REVIEW: Teardrop by Lauren Kate

Everywhere Eureka goes he is there: Ander, a mysterious blond boy who tells her she’s in danger. Ander knows things about Eureka she doesn’t yet know herself, but not her darkest secret: ever since her mother drowned in a freak accident, Eureka wishes she were dead, too. She has little left that she cares about, just her friend Brooks and some heirlooms—a locket, a letter, a mysterious stone, and an ancient book about a girl who got her heart broken and cried an entire continent into the sea.

But Ander has some secrets of his own. The haunting tale is more than a story. It’s real. And Eureka’s like has far more evil undercurrents than she ever imagined.

I wanted to like this story. I really, really did, but alas, I did not. There are a lot of things that I don’t feel like anyone should ever do when writing stories for teens (or for any ages, actually), and Lauren Kate did a lot of those things in Teardrop. This book actually inspired a post I’ll be writing soon titled The Dos and Don’ts of Writing YA. The first thing that made me hate reading this book was the prologue. It was told through Ander’s point of view, but gave me (the reader) no more information than I could have gotten just from reading the book. It was a useless chapter told from the wrong point of view. The first chapter should always be in the protagonist’s point of view so that readers can immerse themselves into that character’s life and thoughts. Don’t even get me started on the epilogue.

The prologue and epilogue were redundant to say the least. Everything that happened in those two chapters was explained throughout the rest of the book. I get the whole “show, don’t tell,” but do it from the protagonist’s point of view so I don’t have to read everything over and over. This book was already overly lengthy. I have to say that I love a great book with awesome detail (hello Daughter of Smoke and Bone) but this book went way overboard and beyond.

If you love reading descriptions about pointless people and things that never come up again later on in the book, thus making the chapters exuberantly long and kind of boring, then this is the book for you. Another thing you really should do when writing YA is make the chapters short. Readers reading this level of book (plus younger readers trying to pick up these books) shouldn’t feel bogged down by lengthy chapters. These readers are prone to boredom and laziness. I should know. I am one of them. And then when the first chapter isn’t even in the main character’s point of view, and it’s practically 20 pages long? Snore. I don’t care. It made getting into this book incredibly difficult.

Like I said, I love me some description, but this book was way too much. There would be three paragraphs describing the way each person looks, including random people that the main character notices in a window once and never sees again. Why? This book could have been half the size it is had I not had to wade through pointless descriptions. There was hardly any dialogue, either. And what was there was a line of dialogue followed by two long paragraphs of description and muck before the next character responded to the first. I was hard to get through, and then there was no goal for the main character.

I guess the goal could have been to figure out the mystery behind Diana, but that goal wasn’t introduced until Eureka got her inheritance, and that was pretty far into the book. The book was a lot of muck, with not a lot of plot, and then when Ander starts explaining things to Eureka it’s all a huge mess of info dump. It was disheartening because I was incredibly excited to read this book, but now I don’t know if I can sit through another one of these.

I know this is a lot of hating for one book, but I can say that I started to like the book toward the end. When things actually started happening. I loved Madame B (Savvy Blavvy was the best character in this book) and Cat. They were well developed, and they actually had decent interactions with Eureka without too much muck. Granted, there was still a lot of muck, but they were great characters. I wasn’t too overly fond of Ander or Brooks. They were vanilla. Ander especially. Brooks was better because he had a cute history with Eureka that involved a lot of inside jokes. I loved those! I wish there’d been more dialogue between them. Actually, more dialogue in general!

There were just so many cons to this book for me. I do think the descriptions were beautiful. Lauren Kate has a way with words. However, there were way too many chunky blocks of description and not enough dialogue. I wanted to read more interactions between Eureka and everyone else. I get that she was mourning and depressed, but still. I got tired of being in Eureka’s head real quick. And that sucks, because there were some fun characters in this story. I just don’t think it was done very well. Nothing happened in the book until Madame B showed up. Ander was barely there, unlike what the synopsis suggests, and I’m sorry but Eureka cares about more than just Brooks and some heirlooms. The synopsis was a big hunk of baloney.

XOXO Tia