Murder at White Oak

What did I just read and why am I now committed to the Bk.2???

A while ago I got this book, as usual only doing a cursory reading of the blurb. I hadn't a clue this was YA. Color me shocked. Apparently it was a finalist for some prize or other. Doubly shocked.

Apparently this a launchpad for a series centering on Jacob “Jake” Weston a 16 going on 17 going on a Victorian 30 y.o. teen who's extraordinary in every aspect of his life. He's tall, blonde, an Olympic calibre swimmer, some sort of literary genius (I don't know what that means), and heir to the Weston fortune which hovers at the six billion mark. Everything about Jake is aspirational and larger than life. Also fantastical. I believed zero about this, not the characters, not the relationships, and that's completely due the narrative voice.

Jake is expelled from his private school in NY and his father, but more accurately his father surrogate, his butler, Abbott, gets him into White Oak academy in England, a step sibling to the likes of Eton and Harrow. Jake arrives with his larger than life persona, mesmerizes everyone he meets, and is quickly hooked on a mystery about a decades old murder. That would've been fine for me in spite of the youth of the protagonists, I'm not categorically against YA. It's just that these teens read like P.G. Wodehouse stock characters and not XXIst Century teens. The conversations are rendered in a kind of Brit speak that the author seems to have gleaned from old movies, adults are only nominally adult, and in weird awe of these teens.

More than likely I'm the wrong audience for this and YMMV but I still can't bring myself to recommend it. Sorry.