Unbreakable - Kami Garcia

Anyone who has been to university knows that there are two basic academic groups: the Science students and the Arts students.  There are of course some subjects that straddle this great divide such as Psychology, Geography etc but these are the main two.  Now I hope you will please indulge me if I be a little broad and sweeping.  

In general Science students like facts, numbers, theories, equations.  They like something tangible; something that they can follow so that they can add ‘x’ to ‘y’ and get ‘z’.  They like to ask questions and get definite answers, or at least some kind of an answer – preferably one that can be expressed in a few words.  

Arts students, myself included here, do not like this.  We don’t answer questions: we like to say things like “well to an extent that is true but really there are a number of factors...” We like to pooh-pooh so-called facts, saying lines like “facts get in the way of a good narrative.”  Now this is of course because the kinds of questions that we tackle are not the same: they are creations of man, not of nature.  You can come up with an equation to figure out how fast something falls or what time the Sun will rise in the morning, but you can’t create one to explain what makes Mozart’s music enchanting or JRR Tolkein’s works enthralling.  You can’t express art through numbers, be it music, painting, sculpture or literature, yet this has not stopped people from attempting to work out the formulas to the perfect book – the 5 easy steps to telling a best-selling story – and in my view, Kami Garcia has attempted to do just that.

I won a copy of Kami Garcia’s first solo book Unbreakable from a competition on Goodreads.  I entered the contest not really bothering to work out what it was about, just because I fancied a free book.  The cover of it made it look a little silly but it was free so who cares right?  The book is a YA supernatural story about a girl named Kennedy who was living the kind of life that 14 year old female protagonists of YA books always lead: alone, boyfriendless and angsty about it, bookish and devoted to her parents (or in her case parent).  Her life is suddenly torn apart when a demon, latched onto her cat like a plague flea on a rat, kills her mother and she is only saved by a pair of dashing twins who tell her that she was descended from a secret order of, in effect, demon hunters.  

So we have the stereotypical protagonist, in a stereotypical-ish plot and now we are going to hit new levels of lack-of-imagination: the twins.  They are both teenage boys but have different characters: one is level-headed and sweet but a little dull; the other is handsome, dashing and damaged.  Care to hazard a guess where the love interest of this story lies?  Oh these three are not alone.  We also have the bitchy, fightery girl who sees the protagonist as a liability, and the nerd, the technical support guy who is no threat to the protagonist and is merely there to provide cool things.  

The plot, other than a lot of angsting around, is about demon/ghost hunting, specifically about preventing a powerful demon from escaping into our world and it is up to our motley band of barely trained teenagers to do it.  Think Ghostbusters but 15 years old and with worse stuff.  And meaner demons.

I think you so far get at why I think this book isn’t great: it’s as formulaic in structure and characters as the speed of light.  Indeed the plot, up until the end at least, is so incredibly predictable that anyone in any sense familiar with YA literature could tell me the entire plot from a small number of clues.  The characters in many ways are caricatures, not over-blown in any sense but just perfect tropes.  I won’t spoil the plot for you, but frankly you could guess most of it from here.  The ending is actually quite good and rather salvages the overall plot into something rather decent, but really this book, while not riddled with faults, suffers from the very basic problem that it is entirely formulaic.  It is as if Kami Garcia had distilled every YA book that she had ever encountered into a mathematical formula, created an algorithm, inserted the names of each character trope that she wished to include, and pressed “Go”.

The book is not badly written, nor is it a terrible read: it is just bland as all hell.  You finish the book and feel very little from having completed it because you feel that you have already read it before.  It is incredibly lazy storytelling and in some ways makes me a little pissed off because I have no idea why this was published.  Books these days are churned out in their  tens of thousands every year and yet the industry is still struggling and it will continue to struggle if all they produce is mediocre, middle of the road, formulaic works such as this.  This books really is one of those times where I wish that it had been bad – if it had been bad then at least it would have been original.

4.5/10