Order LOST IN CLOVER here
Some things make me feel old: smartphone apps, indie rock music, wee hours of the morning, Beliebers and teenager business in general. I don't know if A) I'm not normal, B) I lost touch with my inner tween, C) My upbringing was weird, or D) All of the above, but I feel no kinship towards teenagers of today, whether they are real or depicted in Young Adults fiction. LOST IN CLOVER probably started with two strikes against it, due to my personal biases. But it made me feel like the proverbial shotgun-wielding old man in long johns on his porch, shaking his first to heavens and yelling: ''Goddamn you, kids. You need to shape up. When I was your age, nobody keeled over from emotional issue, for fuck's sake!''
LOST IN CLOVER opens with Jeremy Rogers being decked out by a teammate during football training. That teammate, lovingly nicknamed Crazy Eddie by the people of Clover, is not at his first offense and yet he's still on the team *. Lots of now ex-football players and terrified neighborhood kids have pent up aggression against Eddie. One night, as Jeremy is hanging out with older boys, they decide to roll over to Eddie's house and give him a lesson. Jeremy smells trouble and refuses to go with them. What happens over there is so horrific, it thrusts Clover into national spotlight and sends Jeremy into a long, painful downward spiral only one thing will possibly get him out of.
I'm gonna try to keep this short and as positive as I can. LOST IN CLOVER is what it is. It's a novel where you're supposed to root for the protagonist because he is the bruised teenager and you're supposed to identify with that. But I'm a picky bitch and I can't do that. A character has to give me reasons to love him and while Travis Richardson is going through great pains to make me like Jeremy using John Updike-like author interferences **, none of those reasons stem from Jeremy himself. Kid has a great support system, is spoon fed opportunities of making his life better several times, yet he wallowed in his own sorrow so much, he awoke my inner Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.
''LISTEN UP, MAGGOT! YOU MAY HAVE A HEAD ON THOSE GIRLY SHOULDERS OF YOURS, BUT YOU'RE LIGHT TWO STONES IN YOUR PANTS. DROP DOWN AND GIVE ME PUSH UPS UNTIL YOU'RE TOO TIRED TO BE SAD AND HOLLOW. MAYBE YOU'RE DEPRESSED, BUT YOU'LL BE DEPRESSED AND IN SHAPE BY THE END OF THE WEEK. I'LL GUARANTEE YA THAT.''
I don't know what else to say. I liked the form, I guess. LOST IN CLOVER happened over the course of ten years and Travis Richardson wrote it as a series of defining moments in Jeremy's life. I thought it was an original way of creating scope in a novel. I loved that Richardson paid a selective attention to detail. So yeah, mark this one down as a ''I didn't like it'' more than an ''it was really bad.'' LOST IN CLOVER is an original novel for what it is and it knows what it is and what it wants to say. The major issue here was that I wasn't on board with the agenda, which makes me believe I should shut up and write my own teenager novel and/or stop reading teenager novels altogether. One of these is bound to happen, I'm just not sure which yet.
* I loved how this detail, while improbable, is still somewhat realistic. I could see why a football coach would keep such a brute on his team, even if he injured just about everybody, even star players.
** And that's cool, I mean, it's a recognized technique.