Awoken book review: "YA schlock or thought provoking psychological study?"

Hello readers. So recently twitter (have I mentioned I tweet? Looks like I'm mentioning it again!) has been awash (soon to be contextualised pun intended) with talk and reviews of the newest addition to the overflowing sea (another pun, I swear I'll explain) of young adult paranormal romance novels (I kind of hate that this is considered a subgenre, that it's gotten to that stage. I should stop parenthesising, it's screwing with the flow. Yes, that's another pun, you'll get it in a second.)

The cover is actually pretty damn cool, if not a little clichéd.
An outdated cliché even for YA at this point.
As a teenage girl, I know these things.

This book is called "Awoken" and is written by debut novelist Serra Elinsen. The concept is, as dubbed by twitter (I'm not kidding about this) "Twilight with Cthulhu". I needed to check this out. So I bought it on kindle a couple days ago and despite being somewhat behind on my schoolwork, burned through it in the next two or three days. It is hilarious. The idea alone grants immediate, tear inducing laughter but the way it's written is just pure gold. In fact, there's a line in it which describes the love interest's voice as "Like a thousand cellos made of gold." I read a review on the amazon page describing is as "the room of young adult literature" (the room being a film that's accumulated a cult following for being so terrible that it's hilarious. It's also incredibly, incredibly quotable). It's gotten fairly mixed reviews all round, some claiming that it's innocent enough, others laughing at the silliness, some are offended while others let out a resounding "meh" (or the occasional "Why does everyone seem to care so much?").

The best illustration of the spectrum on which people have responded to this, um, masterpiece...?

Personally, I was with the "so bad it's freakin' hysterical" crowd... until I got to about chapter nine. Chapter nine was a turning point of sorts for me. In chapter nine (and this is one of the spoilers in this review, so you might want to be wary. I'll try to keep them infrequent but some references do need to be made) Riley (the beautiful boy who is really Cthulu, that's not a spoiler if you have a brain) kidnaps Andi (our protagonist) and takes her to his underground (possibly underwater) cave home thing, R'lyeh, where she begins to see things and also does a total U-turn on her previous hatred of him. After this he takes her to New York for fairly arbitrary plot reasons before bringing her home three days after she first went missing from a beach party (don't ask). It is at this point that "Awoken" seems to diverge distinctly from such predecessors as Twilight and the like, and here is why: Andi suffers actual consequences for her three day absence. Her family and friends are all extremely worried about her, and show as much with genuine concern. I've read a fair few of the Twilight clones (and Twilight itself) and in none of them do the protagonist's everyday associates react so... believably to such disappearance (because impromptu jaunts to far off cities seem common in these books). It seemed a little too accurate.

Honestly, that was the light bulb moment for me. That was when I got it. Hold on to your seats, people, I'm about to go all English class nerd on your asses, because...this book... it's about Stockholm syndrome and the effects of such psychological abuse on the vulnerable mind of a teenage girl. This book is a study, an examination of the mind of someone who's suffering from Stockholm syndrome, seen through the eyes of that very person. And once this thought entered my mind and  was allowed to marinate for a while I was unable to not see it from then on. Because once you see it, it cannot be unseen. It's there like an itch in the back of your mind every time Andi mentally whines about how unworthy of Riley she is or how insignificant she is, how it wouldn't be unusual for him to leave her because he is so much more than she is. This theory of mine kept coming back, confirming itself far too many times for it to be passed off as pure coincidence.

It's what I do. But I think I have a point.

Allow me to elaborate a little for those of you unfamiliar with the term "Stockholm Syndrome". Stockholm syndrome is the phenomenon where a kidnapped person develops sympathy or even feelings as strong as love or devotion towards their captor, despite the captor threatening them, beating them, abusing them sexually and/or torturing them psychologically in the past or even still.

If you've read the book, you'll probably be hearing some little bells ringing right about now. Andi originally feels threatened by Riley and is in fact threatened to a point that could be considered assault when she confronts him on his apparent connection to the deteriorated mental state of one of their classmates. He stalks her, invades her privacy and generally makes her feel uncomfortable for the majority of the first nine chapters. In chapter nine, as I've previously mentioned, he saves her from some would-be rapists (because all girls on their own for three seconds are instant rapist prey) by driving them insane. She then passes out and he kidnaps her. It's only now that we begin to see Andi's change of heart with regards to Riley and she begins to think of him as someone to be desired and looked up to while still acknowledging that he is dangerous. This is quite clearly an indicator that she has fallen subject to the symptoms of Stockholm syndrome. In the Cthulhu cave (which is what it shall forever be known as and you can't stop me) Riley shows Andi some sights that she cannot comprehend (as she has probably been given some kind of hallucinogenic drugs), while she is still tied to a chair. Riley also has a totally-not-a-creepy-stalker hand carved statuette of Andi herself. She finds this in no way off-putting.

Now, I'd like to digress quickly to discuss the way in which this metaphor is carried out and how it made itself clear to me. Firstly, the used of the monster Cthulhu, while originally seeming like a reason to adapt Lovecraft's original writing and for shock value, becomes much more obvious once you consider the connotations; Cthulhu is representative of madness and chaos. This is an unmissable reference to the mental disorder which the protagonist develops over the course of the book, once you looks at it in the right way. Then there's the over the top style of writing and sincerity with which the book carries itself. This is all indicative of the the point that's being made, the over the top, borderline ridiculous nature is to signal to the reader that all is not as it seems. It's really very clever, a study of the disturbed and unstable psyche of a character who is is incredibly mentally confused.

The fact that all the events are viewed through the lense of the first person allow us as readers to experience this disorder firsthand. The way that the protagonist truly does not comprehend why it is that everyone is so worried for her, her desperation when she feels that Riley has left her (this occurs a few times over the course of the narrative), the inner conflict between her devotion and attachment to Riley and her feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness.

There isn't much reason for the inclusion of this
aside from that fact it's cute.
Lookada little Cthulu! Daaaw!

Then we have Riley, the captor. He always speaks in a formal, anachronistic manner, perhaps the protagonist's subconscious attempt to reveal that he is, in reality, a man much older than she is. That would explain why she always describes him as this idyllic Godlike figure- it could be a coping mechanism for her young mind to cope with being sexually violated by one so much older.

While we're going into double meanings, this book can also be seen on parallel with books such as "50 Shades of Grey" (which, for the record, I have only read vicariously through livetweets, the wikipedia summary and the "50shadesofwhy" tumblr page, which I highly recommend) where the male lead is also forceful to the point of abusive. Particularly in the New York scenes where Riley is insisting she eat and where he buys her gifts she isn't comfortable accepting, which feel lifted almost exactly from 50SoG, perhaps making a comment on the similar abusive threads. However, where 50SoG plays its awful contrived (and boring) premise fairly straight, Awoken is so over the top that it reeks of social commentary to be analysed. In fact, the inclusion of the "Plaza Hotel" (which I'm pretty sure no longer exists) where the pair stay while on their visit might suggest that the entire outing may have been a figment of Andi's drug addled mind. That, or it's just really badly written with very little research done or thought put into how actual people behave or interact. I find it rather difficult to imagine that so many similarities could be visible without a huge amount of research and carefully placed metaphor and symbolism on the part of the author.

Overall, the plot isn't important, it's simply a vessel for the ideas and messages hidden beneath layer after layer of absurdism and overused vocabulary. This book is an intriguing and thought provoking study of the mind of an abuse victim and also a social study on the romanticism of abuse in today's literature. I must say, I'm curious as to the background of this writer. Someone who could come up with such an intricate concept and such a subtle message that so many have passed it over as just another piece of shit YA novel must have some kind of background in psychology or sociology... excuse me readers, I think I'm going to research this woman a little further, so as to comprehend the mind behind this ingenious work.

............

Oh.

............

Well this is....

My most humble apologies, readers, but it seems I've far, far overestimated this book. Having done a little more research into the life of Serra Elinsen I can quite definitively confirm that none of the aforementioned theories have any founding. Put in the nicest possibly way, this woman is an idiot. I'd daresay that the blog you have just read took more mental exertion than Mrs. Elinsen has the capacity for. I'm so sorry readers, this is really rather embarrassing.

Damn you, Serra Elinsen.
I had such high hopes for you.

You see, Mrs. Elinsen is, from what I can gather, a small minded mother of five from some small town in the middle of the US. She belongs to a minuscule faction of the Christian faith and appears to be rather religious and involved in this church. Quite frankly, it would take someone, no, a team of people infinitely more intelligent than this woman to have written this book for any of the deeper meanings I have extrapolated to have any significance. I take it all back, readers. This book is hilariously bad, but it is bad and nothing more.

Embrace the Madness (or in this case, embrace Cthulhu?)