I do not watch sports. I do not play sports. At work when my team leader jumps into an in-depth conversation with a customer and rambles off statistics and names and bad passes and failed throws I can only boggle when she is surprised that I do not care. I am not crazy about football, or football movies or football television shows, unless you count Varsity Blues, which I was obsessed with because I was a slobbering fangirl.

Wait. I should be honest. The truth is I am bitter at most sports because they become fandoms where grown men can strip and paint themselves pretty rainbow colors while I’m maligned for writing porn about characters I did not create. This is a personal bias: I am inclined to hate all sports on principle just for being mainstream and acceptable things to froth about. Well, guess what, sports fans, I read real person slash about your famous players! TAKE THAT and chew on it. In your face.

To be fair, this story is not about football even though football is a vehicle for the plot to move on, but I think it is important to a) know a little bit about the game and b) be able to handle long sequences of narration about games, plays, and similar events where Ben talks about it at length. The story opens with Ben discovering he has a terminal disease. Instead of choosing treatment for it after learning about his odds, he decides to live out his last year keeping it a secret from everyone, including his family. It’s a story about secrets and shame and choosing to live instead of hiding. I really loved how Crutcher weaved Ben’s story and secret into the secrets of so many other characters. I especially loved Ben’s relationship with Cody. Oh, this story, it doesn’t pull punches.

I’m going to pull out the feminist bitching card and file a complaint with the “Old Dudes Obsessed With Making Women As Fucked Up As Possible” department. So many of the back stories were tied up with sex or The Crazy and I can’t figure out if it’s just because Crutcher was lacking in the creativity at the time he wrote it or if he was just obsessed with deviant sexual behavior and considers women unimportant to the story except as stones for men to walk all over in order to highlight how awesome they are. Dallas’s back story tugged at me after I finished. It bothered me that her story was defined by her sexuality that her character was defined by her sexuality. The other two female characters were practically nonentities. One got to be totally fucking crazy! Fucked in the head, literally fucked, fucked socially if certain truths were revealed, fucking ignorant and parroting the lies of the father…well, I give a big fat FAIL to this book for portraying no major female characters that were strong and healthy and smart. My rule is: if an author uses rape as a major characterization tool for a female character, I give them the Sexist Stink-Eye for the next ten books I read that they’ve written. CHRIS CRUTCHER: ON NOTICE FOR SEXIST TROPE SHENANIGANS.

I really am intrigued over how much sexuality played a part in some of these stories as character-defining traits. Crutcher built so much of so many of these characters over their sexual pasts. I suppose it’s because sex is EXCITING! and EDGY! or maybe just realistic because if people aren’t having it they’re thinking about having it.

Meanwhile, this book has, hands down, some of the best narrative I’ve come across all year. It was fabulous and funny and poignant. Ben doesn’t aim for his death in a grim way — he does the exact opposite. Even though he’s so small, he joins the football team with his brother, and lives the first half of the last year of his life as a hero of small town football. I found the conversations he had with Hey-Soos fascinating. There’s several ways to look at them, but I read it as if Ben was sorting these things out with his subconscious in the best way he could. Religion outright took him too close to death — so many people go that route, so he parsed it through Hey-Soos, which was safer and an easier way for him to deal. Spirituality is a funny thing; there’s so many ways to turn it. The religion in the book reminds me of four-dimensional cubes and the way they exist; the waves and the ways in which they move—you never see all the sides.

I was all weepy at the end. Damn sad books. ;_;

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I wanted to like this book. I wanted to read it and love it and embrace in my arms like the beautiful, creative YA spin on the Beauty and the Beast tale it could have been. I wanted to be wowed by awesome narrative and marvel at this tale being so artfully twisted in a contemporary setting. I warned myself that the message might be a little loud considering the market, but I dived in with glee.

That lasted three pages.

I didn’t realize that the book would be so horrific that I would have to compare the failure to my hed is pastede on yay. Oh, because all the heads here and all the application of the Beauty and the Beast story were pastede on, guys. In fact, that might be a compliment. I’m not quite sure they were even pastede on yay. They were possibly just perched, the entire story sitting precariously atop a forced connection with Beauty and the Beast, ready to topple if the book was opened by someone with standards in literature higher than mediocre. Three chapters in I was somewhere between, “I’m so unimpressed!” and “Well, it can’t get much worse.”

I was wrong.

This book was lazy. I can take bad books as they come and let them go, but when I read about a title and get excited because I like retellings and finally get my hands on it and it flat out sucks balls? No thanks.

Why was this story so awful?

This book proclaims to be Beauty and the Beast from the Beast’s perspective. That sounds awesome, right? Enter Kyle Kingsbury, socialite asshole-in-training, who treats people like garbage and subsequently gets owned by a witch for making bad, bad choices and turned into a horrible, wretched Beast. Now, picture the story of Beauty and the Beast, add in a lonely girl with an abusive father and an obsessive teen-boy-turned-monster and a father who hates him, a witch that codes everything that’s happening to the reader, a few ridiculous sounding chats that only make the entire narrative seem even more ridiculous, a really bad attempt to be hip and cool and IN THE NOW, and there’s nothing new here. At all. Characters? One dimensional. Actual creativity involved in applying the Beast tale to this narrative? I suggest negatives, because the story was so tethered to the original tale that it suffered from embarrassing plot decision after embarrassing plot decision, such as the one that brings Kyle’s chance at redemption to him.

That moment in the book made me so mad. Oh, my god. It was like trying to fit an elephant through a mouse hole. I can suspend my disbelief, but this book asked me to take it and throw it off a fucking cliff to the jagged rocks below.

I boggled through the second half of the story, so utterly bemused why any author would make such choices that made the book weaker just to follow a formula. The entire book was phoned in from, damn, Mars. Maybe on Mars it sounded decent and not like a complete and utter train wreck that treats its readers like morons and plies on the pretentious literary ramblings to disguise characterizations so mortifying and a plot so disastrous it makes a 7.4 earthquake look like a Sunday picnic?

I can think of at least three ways this book would have been better; the whole time I read it I kept looking at various parts, like the awkward and embarrassing chats, or the moronic way Linda ends up in his life, or the whole total disregard for setting the retelling in a city that ends up being ignored and utilized in such small, insignificant ways. It seemed such a waste to set a retelling like this in a city and waste the city night life and possible seedy underground.

Also, if the dude was in a pond, how the hell was he on the internet.

To throw the story a bone: all the messages here are geared toward, well, nine year old kids, even though it has “teen issues”. Good moral lessons, really bad plot? It’s possible I could be too old for it, too old and cynical and demanding for the book to work for me. Other people might enjoy it besides the flaws in it that pulse like huge, gaping wounds. I am so disappointed in this title, the writing, the characterization and the forced formula plot. I can live with predictability; you sign up for it with most retellings, but damn, I wish I had spent my time just watching Disney’s Beauty and the Beast; at least then there’s Jerry Orbach to look forward to.

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