All Our Pretty Songs

If this had not been so short, there is a good chance I wouldn't have finished it. Which is tragic on epic proportions, because I was so excited for this book. I love Sarah McCarry, I love her blog, I love everything she talks about on Twitter. I love the ambition behind All Our Pretty Songs, a reinvention of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a reinvention of what a hero is, in fact. The narrator's journey is like nothing else you'll read in YA fiction right now. She's not just tried and tested, she does stupid things, behaves recklessly, gets called out on her shit, and shows how powerfully she loves her friends.

But aside from that, there's really nothing to latch on to about this book. The story is thin and meandering, and the meat of the book is built heavily on the prose, which didn't really do anything for me. Good prose has got to have static, you've got to feel it like little pin pricks of electricity. Its purpose is to make you feel something. What you get in All Our Pretty Songs is one slow wave after another of brick-like adjectives and metaphors that form into a mishmash that you might be able to call “atmosphere.” I realize something like the effect of Jack's music is difficult to describe in a precise way, but piling simile on top of disjointed simile does not help. I do not understand how salmon swimming upstream is like music, I just don't. It just makes me think the narrator is a bit of a drama queen.

Speaking of which, as much as I sympathized with the narrator and rooted for her towards the end, the majority of the book she annoyed the hell out of me. Her obsessive love for both Jack and Aurora, and subsequently her jealousy towards Aurora, would not have been so bad (they're both perfectly understandable emotions considering her life and her age) if there was something to counteract it, if everything did not revolve solely around Jack and Aurora. But there wasn't. If the narrator wasn't drooling over Jack, she was drooling for Aurora, and then hating herself for it, which kind of made me hate myself for picking up this book.

So, yeah, this was a big disappointment. I appreciate what McCarry was going for, but this book missed the mark by a mile.