Summary
One day, Mia’s biggest problem was figuring out how serious her crush, the jock Ryan, was about her. The next, it’s learning she has leukemia and trying to hide it from all her friends because she believes that as long as she can make everything stay the same as it’s always been, her cancer will eventually go away as well. But the more Mia tries to act normal, the more it strains her relationships with Ryan and her friends, especially that with Gyver, her longtime guy friend. How long can Mia keep up the deception, and what will happen when people find out?
Review
I approached SEND ME A SIGN with the knowledge that many readers had high expectations for this book, though I didn’t really have any myself. What I got out of my reading experience was that this debut novel squandered a good opportunity to discuss cancer in eye-opening ways and opted instead to be a perfectly, irritatingly run-of-the-mill YA contemporary novel about high school relationship drama.
SEND ME A SIGN could’ve used Mia’s cancer diagnosis as an opportunity to reflect on people’s belief in superstitions: What is the significance of signs to people? Why do people often look for signs in the course of their life, and how is the significance they place in signs affected in light of a life-changing event? Instead, Mia’s superstitions are a mere gimmick that fails to mask the truth about this book: that it is a totally average, totally unoriginal “cancer tale” featuring a hopelessly selfish heroine who never realizes the extent of her privilege and concocts wildly immature justifications for the predicaments she gets herself into with her own narrow thinking.
This book wants us to sympathize or empathize with Mia, the popular, she’s-got-it-all cheerleader whose life unravels from something out of her control—but Mia is no Sam from Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall or Parker from Courtney Summers’ Cracked Up to Be. Sam and Parker’s are bitchy and self-centered, but we readers could see their flaws and see how they can become better people.
Mia, however, is—oh, how can I put this delicately—inexcusably, horrifically, disappointingly f*****g selfish. I could see the series of decisions she made to end up the way she did, but I wasn’t sympathetic at all to her self-imposed plight, and I didn’t believe at any point in the novel that Mia’s character was redeemable.
Actually, part of me sees this as a problem with the form of the fiction novel. The very fact that Mia refused to give up the appearance of perfection even when inside she was falling apart was easy for her friends and us readers to see: Mia succeeded much less than she thought she did at fooling her friends, and of course, with this book being written in first-person POV, we weren’t fooled at all. This premature understanding on our part of Mia’s Tragic Flaw, however, meant that the majority of this overly long novel was just a cycle of the same events and situations over and over again: Mia has an opportunity to tell the truth, something prevents her from doing so, and she gets into even deeper shit. It’s painfully repetitive with no point and adds nothing to the story’s character or plot development. Most of the story’s major conflicts were set early on, in the first few chapters, and then the characters don’t arrive at any sort of growth until the last few chapters! Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t need to read nearly 400 pages for the MC to learn something I already knew she had to learn by Chapter 3.
SEND ME A SIGN suffers from a naïve belief that its “deep and sensitive” subject—cancer—will automatically evoke readers’ sympathies and keep readers invested in the story. Uh, no. That’s Fiction Writing 101: even the most intriguing premise can be made into a cure for insomnia by shoddy storytelling. What SEND ME A SIGN really is is a basic high school friendship/love triangle tale with “I’m different because I’m about cancer!” written on its figurative forehead. There is a maybe-maybe-not jock love interest; a group of cheerleaders who try and fail to be more than just an easily forgotten group of privileged white teenage girls; and oh, yes, apparently there is some dude named Gyver who’s supposedly the love interest but kind of just flits in and out of the pages and conveniently forgives Mia for her appallingly selfish behavior because he’s been in love with her his whole life. Like we haven’t read that before. Honestly, if Gyver were half the guy this story wants him to be, he would have never put up with so much of Mia’s crap. It’s pure wish fulfillment, is Gyver. And that is how this book’s romance failed for me as well, adding yet another black mark against it: if you didn’t do the cancer storyline well, couldn’t you at least have done the romance a little better?
The following quote, which appears at 77% in my e-galley, kind of sums up all of what’s wrong with this book for me:
Cancer had cost so much: friendships, grades, cheerleading, my whole sense of who I was. I needed to know: would I beat this and have time to fix things?No, Mia, your cancer didn’t ruin your life. Your self-centered personality did. And this book isn’t a cancer book: it’s about the relationship drama of a protagonist who—by the way—has cancer. You get no pity from me.
Similar Authors
Jennifer Castle
Cover discussion: I don't even want to.
Walker Children's / Oct. 2, 2012 / Hardcover / 384pp. / $16.99
e-galley received for review from publisher and NetGalley. Sorry.
This does sound disappointing. Too bad, the synopsis makes it sounds like it would be good. Thanks for the honest review!
ReplyDeleteIt sounds disappointing. I think cancer books are hard to deal write (and obviously this one didn't seem very successful). I haven't read the book either, but the quote that you gave turns me off on the book. I don't think cancer could wreck so much havoc, and even so, she's seems preoccupied with reverting things back to the way they were, as if she didn't learn anything about her journey through cancer.
ReplyDelete"That’s Fiction Writing 101: even the most intriguing premise can be made into a cure for insomnia by shoddy storytelling."
ReplyDeleteGreat line -- and so true! Sorry to hear this one isn't a knock-out, but I appreciate your honesty and insight (as always!).
She really was pretty awful, right? As someone who is a sucker for those run of the mill contemporary romances stories, I flew through the writing but was pretty irritated by Mia. Great review!
ReplyDeleteYou definitely confirmed my suspicions about this book. That's so frustrating when there's a protagonist who is unlikable and doesn't really undergo any growth or development, yet you can tell that the author still wants you to like/sympathize with the character. I'll be skipping this.
ReplyDeleteOh wow, that sounds.. like an awful book! Cancer is a pretty heavy subject, but it's clearly used for the wrong reasons in this book. Thanks for warning me, because I'm going to stay away from this book. The main character sounds annoying. Honest, great review :)
ReplyDeleteThe romance bit is kind of over stretched but it's a fiction book. I think that the author did do a good job in terms of portraying the emotional and physical struggles of a teenager with cancer trying to be as "normal" as possible and the bit about overprotective parents. At least I had similar struggles when I was in her shoes with the cancer.
ReplyDelete