lauredhel

I'm afraid I was ultimately quite disappointed in this book. It's a fantastic premise, which should be my crack: teenager from the rez, Fred Oday, becomes the only girl (and the only Indian (the terminology used in the book)) on the high school golf team. Surrounded by racist country club bullies, she has to try to make her way in the team, the school, and the world. Unfortunately, to me both Fred and Ryan, her romantic foil, came across as fairly flat characters. The alternating-point-of-view format seems to be rather a trend in YA fiction recently, and it really takes differentiated voices and a deft hand to pull it off; in my opinion, Fichera doesn't. I didn't feel the chemistry between these characters, and there really didn't seem enough to keep the romance going in the fact of Ryan's immense jerkitude. His apologies and reformation fall rather flat, and his very belated stance against his friend Seth, the villain of the piece, seems far too little too late. He just isn't a sympathetic character. Continuing to make apologies for a bloke who keeps calling Fred "Pocahontas" and chases her around the desert in a monster truck? Really?The cardboard-cutout Mean Girls were straight out of an 80s movie. There were no fleshed-out female characters apart from the lead - just the Mean Girls and Fred's (again, stereotypical) drunk mother. Fred's heritage could have been a fascinating storyline, but it was thoroughly under-explored, and, I suspect, under-researched. Most of what we get of the rez is poverty, booze, and a Magical Indian called "George Trueblood", who brings Pueblo and Cherokee (why Cherokee and Pueblo? We're not told) blessings to Fred's golf tournaments and walks around offering mysterious remarks.By the time we reached the rather convenient and tidy climax and resolution, I was just about on stereotype overload, and well and truly ready for the story to end. To make matters worse, my pet peeve "lame" was peppered throughout the text, regularly throwing me out of the story. This book barely made a two-star "meh" rating for me. Would I pick up another of Fichera's books? I might, if it was well-reviewed by reviewers I trust. Out of the blue, though, not at this point.