Zoey sits on her bed and listens to her parents do stuff.

Within thirty minutes our house would begin to fill up with fat women and their beady-eyed pedophile husbands.

Not all Christians are pedophiles.  I’m pointing this out, not because I think there’s someone who doesn’t realize this, but because it’s so fucking obvious that most of you are rolling your eyes and going ‘duh’ right now.  It’s so obvious that I’m fair certain that the author knows this.  So she’s probably not trying to characterize all of these people as being pedophiles, but rather making a very poor joke to show Zoey’s distain, because…I don’t know, apparently whining about something they actually do just wasn’t good enough.

She’s making child sexual abuse a joke.  She’s taking something that’s annoying, like a prayer group when you don’t want one or people being concerned when you wish they’d go away, and saying that it’s as bad as having someone rape or molest a child.  It’s a thoughtless comment that serves no purpose except to demean and hurt real people who read this book just looking for a little escape, not a face full of insult.

Oh, and on behalf of my step-father (well-respected preacher and theology professor who never laid a hand on me) and my second boyfriend (youth minister who, again, one of the most respectful men I’ve ever known), I’d like to just deliver an extra ‘fuck you’ to this book.

And a tasteless fat woman joke!  Because, yeah, let’s throw in some judgment of women for their looks and some demonization of plus sized women, just for kicks. 

That’s a hell of a lot of hatred and idiocy and vile comments all crammed into just one line of narration.

They’d ask God to help me stop being such an awful teenager and a problem to my parents.

Uh, I don’t know what kind of Christians this author is used to hanging out with, but most I know would be more concerned about the ‘imminent monsterficiation’ problem, not just a bit of teenage wangst.  In fact, we have no idea how Zoey acts out.  Sure, since we’re sitting inside her head, we can tell she’s a horrible person who hates everything and everyone around her, but we haven’t seen her interact with her family in any meaningful way and we have no idea if she acts out majorly or if she’s just a smartass.  Even the hardcore types tend to understand that teenagers will be smartasses, and while they might not like it, I don’t think they’d classify ‘grow up faster, please’ as more important than ‘about to lose your soul.’

Or, you know, whatever the argument is.  Since Zoey STILL HASN’T TOLD US why people think vampyres are monsters. 

Zoey gets all teared up because she knows she can’t avoid what’s coming.  All of her concerns?  Revolve around being the ‘new kid’ at a new school.  Not one single word about being worried she might die or turn into something that needs to be exorcized. 

And, as if the People of Faith weren’t bad enough, the horrid prayer session would be followed by an equally annoying session with Dr. Asher. He’d ask me a lot of questions about how this and that made me feel. Then he’d babble on and on about teenage anger and angst being normal but that only I could choose how it would have an impact on my life…blah…blah…and since this was an “emergency” he’d probably want me to draw something that represented my inner child or whatever.

What…the fuck am I looking at? 

Okay, I was iffy on a psychiatrist being called in the first place, but I figured he was probably a sycophant who sold snake oil and the fact that real psychiatry wouldn’t matter would be immaterial.  But now it just feels like the author doesn’t like shrinks, so she’s taking it out here by randomly shoving one into her story but also saying “LOL, LOOK, HE’S USELESS.”

Yes.  Yes, a psychiatrist would be pretty useless in trying to stop a physiological change.  That’s why any good one would say “Get thee to a general practice doctor.”  You can’t say that something is across-the-board stupid when your example is some way in which that thing wouldn’t be used anyway.  Why would anyone in this story think Dr. Asher would be useful right now?

And, by the by, talking about that stuff isn’t useless.  It sounds pretty stupid to a person who’s on even emotional footing, but there are times when a person needs to hear stuff like that, and that’s when and why therapists are called in.  Art therapy is also very useful, too.  It’s not an ’emergency’ tactic, so that’s more fucking stupidity on the book’s part.  ‘Emergency’ usually denotes imminent harm to self or others, in which case a good sedative would be more in order, unless the person has a specific trigger that can call them down.

Why is this book so fucking mean and full of hate? 

Zoey has a spare key to her car, so she grabs that and climbs out the window.  Uhg, why couldn’t she have just done that to start with instead of wasting all that time and energy insulting the intelligence of readers everywhere?

More important than a vintage VW? How? That didn’t even make sense. Jeesh, I just sounded like a guy. Since when did I care about the vintageness of my Bug? I must really be Changing.

Because girl’s can’t like cars.  Ever.  If you like cars, it’s all because you’re turning into a freak.

This doesn’t even make sense, because just before this she was complaining that John doesn’t let her put her car in the garage.  You don’t have to care about the year of your car to want it protected from hailstones or neighborhood kids or whatever.  Once again, this book is just shoving nonsense at us in an attempt to be witty, but all it can manage is rude, crude, and stupid.

Zoey decides that she’s going to go talk to her grandmother, because apparently her grandmother is a saint who would never think anything bad of our precious bag of shit here.

my body ached even worse than it did that time they hired that crazy new gym teacher who thought we should do insane weight circuits while she cracked her whip at us and cackled.

Whhhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?  Weights are not bad for you, but weapons are outlawed from schools, so once again we have something that isn’t possible, thrown into a situation just so that Zoey can LOOK LIKE A FUCKING MORON.

OMG, I’m on chapter four and I’m losing it.  I’m just straight-up losing my mind over how stupid this all is.  There’s no rhyme or reason to it.  At first, it wasn’t so bad.  I could make sense of it.  She’s a hateful character, written by hateful authors, so she says hateful things.  But as it goes on, it just devolves into insanity.  It’s just…it’s just stupidity, warped around more stupidity, until I can’t even tell where it all starts and ends.  She’s not just complaining about things that happen, she’s inventing things that never happen so she can complain about how stupid they are, while we all sit back and scream WE KNOW THEY ARE STUPID, THAT’S WHY THEY DON’T HAPPEN.

I…just…I can’t process this.

Moving on.

Okay, so maybe she didn’t have a whip, but still.

I’m not complain about the whip, I’m complaining about the fact that you shoved a stupid-ass story in the middle of a passage that’s all about driving your fucking car just so you can whinge about shit that doesn’t even fucking matter.  And a little about the whip, but the rest is still fucking stupid!

And while we’re at it, get off your ass and lift some weights.

it had finally turned cool enough for me to wear my Borg Invasion 4D hoodie (sure, it is a Star Trek: The Next Generation ride in Vegas and, sadly, I am on occasion a total Star Trek nerd)

Book…  In fact, all Books, everywhere…  People who read are likely to be at least a little nerdy.  After all, we’re reading.  Perhaps don’t insult your main fucking demographic by saying that they are stupid and should be ashamed.  Because then maybe we will get ashamed and put down your fucking book that keeps insulting us.

Or maybe we’ll just put it down because it’s a stupid book.

And what’s with all the oddly-specific name dropping?  Did the author go to this ride and just loved it so much she felt the need to cram it into her story where it doesn’t belong?

So, Grandma’s house.  Apparently Grandma always knows when Zoey is coming over.  Today she’s left a note on the door saying where she’ll be.  So she can see the future enough to leave a note, but doesn’t bother to be home when her grandchild arrives?

Oh, and, I guess we can go ahead and mark Grandma down now as being supernatural of some sort.

Zoey wanders off to find where her Grandmother is picking wildflowers.  (She lives on a ‘lavender farm,’ but apparently harvests her cop by hand?)  Along the way, she has an astounding revelation.

My parents no longer controlled what I did. I wasn’t going to live with them ever again. John couldn’t

tell me what to do anymore.

Whoa! How awesome!

1) Uh, you didn’t realize this when you snuck out of the house?

2) That’s right kids, running away from home is awesome!  Do your parents tell you what to do?  Is your home life terrible in some way that you can’t even define, so you’ll settle for just calling awful over and over in the hopes someone believes you?  Well, you can fix all that today!  Just run off, it’ll be great!  You can live on a lavender farm!  Wheee!

What a fucking pathetic book.