Pictures in the Words

Title: The White Glove War

Series: The Magnolia League (Book #2)

Author: Katie Crouch (& Grady Hendrix)

Publication: 2012

Rating: ★★

Summary: Every society has its secrets.

The members of Savannah’s Magnolia League have it all: money, beauty, power, and love. Some may call them lucky, but we know better. Spells, potions, and conjures are a girl’s best friends, and thanks to the Buzzards — a legendary hoodoo family — the Magnolias never run out of friends.

Golden girl Hayes Anderson would never dream of leaving the League or Savannah, where there’s no problem that can’t be fixed with a cup of Swamp Brew tea — served in a bone china cup, of course — and no boy who can’t be won over with a Conjure Up a New Love spell.

But when danger lurks and family secrets are unearthed, Hayes discovers that her life may not be charmed after all.

Review: Well, it wasn’t as terrible as its predecessor–I can give it that much. I received this ARC from my supervisor at the library, and although I hated the first book in this series, I had nothing to lose in reading the second one. (Except maybe six or so hours of my time, that is.) Like I said–it wasn’t as horrendous as The Magnolia League was, and miles less offending in its stereotypes and holier-than-thou personality, but based on this book, I would not tell you to read the series. It was still disappointing (even though I wasn’t expecting much to begin with), and unenjoyable. I read this often with my sister-in-law present, who is visiting us right now, and every time I groaned, moaned, or rolled my eyes, she would demand why I didn’t just quit the book. Sometimes books get better at the end!

Unfortunately, that doesn’t apply here.

What I Liked: Spoilers!

• There simply aren’t words to describe how much I appreciated Hayes’ narrative. Part of the reason I hated the first book so much was because I could not stand Alex’s character, and I literally despised everything about her. Hayes was one of the more bearable characters, and I had hope because parts of this book were in her perspective (although don’t be fooled into thinking the whole book is, because it’s not). She was a new voice–a better voice–and I almost enjoyed reading from her point of view. She doesn’t generally hold an air of “I’m so much better than you”, like her Magnolia sisters, or hippie Alex. Her narrative alone is the reason this book as two stars instead of the one I almost gave it.

What I Didn’t Like:

• We’ll start with the thing that bothered me most. During this book, one classmate of the Magnolia Girls’ is killed. The students think that he was either drunk or suicidal and crashed his car into an oncoming semi truck, and his body obliterated–his eyes also pecked out by birds (although the reader knows better). And how do they react? Anna comes up to Alex and starts gossiping about it, and Alex, as Owen’s (the kid who died) alleged girlfriend, she does nothing. She says something like, “Oh, that’s too bad,” or something and then freaks out because it’s her fault, and she needs to take care of the Gray Man and get her mom back. Anna just walks away, Madison barely reacts at all, and it seems like nobody, nobody, is mourning this kid. This is a suspected suicide! I’m sorry, but that is not in any way a believable response. This is a topic that I’m much more sensitive to after this year (for reasons in my Thirteen Reasons Why review), and it bothers me, thoroughly and wholly, when it’s not treated with the proper respect. Killing teenagers in your books needs to at least be done respectfully. Don’t just a kill a kid and then not have anybody care that he’s dead. That’s just not okay. Not only is it not realistic, but it’s not respectful, and that is important beyond what my words can convey. The shock and aftermath of losing a classmate, however close or not close you were, is stunning and it’s wrenching, and it’s a terrible experience. But everybody was okay after fifteen minutes, and it didn’t matter to anyone. Even when Madison confronts Hayes’ mother over it being her fault Owen is dead, nobody cares. Nobody.

• Here’s my second pet peeve with this series. Alex is convinced she’s fat. Granted, she got over it a bit more in this book, because she’s skinny as I’ll get out. However, the way everyone else refers to her at fat and pudgy, when she wasn’t even fat to begin with, seriously grates on my nerves. Sybil talks to Hayes and refers to Alex as her “fat friend”, and when Alex goes to see Dr. Jacobs, he calls her “fat face”. Ugh! All the people judge Alex for her weight and stuff, and she’s not even heavy. She was a size six before the Magnolia League, and basically a size zero during this book. Imagine how that makes a girl like me feel–size fourteen and already self-conscious enough about it as it is. I don’t want to feel like when I walk into a room, people are calling me fat face, or referring to me as the fat friend behind my back, like they do to Alex. By these standards, I–and any other normal sized girl–am a freaking blimp, and that’s really insulting. I do not see myself as fat, as self-conscious as I am about my weight, and Alex and everyone else in this book, has no place to make fat jokes about a skinny girl. It just makes the rest of us feel terrible about ourselves. I hope the authors realize that when writing the next book.

• There’s just plain bad writing. The book starts off introducing Hayes with her full name and family history–something we were taught not to do in creative writing starting from sixth grade and up. That’s a huge writing no-no in itself, because it’s amateur and a terrible hook. There are also just sad grammar mistakes that should be part of Writing 101; for example:

            “Hayes.” Dorothy says. (ARC 39)

            Everybody knows that that is just wrong. Also, this is a present tense book. However, there’s a total slip up in the writing on page 225:

            “Dex saw you going out to that island one day a couple of months ago,” Madison said.

            If you’re going to write your book in present tense, please at least be thorough about it.

            Here’s a couple other easy mistakes that simple editing could have fixed:

            “I did it for my daughter,” my mom hisses. “That Lee girl parachutes in and snatches everything away from Hayes,” my mother hisses. (ARC 230)

          “And I am so sorry,” my mom’s voice is gin-calm. (ARC 231)

            We get out. of the car At least the sound of sobbing is starting to fade behind us. (ARC 249)

            The other Magnolias stand by silently as the two women look at each other like pregnant cats in July. (ARC 289)

            Not to mention my personal favorite! The book starts with Hayes full name, which is given as Hayes Mary McCord Anderson. They loop back around to that in the last chapter in Hayes’ point of view, where she introduces herself as Hayes Mary Elizabeth Anderson. The authors couldn’t even be bothered to remember the name of their own character. To read the first page of their own novel. I don’t see a reason why I should care about their characters, either.

• As with the first book, much of this was unpleasant and trying-too-hard-to-be-cool. Madison and Dexter spend all their time together and are even caught break dancing at a party together (break dancing = trying too hard to be cool); and Madison jumps in as the see-all-know-all girl at the end who brings Hayes to her sense (trying too hard to be convenient). There’s even a blatant The Great Gatsby reference-but-not-a-reference when Hayes describes the people coming into their party–one couple is described as the “old-money Buchanans”. Old-money, I can understand is a cool reference. But actually using the last name of the couple from the book the term old-money came from? That’s stretching it a bit far. Plus, things like the relationship between Thaddeus and Alex, Hayes and her boyfriend Jason, Madison and Dexter…it’s all overwhelming and just makes me want to throw the book down in frustration. Thaddeus and Alex swear they love each other, under a relationship that has no rhyme or reason to it. Just…the little things pile up, one on top of another, until you just want to explode and quit the book altogether.

Overall: As with the first book, I wouldn’t recommend this one. If you aren’t sure you want to read this one, I’d tell you it’s not worth it. There’s practically nothing redeeming about it, except the Hayes’ narrative (and even she gets on my nerves a lot of the time)–most of it was just insulting and upsetting, especially the issues concerning Alex’s weight and the reaction of the classmates to Owen’s death. I will not be recommending this book to anybody, and nothing about my reading experience was pleasant in the slightest.

Title: The Magnolia League

Series: Magnolia League (Book #1)

Author: Katie Crouch

Publication: 2011

Rating: ★

Summary: When her free-spirited mother dies in a tragic accident, sixteen-year-old Alexandria Lee is forced to leave her West Coast home and move in with a wealthy grandmother she’s never known in Savannah, Georgia. By birth, Alex is a rightful if unwilling member of the Magnolia League-Savannah’s long-standing debutante society. But white gloves and silk gowns are a far cry from the vintage t-shirts and torn jeans shorts she’s used to.

Alex is the first in decades to question the Magnolia League’s intentions, yet even she becomes entangled in their seductive world. The members enjoy youth, beauty and power…but at what cost? As Alex discovers a pact between the Magnolias and the Buzzards, a legendary hoodoo family, she discovers secrets-some deadly-hidden beneath the glossy Southern veneer.

Review: How do I say this without sounding like a jerk? The only reason I gave this one star is because GoodReads doesn’t let you give something zero stars without taking it off your shelves altogether. And I’d rather somehow dignify it with even one star and let people know how terrible it was rather than take it off because it doesn’t deserve this singular star and never know I read it.

The main character, Alex, was the most completely irritating self-righteous, hippie, bratty, “holier-than-thou” hypocrite of a character, and I couldn’t stand her in the least. I hated her when she was running around complaining about everything in the beginning (“What, you drive? How evil!”) or when she was a “real” Magnolia Girl (“I still think I’m fat even though I’m size zero and eat everything in sight”). And basically every other character irritated me to, so some extent (even Dex by the end, who was pretty alright in the start). The only thing, the only thing, that even made reading this bearable was making annotations in the margins. See, my best friend Allison gave this book to our other best friend Tristan for her birthday. Tristan thought it was so terrible, she regifted it to Allison for her birthday. And she gifted it to me for mine. And we decided that we’d make these notes in there and pass it around for a few years and see how many we could cram into the pages. So when you flip this copy open, (since I’m the first to write in it) you see all my snarky comments in pen, to never ever be erased. Maybe it’s a little mean, but there was no other way I would have been able to make it through this. That doesn’t even begin to mention my biggest pet peeve of all–present tense–was taken to a whole new level of ridiculous in a way that I couldn’t even forgive.

What I Liked: Spoilers!

• I wish there had been something. I honestly do. I’d heard this was one of the “It” books of 2011, so I was really excited before my friend told me how awful it was (I only read it because we’re having Bad Book Month in book club right now). Like I said, Dex was pretty alright, until even he turned out to be totally sucky. There were a couple witty one-liners that sincerely made me laugh, (“All that girl’s taste is in her mouth!” or, my personal favorite, “If you don’t stop talking like a bumper sticker, I’ll stab you,”) but that was it. For the whole book.

What I Didn’t Like:

• First, we’ll get the biggest thing out of the way. You guys know very well how I feel about present tense writing; it is near impossible to execute perfectly. But that’s not what bothered me most about this book. It’s that it was written in present tense, but was telling a past tense story. The events weren’t happening at the narrator was experiencing them, as is supposed to be with present tense writing. You’re led to believe this up until, “What follows is a story so crazy, it’s hard to retell it without questioning my sanity.” WHAT? The story itself is PAST tense. And yet it’s written in a present tense narrative? That’d be like me telling a friend about something that happened and narrating it like it were happening right then. Nobody would do that. As if I didn’t have reason enough to not like the book by that point, this sent it plummeting to the bottom and erased all chances of it somehow ever getting any respect. Writing in present tense is one thing. Writing in present tense when it makes no sense in your story is another thing entirely. I can’t get past how ridiculous it is.

• This entire thing is beyond stereotypical. Everyone in Savannah is either rich and white, or black and a hoodoo practitioner. There’s almost no middle ground (except maybe Dex). Not to mention the California characters–they all are hippies, smoke pot, and lay out in the sun all day. I’ve never been to Georgia, but I know California, and it’s nothing like that. Crouch totally failed on making anybody believable and probably only succeeding in insulting a lot of Californians and a lot of Southerners. It was totally distasteful, and she should have maybe done a little research on people from the regions now (as opposed to the sixties or something) before writing all her characters grossly stereotyped.
• I hated everyone. I hated Alex, because she was a self-righteous little brat who thought buying a new shirt made you the devil. She acted like she knew everything, and then tried to act like it was no big deal. Except…it was very obvious she was trying too hard to be hipster. “I love Grateful Dead and Jane Eyre and now I’ll give an entire paragraph on the plot of Gone With the Wind in order to sound intelligent.” I don’t know how to quite describe her. She just bothered me in every single way. Not to begin to mention the way she went on and on about Reggie, when their basis for a relationship was on their smoking pot together on the beach and making out sometimes—and also he calls her Pudge!. Yeah, that’s love, hunny. She’s so self centered (“I can’t believe they’re playing mud ball without me, they should have given up the whole game because I moved away!”) and goes on and on about the fashion industry only giving low body images to girls, when she has a low body image for no reason whatsoever, since she’s only like, a size six to begin with. And if size six is a blimp, then I must be a freaking Grand Canyon. Everything about her was insulting and there was not a single way to like her. Even after she changed–then she just turned into a self-righteous hypocrite! Ugh! I have a million marginal notes about my hated from Alex.
• That’s not even starting on everyone else. You can just imagine how I felt about the other characters. I wanted to throw up when Alex and Thaddeus started dating. Within three chapters, Alex is saying that she loves him to herself, when there is again, no basis for their relationship. Crouch just threw them together because there had to be a love interest in there somewhere. And then he asks her to basically run away with him, after blatantly breaking the only promise he ever asked her to keep! She is such an idiot–and so is everybody else. Madison and Hayes (when they went into “gangster” talk, I just about wanted to stab something–I even drew a stick figure of myself stabbing the book), Thaddeus, Miss Lee, Reggie, the Magnolia ladies, Sam, Sina…everyone. Except Dex. And even then, he sold out in the end by getting together with Madison (which was totally predictable).

• I could go on and on, seriously. I have over five hundred notes in this book. If you care to hear more in depth parts and why I hated them, feel free to ask. I’ll leave with one last thing–the plot didn’t even start until page two-twenty-five. I know because I made a note of it. That’s two-third into the book! It was so…awful. I just don’t know what to even say anymore.

Overall: The only thing I can really do is beg you to stay away. And if you ever find you must read this book, do what I did and just write all in it, because that’s honestly the only way I made it through. Getting to draw stick figures and write things like, “I’m sure lying is SO going to help you in a shark attack” and then cross out the word “communal” and replace it with “pot” made everything bearable. Otherwise, just run in the opposite direction. This was not a “gem” of 2011 novels, as I was led to believe. Not to even begin to mention Crouch’s totally condescending and insulting attitude toward her readers. Everything about this was terrible and I’d strongly suggest not giving your money to this waste of paper and sorry excuse for literature. I hate to be nasty but…sometimes it’s deserved.