Review: My Beautiful Suicide

Well, I have to hand it to debut author Atty Eve. She certainly knows how to create a story full of unpredictable, yet believable twists. Much like Kelly Braffet gave the YA/NA a bit of a kick up the bum with her brilliant novel Save Yourself, with My Beautiful Suicide Atty Eve creates a novel that is challenging, unpredictable and, at times, utterly frightening. 

The novel opens on familiar ground, though those with a sound knowledge of English Literature will enjoy the many references to Les Miserables including the names of some of the characters. The heroine is Cozette or Cozy Hugo, a high school junior. Things in Cozy's life are pretty damn ordinary when the novel opens. Her brother, Victor (I'm sure you'll get the reference,) has died under tragic circumstances. Her parents have divorced and Dad has remarried a gold-digger has a new kid and has pretty much forgotten Cozy's existence. Mum doesn't have a lot of time or money--she's working odd hours at the local hospital--and Cozy's life is being further complicated by Hilda (yep) the school mean girl and bully. Although she possesses great strength and the ability to fight, Cozy feels utterly defeated by Hilda until one night when she comes to Hilda's rescue during a savage attack. There's a gang on the loose in the local area, preying on young woman. And, suddenly, the suicidal Cozy has an idea that is as ridiculous as it is clever.

Why not kill herself by baiting the gang into attacking her? She'll go down, but she will make sure that they die with her ...

And then, the plot really takes off. Not only does Cozy keep surviving the attacks that she tries to organise, but she finds herself in a strange Bonnie and Clyde style alliance with Chris, a boy from school who has a troubled family life of his own. Reader beware though, Cozy and Chris' relationship is a far cry from the romances that we've seen in YA/NA fiction in recent years. Or to put it another way, Chris is no stand in for Edward Cullen. He's a whole and complex character who comes with problems of his own and his alliance with Cozy is certainly, well, unusual. 

It's difficult to say more about the novel without giving much of the plot away, but I will tell you that this is the first in a series and it ends on one hell of a cliffhanger. I'm very much looking forward to the sequel. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more