Love/Hating a Book

A "love-hate" relationship is a bizarre thing. To have such strong, but conflicting feelings for someone or something has to be one of the more provocative experiences of the human condition. Not to the degree of intensity as the words suggest, but "love-hate" is what I feel when reading a BJ Rowley book. Perhaps I should call it "like-dislike."

I like his books because Rowley tells an interesting story, no bones about it. He knows how to come up with a topic that has a powerful hook in it. He knows how to take that idea and squeeze fascinating consequences from it and explore them. A boy finds out he can have out-of-body experiences at will. Two girls wish they can age four days in four minutes, and their wish comes true. Who wouldn't be intrigued?

I dislike his books because I don't like the way he tells his stories -- I don't like how he writes. His plotting can be clunky as he forces events to go the direction he wants them to go. His characterization doesn't rise much above the stereotypical thing one would expect. And that dialog! The dialog can roam from decent to acceptable to downright embarrassing at times. Put simply, Rowley writes at a juvenile level.

But I suppose that's a good thing, since his books are aimed at the juvenile audience. Teenagers are his market, and he writes for them.

Nonetheless, as I start reading them, fighting through the writing that bothers me, the story catches me and I end up reading on because I want to know what happens next. Rowley may not be the greatest writer that ever lived, but somewhere in there he knows how to tell a story.

That's exactly what happened with 16 in No Time. The first handful of chapters were a minor challenge to wade through. But once that hook is set, you might as well sit back and let yourself get reeled in.

Celinda and Mandy are two girls who are days away from being sixteen. Unfortunately, their school prom is even fewer days away. Although Mormonism is not explicitly mentioned anywhere, one gets the impression that these are two Mormon girls who are being tormented by that characteristically Mormon family rule: no dating until sixteen. Mandy misses the deadline by a few days, and Celinda by one. Both sets of parents are sticklers on the issue and refuse to bend the rule even a day's worth.

This is an especially tragic disaster because Celinda has been asked by the most popular boy in school. She finally gets a foothold into the big leagues, and she has to turn him down thanks to a childish rule her parents are enforcing. It's guaranteed to be the downfall of her social career.

But a strange boy sits next to her in school and gives her a book. It's a manual on how to make wishes really work. Celinda thinks the whole idea is foolish, of course, but then comes the moment of desperation where she has to try it anyway. She corrals her friend Mandy, and together they make a wish that they can age four days all at once, so they can be old enough to go to the prom.

The "powers that be" take their wish literally, and the next day the two girls suddenly find themselves living at a rate that will cause four days of their lives to play out in four minutes. Everything around them is frozen still. A pitched baseball hangs in midair. Living human statues pose in all sorts of bizarre stances. The girls can come and go without being noticed or heard. They can snatch things away without anyone the wiser. They can nudge a speeding automobile and force it to swerve entirely off course.

Rowley explores the consequences of this situation in innovative ways. Since the girls are moving at such incredible speeds compared to everyone else, their slightest touch can wreak havoc on objects and injure or kill living beings. If they open a refrigerator door, it will rip off at the hinge and catapult across the room -- at super-slow motion to them. If they walk up some stairs, they leave footprints on the order of a jackhammer.

Trying to live and eat and sleep for four days under such circumstances becomes a great challenge to them. But to keep things hopping, Rowley also has them discover some terrible things in the process of happening. A disturbed boy is planting a bomb under the school bleachers. Celinda's father is consummating a half-million dollar deal with some gentlemen whom she discovers are swindling him. And her younger brother is riding on a bus into which a speeding vehicle is about to collide, probably killing him.

Because Rowley is wise enough to make up rules for this "warp time" existence (as the girls call it) and stick to them, Celinda and Mandy can't just tweak this and nudge that and make everything better. They have to think through things and figure out how to save the day without causing a great deal of damage themselves in the process.

And there's always that prom looming on the horizon. The two girls are aging four days in four minutes and will turn sixteen in time to go. But how in the world can they expect their parents to believe any of it?

I may grouse all day about how I didn't like this phrasing of words or that twist of plot or the other line of dialog, but the bottom line is, I wanted to keep reading to see what happened. It would have been nice if the writing could have lived up to the storytelling, but then I'm not the target audience. Who cares what a crotchety middle-aged man thinks of a young adult book? After all, I wasn't keen on Harry Potter either, but I doubt the author or publisher are losing sleep over that.