Signs Point to Yes
Sandy Hall
By trying frantically to avoid going to work with her mother all summer, Jane finds herself looking after the three kid sisters of her mortal enemy’s best friend – Tao. Who happens to have some issues of his own, but it’ll all be sorted by summer’s end. Won’t it?
I kept putting off reading this novel for a very long time. The colour of the cover didn’t speak to me, the blurb put me right off… and it the end, it was 3 stars. It passed GO, but it certainly wasn’t any sort of master piece.
What is which that freaking Magic 8 ball? She doesn’t even need it! Honestly, even though it was obviously included in order to provide a title for the novel, it wasn’t really adding anything.
This was too light. Compared to all the other wonderful YA fiction I have been reading lately that tend to explore deeper issues than just cute ol’ love, this one is nothing special. It’s ticking boxes of being modern (gay character? working mom? check. check.) yet not giving anything new or exciting to the reader.
I can see a target audience for this – teenage girls who want a nice simple romance with not too much thinking required. That sounds so uncharitable of me doesn’t it? There is attempts to add depth and variety – Ravi hating Jane, Jane’s sister Margo, Jane’s college decisions – but overall it’s just about Jane and Teo’s cute little crush on each other.
I’d rather re-read Girls Love Travis Walker – also a light fiction romance but so much better written and with characters that make me want to come back for more. 3 stars from me.
Marin! You great idiot. What were you thinking? You caused alllllllll of those issues. And then you wonder why people are mad. I guess you do sort of redeem yourself.
There’s not much I can really say here, it is such a tiny little volume. I snaffled it up in around a half-hour. The action is fast-moving, and tries to keep your attention that way. I did drift off at points, but I think that’s just me.
This novel had some fantastic laugh out loud parts that I couldn’t help sharing with my partner. And then she laughed as well. I really enjoyed it for those moments, and the language twists and the sheer absurdity of the fights that take place.
Unbelievable! The number of hidden twists in this is epic, and I have no idea how the author kept them straight. It’s an interesting and relevant novel to these days – both in hiding your tracks and tracking others.
There are some interesting things going on in this novel. If you wait too long after reading something, you lose those things. It’s not that I’ve waited too long, its that I’ve read about 5 books in the mean time. Oops?
Most of us want to hope that we won’t fall for a Con. Who would get into a pyramid scheme? Hell, I was almost pulled into one as a kid, but it didn’t work in Australia because we don’t have $1 notes to post. The deal was that you post $1 to each person on the list, then you add your name to the bottom of the list. Then the more people you send it to, the more you make back. Now it costs a $1 to send the damn letter, so you wouldn’t even break even!
Ah, the ending. It tidied things up nicely. Perhaps too nicely. Worlds never end like that. So it could be unexpected, except the minute a couple of people do their ‘expose’ thing, then it becomes obvious what is happening around that, and it proves to be inevitable. It was already so unpredictable, in its own way it was predictable.
All the characters feel one-dimensional, which is ironic, given that pretty much only 2D things can slip through the current crack used by Elliot and Madeline. I’m sure they could all pass through too!
This novel started so slowly and got so confusing at times that I couldn’t work out what was going on. I struggled to get into it, and found myself easily distracted. Near the end, I was finally hit with a shock of ‘wow’, but it only lasted a couple of pages.