I am not one to buy books. I prefer the library, and if I do buy a book, it is usually paperback, or a $9.99 Kindle eBook. So when I picked up "You Have Seven Messages" by Stewart Lewis -- hardcover -- I had high expectations. None of said expectations were met.
"It's been a year since Luna's mother, the fashion-model wife of a successful film director, was hit and killed by a taxi in New York's East Village. Luna, her father, and her little brother, Tile, are still struggling with grief.
When Luna goes to clean out her mother's old studio, she's stunned to find her mom's cell phone there—charged and holding seven unheard messages. As Luna begins to listen to them, she learns more about her mother's life than she ever wanted to know . . . and she comes to realize that the tidy tale she's been told about her mother's death may not be the whole truth." [from goodreads.com]
The Good:
Whoever wrote the blurb on the inside cover, Lewis or not, was good at drawing me in. They took what little plot Lewis had and drew it out to an enormous extent. The little blurb on my book was different than above, and there was a little bit about how Luna goes to discover the truth along with her, and I quote, "dreamy neighbor, Oliver."
Dreamy neighbor? Discovering the truth about her mom? All though cell phone messages? Yes, in fact, I will take this book for $17.99, ten dollars paid for with a gift card.
Wrong decision.
This is where the good ends.
The Bad:
Plot: Where was the plot, exactly? Where was the mysterious plot promised to me in the blurb? Nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. Luna does get her mother's cell phone, and then waits about six and a half million years to listen to the messages. When she finally listened to the first one, I was ready for the book to pick up in pace. I was ready to forget about the terrible writing and the terrible voice (I'll get to this in a second) because, yes, oh finally, the mystery will be revealed!
The first message was from the dry cleaners. Her mom never did pick up that dress.
Mysterious.
So Luna takes a stroll down to the dry cleaners and gets the dress. There's nothing really special about the dress. The dress does not have a key to the secret chamber of the house in its pocket. No. The dress was just a way to get Luna to the dry cleaners at the same exact moment as her "dreamy neighbor, Oliver." This is where Luna starts her pathetic relationship with Mr. Nonexistent Personality, and where I started to read the rest of the book for the sole purpose of writing this review.
Luna then took it upon herself to wait chapters in between listening to messages, none of them, but the last, being very insightful or mysterious. One leads her to a bar, where they talk about some guy, and the really big "mystery" is solved pages after that. There you go. Mystery solved halfway through the book. And what a mystery it was.
I was expecting her mom to be some spy or something, and people were after her, and she had to keep the secret from her family. She did not, in fact, get hit by an innocent driver, but a saboteur.
Nope. Not that at all. The mystery was -- who was she with on the night that she died?
And in all honesty? I didn't care.
The rest of the book is devoted to Luna trying to find herself and all that and trying to get dreamy neighbor Oliver to kiss her. Wonderful.
The Characters (Especially of the protagonist sort): I could not stand about the vast majority of the characters in this book. Luna was maybe the most unconvincing, unrealistic, teenage character I've ever read. I know, I know, "EJ, cut him a break! This is a middle-aged man writing from a fifteen year old girl's perspective! Geez!" Well, I am a fifteen year old girl, and this to me sounds nothing like anybody I would ever know.
As one reviewer on goodreads said, Luna's voice varies from the voice of a kindergartner to an adult. At the beginning, she sounds like a two year-old. "I'm not a tween! I don't watch Hannah Montana! Blah blah blah." This again, is something that will bring the book down -- Lewis refers to something that is common today about every other page. People reading this in say, fifteen years, will not know what the heck is going on. Anyway, other things that made Luna unbelievable was her severe lack of friends. In some cases, it's okay for characters to be friendless, as long as there's a reason. (Such as Vera in "Please Ignore Vera Dietz." There were tons of reasons she didn't have any friends. Review coming soon!) But Luna, the daughter of a multi-millionaire film director, should have people on their hands and knees, begging to be her friends! She has two distant friends, but you would think that there would be another group that she would still belong to. But, no, apparently there are only three other girls in this school, because she must turn to Janine, a girl that is severely more mature than she is, and is mentioned about four times in the entire book. Luna's reaction to just about everything kind of annoyed me, not just with the messages, but also to Oliver (get to that in a sec) and major plot points. At one point, she found out that her dreamy neighbor Oliver was seeing another girl. She walked away with barely even a "This made me sad" kinda dealio. She just walked away and got ice cream or something. No expression of emotions. None at all.
Then there's Oliver. Oh, oh, Oliver. Dreamy neighbor Oliver. Second place in the "No Personality Whatsoever" competition, only losing to Mr. Cullen. Anyway... I had high hopes for our dreamy neighbor. In fact, when Luna acted like the biggest dork in the Northern Hemisphere by walking up to him on her birthday and saying, "I'm fifteen!" he replied back, "Hi, Fifteen, nice to meet you." I thought it was kind of cute. That's pretty much were the cuteness ended.
Luna described his lips as "violet" which kind of scared me, and their conversations were always dull and bland and pretty much summed up an awkward first relationship... if they were seventh graders and their relationship died after four painful days. But it didn't. More like four painful months, and still going strong when the book was over (sorry to spoil it, but... well, no I'm not.) He insisted on calling her Fifteen the entire time, too, which was sorta cute, but at the same time.... weird. I was kind of scared he didn't actually know her name.
Her dad was bland and her brother was too angelic to be a ten year-old, her dad's girlfriend was pretty much faceless, and Janine was mentioned too briefly for me to even develop an opinion of her.
The Cover: I saw the same picture being used on a different book. Kind of strange.
Overall: I would not recommend this book at all. With the voice, plot, and characters all being sub-par, I would suggest you save your money and your time.
I'll try to make my reviews less ranty from now on. But I'm a ranter. We'll see.
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