Book review: 'Abandon'

Abandon
Meg Cabot
Macmillan
292 pages
Rs299

I’ve started feeling sorry for living, breathing teenage boys. If you go by recent bestsellers in Young Adult fiction, teenage girls are mainly interested in dead teenage boys: dangerously sexy vampires, zombies, ghosts et cetera.

So who can blame Meg Cabot for choosing a death deity as the hero of her latest novel?

Abandon is a contemporary twist on the Hades-Persephone story. If you’ve forgotten your Greek mythology, here’s a brief refresher: Hades, God of the Underworld, abducts Persephone and drags her to his dark world. Her mother eventually rescues her, but Persephone has to spend a few months every year in the underworld (of course, Persephone does fall in love with Hades later). And so Cabot gives us Pierce, a young girl who drowns and has a near death experience.

While waiting for her ferry ride to the underworld, she meets John Hayden (Hades, get it?). John sweeps her off to his chambers, gives her a spooky diamond necklace, and offers her hot tea which she flings at his face in an attempt to escape. She succeeds because the defibrillators working on her body in the real world do their job. Thereafter, Pierce is a changed person with attitude problems and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). John makes an appearance whenever Pierce is in trouble — and that just makes matters worse. She’s expelled from her posh school, and her now divorced mother whisks her off to Isla Huesos (Island of Bones). She spends most of her time lurking around the cemetery after dark, and of course, she meets John again and again — his tomb is there! The villains of the piece are the Furies who go all out to punish John and everything that he loves.

Fans of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series may find this book disappointing. Edward (the vampire hero) was sexier, cooler and more dangerous than John Hayden — I know grandmothers who fell passionately in lust with him. The sexual tension between Pierce and John is not as electric as it was between Bella and Edward. Also, Cabot’s plot is sloppily executed and riddled with holes and has just a fraction of the dark brooding atmosphere that pervades the Twilight series. Most annoying of all, Cabot believes that her readers have got the same problem as her heroine (ADHD) — she repeats things so often, you want to scream.

What I enjoyed, though, was Cabot’s wit and her attempt at bringing mythological characters to life. Pierce’s rich, powerful and irresponsible father has shades of Zeus, and her environment-friendly mother is a modern Demeter. It would be interesting to see how John finally succeeds in abducting Pierce and keeping her with him in the underworld — fortunately, work is in progress on two more books, so perhaps I’ll have kinder things to say when the trilogy is done.