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Books I hated: Heartwood Box by Ann Aguirre
Read earlier this summer. Complained to various people. Never actually wrote it up for DW.
This was doubly annoying because I enjoyed the first half so much! It reads like a modern-day version of Stranger Thing with a more diverse cast and more of a focus on social issues.
And then it goes off the rails in the most stupid and trainwrecky way imaginable.
Araceli is the protagonist, born to a Mexican/(white) American couple who are globetrotting journalists. To keep her safe while covering violence in Venezuela, they send her to stay with her grandmother and go to school in a mostly-white upstate New York town. The town is your basic Affably Evil Suburb where everyone insists everything is fine and things are clearly not. It's almost 100% white, for one thing, and the kids at school -- where she makes friend with the handful of other kids of color -- tell her about the town's racist past; it's a former sundown town where the streets literally used to be named after Nazis. There are missing-persons posters everywhere, and inexplicable sounds in her grandmother's house at night. Her new friends tell her that people are going missing in worrying numbers and the authorities appear to be covering it up. There are strange lights in the woods at night, and her grandmother still puts out a dinner plate for her grandfather that she asks Areceli not to ask questions about.
Areceli also finds a mysterious keepsake box in her grandmother's attic, and discovers that it's full of letters written by a WWI soldier to his relatives back home. On a whim, she writes a letter to him and puts it in the box. It vanishes, and soon a new letter reappears, and she finds that she's in an impossible correspondence with a young man who died before she was born, who she finds herself falling in love with.
Oh yeah, and there's a mysterious lab near the town that possibly might be run by Nazis? No one is sure.
I realize there is A LOT going on here (this is all before the 20% mark of the book, too). I expect you might think all these things are going to tie together and be resolved in some kind of satisfying and not mindblowingly stupid way by the end? Yeah, so did I.
I am going to spoil literally everything underneath the cut. This book was fascinating and twisty and fun until about 3/4 of the way through, and then it careened off a mile-high cliff into one of the most infuriating, throw-the-book-at-the-wall endings I've ever read.
So it turns out that NaziLabs is conducting time travel experiments that have caused spacetime to go somewhat haywire around the lab. The floating, appearing-disappearing lights in the woods are spacetime rifts, and anyone who comes in contact with them -- who it turns out included Areceli's grandfather -- are being shunted a few seconds out of sync with everyone else in their timeline, but are still alive. Hence the house being apparently haunted: it's haunted by Arecelli's grandfather, and this is why her grandmother still feeds him. A couple of Areceli's friends get vanished this way. One of them just disappears. The other one vanishes slowly over the course of several days and at the end of that time, when he disappears completely, no one except Areceli remembers him. Unlike the rest of the victims, who merely vanish but are still remembered, he's been erased from the timeline.
This, like everything else, was very creepy at the time it happened, but was never explained.
Nothing is ever explained.
The founder of NaziLabs is the daughter or granddaughter of one of the town's founders, who has been traveling back to WWI to do ... things? It's never really explained? She's some kind of spy I guess? (There was a general implication that she was messing around in WWI to somehow ensure that the Nazis won WWII, but it was never elaborated on, or if it was, I forgot because it was probably total nonsense like almost everything from here on out.)
Anyway, Areceli and her WWI love interest work together to try to figure out what she's up to. This plot thread is dropped as things heat up in the present time, when Areceli finds the scientist who invented NaziLabs' time travel hiding in the woods in a literal hole in the ground (IIRC, this is never actually explained either, at least not in a way that makes sense) and he tells her that the box she's been using to communicate with WWI Love Interest is one of two experimental time travel prototypes (the other one is at the lab). Why it looks exactly like an antique wooden keepsake box, why she never examined it in enough detail to notice the time travel dial controls hiding inside, and most importantly how it ended up in her grandmother's attic of all places, is, of course, never explained.
Bringing the box with them, Areceli and her scientist friend break into the lab to try to fix the timeline and restore the people who were knocked out of sync with everyone else's timeflow. A bunch of guards shoot at them, and Areceli steals a gun and inexplicably turns into an action hero, despite never having used a gun before, and goes through a big action shooting scene and kills a bunch of people without seeming particularly bothered by it. Up to this point she was a pretty normal cheerleader who, while brave in a high-school-student kind of way, was generally freaked out by violence and whose reaction to people with guns was to run away.
This was about the point when I started thinking, "Okay, this just got really stupid."
Unfortunately it had not even begun to get stupid yet.
The scientist guy got shot in the action scene, so she finds the other device but, without him, isn't sure what to do. She throws her box at the other box, and they annihilate each other in a flash of light.
She wakes up in her bed at home.
(I should mention that I was fully expecting her to wake up having been knocked out of sync with time, in a mostly deserted world inhabited only by the other time-ghosts, because that is such a cool and creepy idea that I really thought we were going to see it at some point, and I still can't believe the book never did anything with it.)
Her grandparents -- plural -- come in. They appear to know she was running around in the woods near the lab, but while she's floundering for how to explain, they remind her that she suffered a concussion while hiking and this is why she doesn't remember anything from the last couple of days. Gradually she begins to figure out that she's in a completely changed timeline.
Something about annihilating the two boxes changed history so that the lab was never built. (There was an explanation for this, but I've forgotten it because, well, it was stupid.) This means everyone who got hurt or killed or knocked out of sync with reality is now fine. But since this is the town she lives in and the town her mom is from, it means everything in her life and her friends group is different.
Coincidentally, she really WAS hiking in the woods around the same time she was running around in the woods near the now-nonexistent lab, and really DID get a concussion (never explained).
She shows up at school to find all the relationships in her friend group different, and her own life different as well. She's taking different classes. Instead of being a cheerleader, she's in choir. She has to rely on other people's cues to figure out the most basic details of her own life.
In the old timeline, her friend who was erased from history was a class clown who fronted for his lousy home life by acting out in class. In this changed version of reality (for incredibly stupid reasons I'll get to in a minute), he has a well-adjusted home life and is a happy and adjusted person, which means he's confident and well-spoken, and also she notices for the FIRST TIME EVER that, oh hey, he sort of looks like her dead WWI love interest, and she's like wow, now that you're not goofing around and making jokes all the time, you're really hot!
No he's nooooot. He's the creepy, unfunny Stepford version of your BFF! Why aren't you bothered by this like any normal person!
But she's not, any more than she's bothered by the fact that, instead of being muckraking journalists traveling around the world righting wrongs and bringing down corrupt regimes, her parents are now studying penguins in Antarctica. Or how her formerly close online friend never got to know her online and is now a stranger, or her black cheerleader friend is now dating the racist white cheerleader who was a complete dick to both of them earlier in the book. If there ever was a case of "your lesbians are pastede on, yay" this scene is definitely it.
It turns out the reason why Class Clown Love Interest is no longer the same person she remembers is because in a ~shocking twist~ he's the great-grandson of her WWI love interest. In the last conversation she had with WWI Love Interest, she gave him some kind of banal advice along the lines of "Don't keep your feelings bottled up inside," and consequently he was a much better father and this meant that her future love interest's dad, the town's creepy and abusive sheriff, is now a really nice guy, so everything is great!
Just to twist the knife a bit, she finds a new cache of letters from WWI Love Interest in which he reveals that despite coming home from the war and marrying someone else, he remained in love with her all his life and hopes she reads these someday. The tone of the letters is very much "I still love you but I'm stuck being married to this woman I don't love instead."
(He still remembers her because the point of change in the timeline was the lab being built in the early '80s, so everything prior to that was unaffected by the reset.)
Meanwhile, remember that whole thing with the town's creepy, racist past and general air of eerie too-white suburbia? And the implication that it was connected to NaziLabs somehow and all these threads would tie together eventually? We never hear about it again.
So yeah, the book's happy ending -- and it clearly is meant to be viewed as a happy ending -- is Areceli stuck for all of time in a changed version of reality in which all her relationships are different, her parents are different, and her friends are different, there is never any explanation for anything that happened beyond "IDK, Nazis? Evil labs?" and the whole town is still creepy conformist white suburbia except now no one seems to notice or care.
This was doubly annoying because I enjoyed the first half so much! It reads like a modern-day version of Stranger Thing with a more diverse cast and more of a focus on social issues.
And then it goes off the rails in the most stupid and trainwrecky way imaginable.
Araceli is the protagonist, born to a Mexican/(white) American couple who are globetrotting journalists. To keep her safe while covering violence in Venezuela, they send her to stay with her grandmother and go to school in a mostly-white upstate New York town. The town is your basic Affably Evil Suburb where everyone insists everything is fine and things are clearly not. It's almost 100% white, for one thing, and the kids at school -- where she makes friend with the handful of other kids of color -- tell her about the town's racist past; it's a former sundown town where the streets literally used to be named after Nazis. There are missing-persons posters everywhere, and inexplicable sounds in her grandmother's house at night. Her new friends tell her that people are going missing in worrying numbers and the authorities appear to be covering it up. There are strange lights in the woods at night, and her grandmother still puts out a dinner plate for her grandfather that she asks Areceli not to ask questions about.
Areceli also finds a mysterious keepsake box in her grandmother's attic, and discovers that it's full of letters written by a WWI soldier to his relatives back home. On a whim, she writes a letter to him and puts it in the box. It vanishes, and soon a new letter reappears, and she finds that she's in an impossible correspondence with a young man who died before she was born, who she finds herself falling in love with.
Oh yeah, and there's a mysterious lab near the town that possibly might be run by Nazis? No one is sure.
I realize there is A LOT going on here (this is all before the 20% mark of the book, too). I expect you might think all these things are going to tie together and be resolved in some kind of satisfying and not mindblowingly stupid way by the end? Yeah, so did I.
I am going to spoil literally everything underneath the cut. This book was fascinating and twisty and fun until about 3/4 of the way through, and then it careened off a mile-high cliff into one of the most infuriating, throw-the-book-at-the-wall endings I've ever read.
So it turns out that NaziLabs is conducting time travel experiments that have caused spacetime to go somewhat haywire around the lab. The floating, appearing-disappearing lights in the woods are spacetime rifts, and anyone who comes in contact with them -- who it turns out included Areceli's grandfather -- are being shunted a few seconds out of sync with everyone else in their timeline, but are still alive. Hence the house being apparently haunted: it's haunted by Arecelli's grandfather, and this is why her grandmother still feeds him. A couple of Areceli's friends get vanished this way. One of them just disappears. The other one vanishes slowly over the course of several days and at the end of that time, when he disappears completely, no one except Areceli remembers him. Unlike the rest of the victims, who merely vanish but are still remembered, he's been erased from the timeline.
This, like everything else, was very creepy at the time it happened, but was never explained.
Nothing is ever explained.
The founder of NaziLabs is the daughter or granddaughter of one of the town's founders, who has been traveling back to WWI to do ... things? It's never really explained? She's some kind of spy I guess? (There was a general implication that she was messing around in WWI to somehow ensure that the Nazis won WWII, but it was never elaborated on, or if it was, I forgot because it was probably total nonsense like almost everything from here on out.)
Anyway, Areceli and her WWI love interest work together to try to figure out what she's up to. This plot thread is dropped as things heat up in the present time, when Areceli finds the scientist who invented NaziLabs' time travel hiding in the woods in a literal hole in the ground (IIRC, this is never actually explained either, at least not in a way that makes sense) and he tells her that the box she's been using to communicate with WWI Love Interest is one of two experimental time travel prototypes (the other one is at the lab). Why it looks exactly like an antique wooden keepsake box, why she never examined it in enough detail to notice the time travel dial controls hiding inside, and most importantly how it ended up in her grandmother's attic of all places, is, of course, never explained.
Bringing the box with them, Areceli and her scientist friend break into the lab to try to fix the timeline and restore the people who were knocked out of sync with everyone else's timeflow. A bunch of guards shoot at them, and Areceli steals a gun and inexplicably turns into an action hero, despite never having used a gun before, and goes through a big action shooting scene and kills a bunch of people without seeming particularly bothered by it. Up to this point she was a pretty normal cheerleader who, while brave in a high-school-student kind of way, was generally freaked out by violence and whose reaction to people with guns was to run away.
This was about the point when I started thinking, "Okay, this just got really stupid."
Unfortunately it had not even begun to get stupid yet.
The scientist guy got shot in the action scene, so she finds the other device but, without him, isn't sure what to do. She throws her box at the other box, and they annihilate each other in a flash of light.
She wakes up in her bed at home.
(I should mention that I was fully expecting her to wake up having been knocked out of sync with time, in a mostly deserted world inhabited only by the other time-ghosts, because that is such a cool and creepy idea that I really thought we were going to see it at some point, and I still can't believe the book never did anything with it.)
Her grandparents -- plural -- come in. They appear to know she was running around in the woods near the lab, but while she's floundering for how to explain, they remind her that she suffered a concussion while hiking and this is why she doesn't remember anything from the last couple of days. Gradually she begins to figure out that she's in a completely changed timeline.
Something about annihilating the two boxes changed history so that the lab was never built. (There was an explanation for this, but I've forgotten it because, well, it was stupid.) This means everyone who got hurt or killed or knocked out of sync with reality is now fine. But since this is the town she lives in and the town her mom is from, it means everything in her life and her friends group is different.
Coincidentally, she really WAS hiking in the woods around the same time she was running around in the woods near the now-nonexistent lab, and really DID get a concussion (never explained).
She shows up at school to find all the relationships in her friend group different, and her own life different as well. She's taking different classes. Instead of being a cheerleader, she's in choir. She has to rely on other people's cues to figure out the most basic details of her own life.
In the old timeline, her friend who was erased from history was a class clown who fronted for his lousy home life by acting out in class. In this changed version of reality (for incredibly stupid reasons I'll get to in a minute), he has a well-adjusted home life and is a happy and adjusted person, which means he's confident and well-spoken, and also she notices for the FIRST TIME EVER that, oh hey, he sort of looks like her dead WWI love interest, and she's like wow, now that you're not goofing around and making jokes all the time, you're really hot!
No he's nooooot. He's the creepy, unfunny Stepford version of your BFF! Why aren't you bothered by this like any normal person!
But she's not, any more than she's bothered by the fact that, instead of being muckraking journalists traveling around the world righting wrongs and bringing down corrupt regimes, her parents are now studying penguins in Antarctica. Or how her formerly close online friend never got to know her online and is now a stranger, or her black cheerleader friend is now dating the racist white cheerleader who was a complete dick to both of them earlier in the book. If there ever was a case of "your lesbians are pastede on, yay" this scene is definitely it.
It turns out the reason why Class Clown Love Interest is no longer the same person she remembers is because in a ~shocking twist~ he's the great-grandson of her WWI love interest. In the last conversation she had with WWI Love Interest, she gave him some kind of banal advice along the lines of "Don't keep your feelings bottled up inside," and consequently he was a much better father and this meant that her future love interest's dad, the town's creepy and abusive sheriff, is now a really nice guy, so everything is great!
Just to twist the knife a bit, she finds a new cache of letters from WWI Love Interest in which he reveals that despite coming home from the war and marrying someone else, he remained in love with her all his life and hopes she reads these someday. The tone of the letters is very much "I still love you but I'm stuck being married to this woman I don't love instead."
(He still remembers her because the point of change in the timeline was the lab being built in the early '80s, so everything prior to that was unaffected by the reset.)
Meanwhile, remember that whole thing with the town's creepy, racist past and general air of eerie too-white suburbia? And the implication that it was connected to NaziLabs somehow and all these threads would tie together eventually? We never hear about it again.
So yeah, the book's happy ending -- and it clearly is meant to be viewed as a happy ending -- is Areceli stuck for all of time in a changed version of reality in which all her relationships are different, her parents are different, and her friends are different, there is never any explanation for anything that happened beyond "IDK, Nazis? Evil labs?" and the whole town is still creepy conformist white suburbia except now no one seems to notice or care.
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That is such a good concept that I desperately wish it existed in a novel that did not take such pains to douse itself in gasoline and strike the match before hurling itself over the cliff onto the reader.
(I should mention that I was fully expecting her to wake up having been knocked out of sync with time, in a mostly deserted world inhabited only by the other time-ghosts, because that is such a cool and creepy idea that I really thought we were going to see it at some point, and I still can't believe the book never did anything with it.)
You should write it. I'd read it.
It turns out the reason why Class Clown Love Interest is no longer the same person she remembers is because in a ~shocking twist~ he's the great-grandson of her WWI love interest.
This is the stupidest possible variation on A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
and the whole town is still creepy conformist white suburbia except now no one seems to notice or care.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.
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Hahaha. This is so tragically accurate. When I was working on this post, I even came across a partial write-up that I had done while reading because, based on the first few chapters, I thought I was going to want to recommend this book widely. Oh sweet summer me.
I always wonder how a narrative goes off the rails to this extent. Sometimes you start a book not knowing where it's going; that's a thing. But you can always go back and edit!
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I'm sorry, I'm still on my first coffee of the day.
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Strangely enough it has a bunch of positive reviews at Amazon and people praising the brilliant ending. I can only say that for me, the protagonist waking up in a reality completely different from her normal one and being stuck there forever is my horror ending.
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This review cracked me up!
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(Also, characters falling for the descendant of their time-displaced love interest is something that seems to show up weirdly often in time-travel stories, and I almost always find it really creepy and off-putting in ways that I can't fully articulate).
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And all the not-explaining-stuff? Very lazy writing!
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okay that was where I REALLY lost it
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How frustrating! That sounds like the natural progression of the premise, and it's so inherently cool. Why not do that instead of the utter WTF that actually happened?
The ending really does sound like a horror ending.
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Anyway, my days of side-eyeing Tor's editorial choices are coming to a middle.
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...damn.
This sounds like it was so promising at the outset! AND THEN.
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The most WTF part for me is definitely her randomly killing people with a gun and apparently being Fine afterwards.
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