Anna's Reviews > Envy

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that with a plot like Envy's, there's a big emphasis on writerly things, and nearly all of the characters are involved in the industry at some point, either from the writing or the publishing aspect. Ironically, the criticism given to one of her writing characters pretty much sums up the book: lively dialogue, but the plot needs work. The plot needs a lot of work, because I don't have enough suspension of disbelief to buy the story past the first fifty pages. A successful and extremely busy New York publisher is going to drop everything to hunt down an author who didn't bother to leave contact information? Not only that, but she's going to fund a trip to visit him when he rudely informs her over the phone he's not interested in pursuing publication? Let's not even get into how she agrees to pay him when he tells her the manuscript hasn't been written past the first chapter, because that chapter made my head hurt (ok, the headache might have had to do with the way I wound up pounding my head against the wall). How a book that understands the role of publishers so little ever got published, I will never understand.

Every character in this book is two-dimensional. The villain has no redeeming qualities, so everything he does, thinks, or says is malicious or evil in some way. Maris's father is meant to be shrewd, so he winds up being omnipotent and able to predict everyone's actions, although he doesn't often do anything with that knowledge. Maris herself is a big plot device. Her personality shifts as needed to carry on the plot, which often makes her dumber than dirt. Really dumb dirt, at that. "I have caught this person involved in my personal and professional life, who happens to be in a key position of my family company, in some nefarious activities and have reason to believe he is thoroughly villainous, but I am just going to sit on that information rather than actually doing something about it. I should probably tell my father, and the head of the company, what is going on but I won't because that would not only be logical, it would take a good 100 pages or so out of the book." What makes this even better is that everyone throughout the book refers to Maris as being very smart, which would normally make me grit my teeth except that I started reading it as though they were all patronizing her, which made me laugh.

Ok, the characterization and plot need work, but it's not all bad. The prose itself is very readable, and the dialogue is good (when it's not revealing the flat characters). It's the kind of writing where although nothing in the book makes sense, it's at least not painful to do the actual reading. The book is trying too hard (and failing) to be a mystery, and although the tone is about right, there's a lack of actual mystery, which you'd think would be one of the given elements, but apparently not.