rameau's ramblings

I’m done. I’m just so done.Lately, apparently, I’ve been drawn to books where the main character has some kind of disability. There was Seraphina where the main character was half human, half dragon and disfigured with scales, and then there was Sight Unseen, a promising m/m romance that ended up just being just an offending mess to all blind people (at least in the opinion of this sighted person).So, naturally, when I saw this book about a boy who loses his ability to speak, I was intrigued. Remembering the Buffy episode Hush and how forced silence was used to enhance communication between couples, I was hoping for the best. That Jake’s inability to use speech would squash the telling and do wonders for the showing. I was sorely disappointed. In fact, I believe the only part where showing was appropriately used was in the detailing of Jake’s accident that led to the loss of his vocal chords. Quite literally. That’s what not bothered me, the location of the hospital he was taken to did. Seattle. Oh, well, I thought. Other people can write books set in the general area too, and it’s not like they lived in there. Jake and his family lived outside of Seattle on an island name of which I can’t remember right now. Then there was Jake’s obsession with Air Force and joining up right after graduation, and his unrequited love for Samantha Shay, the good girl student with an absent mother and a father who’d walked out of their lives many a year ago. All something I could ignore and blame on genre clichés.Then there were the things that I didn’t like and that brought down the impending rating. There was the mockery of school assembly or forced AA meeting for teens, the casual slut shaming, the dismissal of language studies because he can’t speak—it apparently means he can’t read or write let alone hear and understand another tongue. And there was the overall quality of writing, which found poor and lacking. All things that frayed my nerves until I read that line. “It felt like currents of electricity were running through the two of us-“That was one cliché too many. At 45%, I’m done.I received a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.