If Willie Upton were a real woman, I would kick her ass. I considered drop-kicking this book across the room, but I have too much respect for literature. However, I define "literature" quite loosely in this case.

I had all sorts of issues with this book, but my primary beef is with Willie Upton, a Stanford archeology PhD candidate and the main character. She goes away to Alaska with her professor and a group of Harvard guys to search for the oldest human on the continent. She has an affair with her dorky professor and right as they make their discovery, the professor's wife shows up. Willie tries to run her over with an airplane and ends the afternoon by running home to her mother, thinking she is pregnant. Okay, I remember the true story of the NASA astronaut that drove cross country in a diaper, to kill her fling's wife or girlfriend, but still, how realistic is it for an intelligent woman with everything going for her to lose her mind and f-up her life because she is boning the a-hole professor? Come on! Willie is the ONLY woman to go on this excursion, the only one invited EVER and she screws the professor and runs home to her mother, knocked up and crying? What a shameful representation of a weak woman in hysterics. Excuse me while I wipe this bustle off my ass!

Then, to make matters worse, she doesn't take a pregnancy test or see a doctor (remember we are talking about a PhD at Stanford here) and can't decide if she is going to keep her baby or not. I was getting really angry at this part, because I thought our author, Lauren Groff, was about to make a statement about abortion. Given that she had already made her main character into a stereotypical raging hormone, I wasn't liking the statement I suspected she was about to make. However, she wimped out of it altogether and instead gave her pseudocyesis, better known as "false pregnancy." So our Stanford PhD basically made the whole thing up. Uhm sorry Lauren, but next time you write a book call me and I will lend you my DSMIV. Your girl Willie doesn't fit the profile for someone that would happen to. Plus, it made me, as a reader, hate Willie even more.

Of course, this book had more to it than Willie being a complete disgrace to her gender, but a lot of that didn't make sense either. I often wondered why characters were introduced and why the hell they had certain shit going on with them. What does Lupus have to do with anything, for example? I understand a writer uses people she knows and her own experience to write pretty much everything and I suspect that's what happened, but Ms. Lauren needed to drop some baggage on this one.

I give it two stars, because at least the monster was sorta cool... sorta.