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A review by romanaromana
Black Rabbit Summer by Kevin Brooks
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
3.5 stars.
(Here are some trigger warnings - spoilers included. None will be mentioned in this review).
It was all going so well and then it just...fell.
Pete Boland has spent most of his summer before Sixth Form sweating away in his bedroom and seeing nobody except his parents. That is until the last day of the town's fair, when he receives a call from an old friend, suggesting that their old group of friends get together one last time before her and her brother move away to France. Pete isn't sure how he feels meeting up with people he barely knows anymore, but figures no harm can come from it; he says yes. But by the early hours of the next morning, Pete begins having some serious regrets. For starters, that tequila and weed didn't go down so well, and then there's the whole disappearance of Stella Ross, local teen celebrity. And of course, Pete hasn't seen his friend Raymond since they visited the fortune teller at the fair...
I started this book very optimistically. I really loved Pete's narration - he was relatable, frank and believable. What's more, Kevin Brooks introduces a great cast of characters, each with interesting traits and personalities that make them equally suspicious as the mystery begins to unfold. I thought Brooks had built solid foundations for what could have been a great young adult mystery, and I genuinely couldn't wait to find out where both Stella and Raymond had got to.
But Black Rabbit Summer slowly, and then quickly, fell apart.
I continued to enjoy Pete's narration, but all the great characters and leads Brooks had created just faded from the story, until we were left with only the most relevant of them. Typically I wouldn't have a problem with this if the protagonist dropped some of their previous ideas because of new evidence or findings, but Pete had no reason to stop considering many of the people he had encountered whilst trying to find Raymond and Stella. And so, I was seemingly left all by myself with comments and findings from previous chapters that nobody in the story cared about anymore. Brooks continued to do this right until the end of the novel, which was incredibly frustrating as it left me with a lot of loose ends and unexplained details.
Many of Pete's advances also relied on persistent use of one of my fiction pet peeves: something I can only describe as 'inexplicable sensing'. This is when a character frequently makes choices based on nothing more than a mysterious 'feeling' or 'sense' that it is what they should do. Common markers of this painfully disappointing technique are phrases like 'something told me that...' or 'I got the feeling that...' or, of course, the dreaded unknown voice in the back of a character's head, urging them to say or do things. This appeared in Black Rabbit Summer all too often for my liking. Granted, on some occasions it could be forgiven because fortune telling and the concept of fate and prediction are themes in the novel, but this did not justify the extent to which Pete relies on these random intuitions. The whole story centres around a police investigation of two missing teenagers, so I just wanted some real answers and facts.
Perhaps my standards for YA mysteries are just unfairly high because my experience with the genre is dominated by a love for Holly Jackson's series (which, by the way, is incredible). But ultimately, I wanted to like this book more than I did, and I can't get over how agonisingly disappointing this ending was. For an investigative mystery, I simply have too many unanswered questions. Having said this, I quite liked Kevin Brooks' writing style, and the strength of many of his characters was a big positive. A lot of his other novels sound super interesting, too, so who knows? Maybe I'll pick up another.
(Here are some trigger warnings - spoilers included. None will be mentioned in this review).
It was all going so well and then it just...fell.
Pete Boland has spent most of his summer before Sixth Form sweating away in his bedroom and seeing nobody except his parents. That is until the last day of the town's fair, when he receives a call from an old friend, suggesting that their old group of friends get together one last time before her and her brother move away to France. Pete isn't sure how he feels meeting up with people he barely knows anymore, but figures no harm can come from it; he says yes. But by the early hours of the next morning, Pete begins having some serious regrets. For starters, that tequila and weed didn't go down so well, and then there's the whole disappearance of Stella Ross, local teen celebrity. And of course, Pete hasn't seen his friend Raymond since they visited the fortune teller at the fair...
I started this book very optimistically. I really loved Pete's narration - he was relatable, frank and believable. What's more, Kevin Brooks introduces a great cast of characters, each with interesting traits and personalities that make them equally suspicious as the mystery begins to unfold. I thought Brooks had built solid foundations for what could have been a great young adult mystery, and I genuinely couldn't wait to find out where both Stella and Raymond had got to.
But Black Rabbit Summer slowly, and then quickly, fell apart.
I continued to enjoy Pete's narration, but all the great characters and leads Brooks had created just faded from the story, until we were left with only the most relevant of them. Typically I wouldn't have a problem with this if the protagonist dropped some of their previous ideas because of new evidence or findings, but Pete had no reason to stop considering many of the people he had encountered whilst trying to find Raymond and Stella. And so, I was seemingly left all by myself with comments and findings from previous chapters that nobody in the story cared about anymore. Brooks continued to do this right until the end of the novel, which was incredibly frustrating as it left me with a lot of loose ends and unexplained details.
Many of Pete's advances also relied on persistent use of one of my fiction pet peeves: something I can only describe as 'inexplicable sensing'. This is when a character frequently makes choices based on nothing more than a mysterious 'feeling' or 'sense' that it is what they should do. Common markers of this painfully disappointing technique are phrases like 'something told me that...' or 'I got the feeling that...' or, of course, the dreaded unknown voice in the back of a character's head, urging them to say or do things. This appeared in Black Rabbit Summer all too often for my liking. Granted, on some occasions it could be forgiven because fortune telling and the concept of fate and prediction are themes in the novel, but this did not justify the extent to which Pete relies on these random intuitions. The whole story centres around a police investigation of two missing teenagers, so I just wanted some real answers and facts.
Perhaps my standards for YA mysteries are just unfairly high because my experience with the genre is dominated by a love for Holly Jackson's series (which, by the way, is incredible). But ultimately, I wanted to like this book more than I did, and I can't get over how agonisingly disappointing this ending was. For an investigative mystery, I simply have too many unanswered questions. Having said this, I quite liked Kevin Brooks' writing style, and the strength of many of his characters was a big positive. A lot of his other novels sound super interesting, too, so who knows? Maybe I'll pick up another.