self (with an espresso machine, in the bath), have some odd abil­i­ties. Haley is com­pelled to inan­i­mate objects and with a touch can ‘see’ a mem­ory or feel­ing. Tay­lor receives coded mes­sages from the dead when she is sub­merged in water. They first sense some­thing isn’t right sur­round­ing Katelyn’s death when, in the mid­dle of the night, from their bed­room win­dow, they see a small boat spell out the mes­sage ‘Look’ in the water. (I’m still not quite sure how or why the boat did this, some­thing to do with the foam in the water cre­at­ing the let­ters, either way, it’s all too ran­dom for me).

The char­ac­ters are flat and lack any sort of per­son­al­ity. The almost clin­i­cal way Envy is writ­ten makes it very dif­fi­cult to form any sort of emo­tional attach­ment to any­one, some­thing not at all helped by the fact that the major­ity of the char­ac­ters came across as fairly unlik­able in any case. I’m also not a fan of using text mes­sage speech within a nar­ra­tive, which Olsen uti­lizes quite a lot, while fail­ing (in my opin­ion), to cre­ate an authen­tic teenager voice.

Basi­cally, every­thing, from the editor’s open­ing let­ter, to the author’s misog­y­nis­tic note, (con­sid­er­ing how women have long been blamed as the root of evil, I don’t par­tic­u­larly appre­ci­ate the label­ing of ‘evil’ as ‘she’), to the writ­ing, it all served to annoy the hell out of me. Maybe I was sim­ply in a bad mood, maybe this book just put me in a bad mood, but there it is. It’s a shame, because this could have been a solid story about the grow­ing issues of cyber-bullying. As it was, I wasn’t inter­ested in fin­ish­ing this one.

Read: 105/285 pages

space

*Many thanks to UK Book Tours for pro­vid­ing this for review*

Book Breakups was cre­ated by the lovely Lori at Pure Imag­i­na­tion.

s