A few motnhs ago on twitter, I posted my very first #brynnreads thread, where I guided my small twitter following through a truly terrible YA Fantasy book I’d picked up. Until this post, the book and the author were anonymous because I don’t know, I felt mean. But it’s become such a problematic point of discussion that there’s no point in censoring it anymore, and my distress has grown too vast for short bites of 280 characters. It’s time to look at how I got here.

Earlier this year, toward the end of march, I attended the AWP convention in Portland, Oregon. To keep it short, I had a great time. To get to the point, of this particular series of posts, a writerly convention in Portland would’ve been pointless without a trip to Powell’s City of Books.

First of all, before I continue, can I just say that accessible public transportation is fucking wild? I came home to a town with buses that only serve the campus and places like Walmart, so the world felt very different. We also kept passing a food truck depot and a lot of us developed a weird attraction to a falafel truck owner who was just doing his job.

Anyway.

I bought a bunch of books, I left with something both times we went. I left with good things (I finished My Best Friend’s Exorcism before my three-hour plane ride home was over), I left with things that are probably good that I haven’t read, and I left with—

Okay, I should explain.

On my first real date with my girlfriend, she learned that I cannot be trusted in used bookstores. I picked up a Christmas-themed harlequin novel and tried to get it—except I didn’t have cash, so I kind older lady mystifyingly said “I’ll get it” and so now I had a free Christmas-themed harlequin novel and Jingle Spells is still in this apartment. Somewhere. Anyway, said girlfriend is still with me, so it’s probably fine.

So as you can guess, it was a risk even letting me near Powell’s. I gravitated toward the terrible, craved camp, I so relished in badness and mediocrity it was almost sickening, and I still don’t why. Fascination? A salve for impostor syndrome? I can’t explain it. All of my terrible short stories and fanfiction are on a dead Gateway laptop from 2006 that’s languishing somewhere in my parents’ house. It hasn’t seen the light of day. Quizilla is dead. But there are some people who can’t undo the horror they’ve unleashed, and if you put your worst stuff out there, I’m going to see it and I love every second of it.

When I picked this book up, the cover art told me something about it was different from everything else I had. Then I turned it over and saw it was only three dollars. Then I looked inside and–

Seeing as I had just picked it up, relatively undamaged, for three dollars and from an entity I doubt knew who Mia was, I feel like the reception was mixed.

I had to have this book.

But I had to play it off like I was an adult of sound decision-making mind, so at least one conversation regarding it had to take place.

Me: hey, should I buy this?

My Girlfriend, who didn’t skip a beat: probably not but I feel like you’re going to.

#RelationshipGoals

So after building up a nice buffer of books I thought would be good—and a lot were—I checked out. Now I owned this thing. That’s the story.

What’s it about? Well, I’m going to first give out what was provided on the back of the book:

“A sickly mom. A crummy travel trailer. High school bullies and snarky drama queens. Bad guys with charming smiles. Allie has problems. And then there’s that whole thing about fulfilling a magical prophecy and saving the world from evil.

Welcome to the funny, sad, sometimes scary world of fifteen-year-old Allie Emerson, who’s struggling to keep her act together (not to mention her mom’s) in the world of Peacock Flats, Washington. A zap from an electrical fence sets off Allie’s weird psychic powers. The next thing she knows she’s being visited by a hippy-dippy guardian angel, and then her mysterious neighbor, the town “witch,” gives her an incredible moonstone pendant that has powers only a Star Seeker is meant to command. “Who, me?” is Allie’s first reaction. But as sinister events begin to unfold, Allie realizes she’s got a destiny far bigger than she ever imagined.

If she can just survive everyday life, in the meantime.”

Can you see why I bought this? I love this stuff. I fuck with psychics, I fuck with witches, I’m into all of this stuff and am currently writing something with a lot of these tropes in it. I’m down. Yes, I’ll try to have fun and play in this space. I now have regrets.

The back summary actually follows the book pretty closely, though it’s not the electric fence that triggers Allie’s powers so much as it was the fall that made her land on “the part of her head where her third eye is located,” and the hippy-dippy guardian angel doesn’t show up as often as you’d think, and she doesn’t really do much to help Allie. Allie’s mom is basically supposed to be terrible and faking her chronic pain disorder, and their relationship is such that Allie calls her by her first name which, depending on the author’s mood, is either Fay or Faye.

Yeah, we’ll get to that.

That list of character tropes at the very beginning of the summary is a good introduction into exactly how many characters are introduced and forgotten about throughout the novel, and she finally settles on a love interest about halfway through the book. Her neighbor, her guide through all of this and not a witch but a “romany gypsy” (YUP), spends a lot of the novel in a coma, with her mean adopted daughter may or may not be working with the Big Bad Guy in A Suit. He wants the moonstone because reasons. He does some weird shit because he’s a Trimark and they are bad. They’re all bad. Apparently, the Trimarks thrive so intensely off chaos and suffering that they were present “at the crucifixion of Christ, the Nazi death camps, the Kennedy assassination, [and] Hurricane Katrina.”

We’ll get to that as well.

First, though, we’re going to have to learn more about our key players, and the other 8000 characters named in here. Right now, I am weary.

Join me in Part Two: There’s So Many Characters, It’s Basically Just the Mii Channel