Damage Done. Rating: Execrable.

"I haven't been entirely honest."

Ooooooookay, reader. It's that time. We've been avoiding it, but it's here.

It's time for us to talk about Gone Girl.

I loved Gone Girl. You should not be surprised by this. I loved the unreliable narration, and the twisty plot, and how brilliant Amy was. I loved that all the characters were trying their best, and she still outsmarted them all. I loved that we as readers saw her as she wanted to be seen - our only view of her was from her diary, until the massive narrative turn; and then we discovered that we, too, had been duped. I loved the satirical undertones. I loved it. No holds barred, full-stop, loved it.

So many people and publishers have said to me, "if you loved Gone Girl, you'll love..." - and every time they do it, I just want to shove them off the roof of a burning building. Because, come on. We know better. None of these books are the next Gone Girl, and it's insulting to dark female writers to compare all of them to Gillian Flynn. Not because it's an insulting comparison in and of itself - Flynn is brilliant, hello - but because there's allowed to be more than one dark authoress out there.

I picked up Damage Done on the recommendation of a reader who DM'ed me on twitter saying "Did you like Gone Girl? Because this writer is the next Gillian Flynn..." My expectations were spectacularly low.

And yet.

Damage Done by the not-Gillian-Flynn-so-stop-saying-it-please Amanda Panitch...

...still managed to let me down. I almost couldn't stick it out. But I did! For you, and you alone, readers. Because I do a lot of "Magnificent" and "Divine" ratings, and I owe it to you to warn you away from the bad stuff.

Let's dive right on in.

Julia Vann (aka Lucy Black, but to avoid confusion, we'll just stick with Julia) is trying to start over after her twin brother shot and killed eleven people. She has some dark secrets about her brother, and about the shooting, and she's doing her damndest to keep them all tamped down. Her first-person narration is interspersed with diary entries written by her brother's former therapist (supposedly 'case logs,' but I know a diary entry when I see one). As she begins to develop a romance with The Cutest Guy at School, her past starts threatening her new life.

The thing that bothered me most about this book is a Huge Spoiler, so I'm going to give you the little problems up here and the big ones down there. Feel free to skip ahead if you want to know the worst of it. Until then:

Characterization in this one is weak at best. Mom's guiding characteristic, for example, is that she cleans a lot. Because she's upset, because her son shot and killed a bunch of people. That's all we really get about her. Secondary characters are not in any way fleshed out; frankly, neither are primary ones.

The romance (of course there's a romance, silly, it's YA) is almost comically unrealistic. Cutest Guy at School shoves his way into Julia's life with no discernible motivation, and just like that, he's pushing his way into her house and cooking her dinner. The relationship is heavily laden with your standard YA-romance aggressive chivalry: she says 'don't do that,' and he does it anyway, but because he's doing nice things for her it's supposed to be romantic.

Now, here is one place where I'll give Panitch a lot of credit - she wrote this boy's actions beautifully. Julia describes him as desperate for a damsel-in-distress, and deftly manipulates him using that one little trait. We've all known men like this - men who are dying to rescue someone - and Cutest Guy at School is one of them. He helps her even when she doesn't need - or want - help. She insists that she's fine with eating a sandwich; he insists that he must make her eggs.

I've been on dates with men like this. They refuse to let me carry my own purse, and push me to the inside of the sidewalk, and put their arm around me as if I can't stand up without their support. I don't need to wear a jacket, but they drape theirs over my shoulders anyway. They're always telling me to eat more. Their intentions are sweet, and they can be relied upon as getaway drivers in a pinch, but they can also be incredibly irritating and controlling. Panitch's portrayal of that nuance (you're useful, but also, could you just stop it and let me walk on my own strength) is well-done.

The sloppy execution on the romance - CGaS's chivalry aside - is mirrored by the rest of the book. Every character that isn't Julia is written as cartoonishly stupid. The police are incompetent; Julia's friends (such as they are) are putty in her hands. The therapist who treated her brother is a marionette with no sense of self-preservation. No character has clear motives for their actions; they are narrative devices, moving through Julia's life only to give her a story to tell.

Now, for Spoilers.

Here's the thing with an unreliable past-tense first-person narrator: You can't have them just come back at the end of the book and say "whoops, I lied!" It doesn't make any sense. The entire conceit with a past-tense first-person narrator is that they are telling you their story after the fact. They've given you their entire story, all at once, and handed it to you, and walked away. Maybe it didn't happen as they say it happened; but they're unreliable because they don't know that's the case, or they don't realize it until the very end (à la The Sixth Sense).

Well, here's the big twist ending: Julia is a sociopath who orchestrated the shooting so that nobody would know she was schtupping her brother. At the end of the book, Julia says "I haven't been entirely honest." She has, for some reason, lied to the reader for the previous 267-odd pages. All the times she's told the reader "I don't remember what happened that day" in her narrative - all lies, she says. "I remember everything."

This ending is not surprising, reader. The entire book sets up a pretty obvious "Julia was the killer all along" arc. I was not shocked to read that she manipulated her brother into shooting her classmates. Hell, I wasn't even surprised by the incest. I was so dismayed, though, that the author erased her entire story with that one sentence: "I haven't been entirely honest."

As soon as I saw that sentence, I had to put the book down and go for a run through the woods where I was hiding, just to burn through some of my pissed-off. She may as well have written "...and then I woke up." What followed the admission of dishonesty was a few chapters of revision: here's what really happened all that time!

Why, then, did I read the entire rest of the book? Why did I stick through the frustratingly weak characters and the underdeveloped plot?

Reader, you know how I feel about books that waste my time, and this was one of them. This structure - [most of the book] [lol nevermind] [here's the real story] - did not leave me feeling pleasantly duped the way that Gone Girl did. I can't quite describe the level of frustration that "I haven't been entirely honest" left me with, but I will tell you this: Somewhere in the woods of West Virginia, there is a tree that got kicked a lot harder than it deserved.

Rating: Execrable. 

Possible ratings: Magnificent, Divine, Satisfactory, Tiresome, Lamentable, Execrable. This is a blog about words, what rating system did you expect?