200 pages of Happily Ever After

¿Dónde estaba Atlantis? He took a level in juggling.

200 pages of Happily Ever After

Dear Reader,

Have you ever felt like reading a book where everything goes right, the struggle is over, all the fights already won, and the teenage hero gets everything sorted out at first attempt? Me, neither.

B. A. Bellec skipped most of the novel and wrote happily ever after straight from the second chapter. His nameless teenage protagonist talks to a consultant, heeds his advice and gets his life sorted out. Never does he cling to bad habits, make excuses or put off decisions like people do in real life. Someone's such a disciplined, organized, honest, motivated person already that I wonder why he needs a consultant at all. He makes friends quickly. Not superficial friends, either, but genuine friendships. He claims to have anxiety and panic attacks, but we never see that happen. Of course he's not sure what to say when he meets a pretty girl, but that happens to everybody. That's not clinical anxiety, it's being seventeen.

Late in the book, the author remembers that Someone must fail at something at least once, so he has him fail to get into a fight with a whole football team at once. That's not anxiety, it's having half a brain.

Out of nowhere, a plot twist. It turns out that not everything was perfect after all. Someone does have mental health problems, or so the author claims. But like everything else, the boy gets them sorted out in two pages with jogging, meditation and stable relationships. Nevermind that it doesn't work that way. Nevermind that with certain conditions, meditation makes things worse. Nevermind the lifelong medication, social stigma and years of fruitless therapy that people with severe schizophrenia face in real life.

B. A.Bellec didn't do his research. He writes about mental health like it's obesity: Everything will be all right if you just work out and eat healthy. He's doing patients with severe mental health problems a disservice. Or he would be, if the book were any good. Luckily, he didn't take the time to write it well. He self-published a rough draft. Grammar and spelling are perfect, but he commits all sorts of beginners' errors: telling what should be shown, stating the obvious three times over, adverbs galore. He fails to hook the reader or build any tension. He writes most of the book in the present tense, but switches into past tense in random paragraphs. He only finds something like a storytelling voice after the first hundred pages. Few readers will follow him that far.

The book begins with a foreword by one Sheila Harris, editor, who gushes about how much Someone's Story spoke to her. Google shows me three women with this name and profession. One is a freelancing proofreader and editor. Can't be her; a proofreader wouldn't have let Mr. Bellec publish his book quite that raw. It must have been a different Sheila Harris, either the IT consultant or the newspaper editor. Or someone who isn't on the first page of Google's search results. Anyone's guess.

Yours sincerely
Christina Widmann de Fran