Initially, I decided to pick up Where You Belong by Pat Dilloway because he said it was the very best of his books. He said he was inspired and that he would never write anything better than this novel. I think that's what he still says about it. I figured that sounded like a good place to start. I mean, if an author says about one of his books that it's the best thing he's capable of writing, you may as well start with that, right? Yeah, that's what I thought, too.
It didn't take me very long to realize that if this wis the best that Dilloway has to offer, then I won't be reading any of his books.
First, it's written in first person. (I haven't been shy about how I feel about first person. But it's worse, because it's written in first person omniscient and, well, that's just not a thing. I mean, unless your protagonist is God (or, maybe, Charles Xavier), omniscient and first person do not go together. That's the whole reason for writing in first person, to have a limited view of what's going on. A view limited to only what the protagonist knows and observes. That's why first person works so well in detective fiction, because the whole point of that is the protagonist trying to work out what he doesn't know from his rather limited perspective. This issue of allowing the first person protagonist to know too much is very pervasive in first person stories, but I'd never seen full-on first person omniscient before. Yes, it set me against the book right from the start, because, again, first person omniscient is not a thing.
[Note: Dilloway has spoken on his blog and various other places that the book was originally written in third person and that he later went back and converted it. I think he must have done this through a simple replacement of pronouns, because he didn't do anything to adjust the viewpoint. I'm saying this based on my experience with my middle school students. There have been many times when I have given writing assignments to write from a particular perspective. It is not infrequent that I will get stories that were originally written from a different perspective so the student just went in and changed the pronouns. That's not enough when making a perspective shift and, anytime I have asked, for instance, "Did you originally write this in first person," the answer has always been "yes."
So that would explain the omniscience problem. He originally wrote it in third person omniscient but didn't narrow the viewpoint to first person when he converted it to a first person story. I'm just going to call it what it is: a middle school mistake.]
The next issue with the book is that it shifts back and forth from past to present tense, but not in a way that makes sense. For instance, it would make sense if part of the story was being told "now" and part of the story was being told "then." However, what we have are clearly places that are "then" that are being told in past tense, followed by a section that is still "then" but now in present tense, followed by a section that is still "then" but back in past tense. These are chronological events, so the shift in tense didn't work for me.
[Note: This is a thing I am extremely sensitive to, because it's an issue my middle schoolers struggle with a lot. The most common reason I hand a story back to a student is because of an issue with tense shifts. My comment is generally, "Pick one, past or present, and stick to it."]
Then there's the issue of the voice, and this, also, is probably related to the shift the author made from third to first person. When you write in third person, the voice can be whatever you want it to be, because it's the narrator's voice, not the character's. When you write in first person, though, the voice needs to be the character's voice and, thus, reflective of the character. The protagonist starts out at age three or four, but the voice is definitely that of an adult. That would be okay if it was clear that it was an adult reflecting back on his childhood, but the feel of the story is that it's being told by the kid, especially since some of it is in present tense, but not in a kid's voice. Now, I get that writing from a child's perspective can be difficult but, if you can't do it, don't choose to do it.
I put the book down. I decided it wasn't worth the effort to wade through it when there was no indication that it would get any better. Sure, the kid grows up to fit the voice, so to speak, but it was already messed up for me by that point, and none of the other problems were going to work themselves out. Generally, I don't review books I don't finish, but it has been a long time since I quit reading a book because it wasn't worth the torture to do it (I have slogged through a lot of really bad books in the last few years), so I thought, this time, it was worth noting for the mere fact that I did decide I couldn't finish it.