Friday, September 14, 2012

Drown by Alex Jones

First thing, this book read more like a really promising rough draft than an actual book that I would be happy to pay $5.99 for, the editing was ATROCIOUS. BAD just BADDD. I actually went back to check if it was self-published. It is not, it is published through Rebel Ink Press, I guess part of their rebellious spirit is rebelling against grammatical rules.

The use of nouns in this book pretty much ruined my reading experience. The author overused the words "the goth" and "the jock" to refer to the main characters sooo much, it was ANNOYING. Please, in the future don't be afraid to use pronouns! 

About the story...Dom Sal is a high school JOCK in a town somewhere in the USA I presume, since at no point in the book there was any indication of where they were. He is very religious, he is also poor. Damion Adrik is a GOTH in this same high school, he is rich and he is super fucked up. They get assigned to work together for a history project and they start a relationship.

Dom, the jock, despite the fact that he is a Christian and believes homosexuality is an abomination persues this relationship with Damion, the goth, and Damion, the goth, despite the fact that he is suicidal and HATES EVERYONE most of all jocks is also willing to be with Dom, the jock. SEE HOW ANNOYING NOUN OVERUSE IS!!

See the thing is this story was shallow, the idea was good but there was no detail, NO DEPTH. I still don't know what the kids even looked like! I had no sense of how to picture them in my head, physically how they went together. 

The Cutting. That was an issue for me. Damion was a cutter since his childhood, hurt himself when his feelings of anger or frustration overwhelmed him. Fair enough that is something a lot of teenagers deal with. Thing is I didn't think that it was written very well in this story. These types of subjects need to be written after lots of research and with A LOT of sensitivity and A LOT of respecfulness and I didn't sense any of that in this story, and the graphic description *shakes head* JUST NO! 

I don't even know what happened with these boys, they were all over the place, I'm surprised they were even alive by the end of the book with all the crazyness going on.

The parents were a MESS, the kids pretty much on their own, they were seniors in high school, but not once was there any mention of college. I do not know what the hell happened in this book. I really don't. The religion thing apparently was resolved at some point too, not sure when though.

There was no explicit sex, which makes me think this is supposed to be a Young Adult book, I'm not sure that teens should be reading this. The drug and alcohol abuse and the self-destructive behavior of Damion's was in the book, but how he got better was not. I mean I have to assume he had to get professional help as fucked up as he was, and that he wasn't just miraculously "healed" by the love of his seventeen year old boyfriend who grew up in a house with an alcoholic mother and a stepfather that threw him out for being gay...Not to mention was seriously struggling with reconciling his religious beliefs with his sexuality, without any kind of support from any adults or his peers.

This book needed like another 50 more rounds of editing before it made it to Amazon.

Can't really recommend this one.


For those interested in reading M/M Young Adult Lit here are some options...

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