Between the Lines: or, Stick to Your Genre, Kids

Oh, Jodi Picoult. There's a reason most authors of adult fiction don't switch to writing novels for children or young adults, and vice versa.

There's also a reason teenagers aren't usually published authors.

Jodi Picoult was once one of my favorite authors, starting roughly around the time My Sister's Keeper became popular. Her books were always well-written, if not a bit formulaic (the standard hundred-page courtroom battle three-quarters of the way through), and well-researched (though her tackling of a Big Issue each time around became, for me, rather tiresome). I'd heard about this book when it came out, and it sounded fun from the synopsis, especially because Picoult had co-written it with her (teenaged) daughter. I didn't expect to flat-out hate it. However, only a few pages in, my skin startled to prickle and crawl. Trying to suppress the feeling, I put the book aside until the next morning. Yet still, the more I read, the more my skin crawled – crawled until it roiled with loathing.

Here's the summary I snagged off Barnes & Noble:

What happens when happily ever after…isn’t? 

Delilah is a bit of a loner who prefers spending her time in the school library with her head in a book—one book in particular. Between the Lines may be a fairy tale, but it feels real. Prince Oliver is brave, adventurous, and loving. He really speaks to Delilah. 

And then one day Oliver actually speaks to her. Turns out, Oliver is more than a one-dimensional storybook prince. He’s a restless teen who feels trapped by his literary existence and hates that his entire life is predetermined. He’s sure there’s more for him out there in the real world, and Delilah might just be his key to freedom. 

Delilah and Oliver work together to attempt to get Oliver out of his book, a challenging task that forces them to examine their perceptions of fate, the world, and their places in it. And as their attraction to each other grows along the way, a romance blossoms that is anything but a fairy tale.

I'm going to try not being scathing. We'll see how that goes. Spoilers ahead. 

I have a lot of issues with this book, which is probably apparent, because I've been stirred up into not only sticky-noting their occurrences in my library book, but actually bothering to write about them. I don't know whether to attribute these problems to Picoult's inexperience as a YA writer, or to her daughter's inexperience as an actual author. (Because teenagers are never good writers. They grow up to become good writers, to become authors. The literary world generally seems to consider a thirty-five-year-old author a miraculously gifted infant, and there's a reason for that.) 

One of the book's most obvious issues is with the main two characters, Delilah and Oliver, whom their creators ironically forgot to turn into people instead of stick figures standing in for the sake of the plot. Each has his and her own distinct personality, of course, but it's shallow and undeveloped – and not to mention, nothing we haven't seen before. Our hero and heroine are totally unlike their shallow, unfulfilled peers – Special Snowflakes, if you will, which feature in many a popular and amateurishly written YA series. Observe our heroine's opening description of herself:

I’m weird.  

Everyone says so. I suppose it’s because while other fifteen-year-olds are talking about the best lip gloss and which movie star is hotter, I would rather be curled up with a book. Seriously – have you been to a high school lately? Why would anyone sane want to interact with Cro-Magnon hockey players, or run the gauntlet of mean girls who lounge against the lockers like the fashion police, passing judgment on my faded high-top sneakers and thrift-store sweaters? No thanks; I’d much rather pretend I’m somewhere else, and any time I open the pages of a book, that happens. (27)

What's this? Oh, yes. Delilah is not like other girls. She's an outcast and bookworm who shops at thrift stores and finds the entirety of the high school experience barbaric. What an original child. What an original concept.

It's honestly just fine to have characters like this... if you flesh them out beyond this initial description. Delilah is Not Like Other Girls. The end. 

Her love interest, Oliver, is no better:

“I’m not like most characters, I guess,” I say slowly. “Everyone else in here seems to be happy having their lives already planned out for them, and doing what they’re told to do. But I’ve never really fit in. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be someone... different.” (53)

He, too, is a nonconformist, struggling against society's expectations. He doesn't want to be a hero. He just wants to have his own life. Which, all right, is a little bit less annoying when you consider the fact that he's forced to act out the plot line of the fairytale into which he's written every day. But still. I had to laugh at the variation on the "not like other girls" line. 

Neither of these characters' worries and fears are at all unique, either:

I told Oliver things I’ve never been brave enough to tell anyone else: how I worry about my mom; how I panic when someone asks me what I want to be when I grow up; how I secretly wonder what it would be like, for an hour, to be popular. In return, Oliver confided his biggest fear: that he will pass through his lifetime – whatever that may be – without making a difference in the world. That he will be ordinary, instead of extraordinary. (148-9)

Yes, most, if not all, teenagers experience these feelings, or some variation thereupon. But with this paragraph, and in particular, Delilah's introduction, it feels like Picoult/van Leer are hitting on perceived genre standards. They are trying to identify with their audience, and thus, have resorted to the cookie cutters left behind by their forebears. Neither Delilah nor Oliver possess any sort of unique or even interesting qualities, because the plot doesn't require them to. And that's a mistake. 

Almost laughable are the other high school/teenager cliches Picoult and van Leer employ: 

• The misunderstood goth/punk best friend, complete with "pink Mohawk" and "safety pins" in her ears, who loves "B-movie horror films" and "refers to the popular girls in our school as Pod People" (28). 
• The cute and vegan lab partner, Zach, who "insists on feeding tofu crumbles to the class Venus flytrap... will save the whales before he turns twenty-one" (33), and takes a "conscientious objector position" on the class's frog dissection day (149).
• The "geeks" in the cafeteria, who are "completely enraptured by their matrices and graphing calculators" and pay no attention to the two obviously hot girls who sit in their vicinity every day (65). 

You've already heard about the popular people. 

Honestly. I'm not really sure what happened here, because I know Picoult is perfectly capable of writing teenagers well. Multilayered, colorful, individual teenagers, who carry the same burdens and fears of teenagers everywhere, but in a manner nuanced by their character.

My only explanation for Picoult's contribution is that she's dumbed down her writing style for her intended audience. Everything gets told, not shown, and is rife with the tired archetypes of the genre. In fact, there is little to no deeper meaning found between those titular lines. Everything left for readers to glean is soon spelled out, as if the target audience is not intelligent enough to interpret anything beyond the hackneyed metaphor of a butterfly captured inside a glass jar (126). 

I felt perhaps a twinge of hope when Delilah races to the author's house in the climax of the story, where the latter reveals that she wrote Between the Lines to help her son Edgar through his father's death ten years before; Oliver is, after all, Edgar's fairytale twin, who becomes brave and heroic despite losing his father to a dragon as a baby. But no, my hope died, because the conclusion of the story is more than a bit troubling: Edgar figures out a way for he and Oliver to switch places. Oliver can masquerade around as Jessamyn's son so that he can have a place to be, even though he's a completely different person. As if his mother wouldn't notice. 

But that's all okay, because she "always wanted a son like [Oliver]" instead of one like Edgar (342). I'm sure Jessamyn would be happy for the upgrade from the baby boy she raised and loved unconditionally to the idealized stranger she painted and wrote about during the saddest era of her life. It's not like she quit being an author because she realized she wanted to focus on being a mother to her imperfect child, or anything. You know, her one, specific child. I'm sure she'd be happy to know that said chose to literally escape into a book in order to avoid his problems. As an author, she'd love the situation to be romanticized, and not delve at all into any consequences whatsoever for any of the parties involved.

Sorry. Didn't I say I'd try not to be scathing? 

Overall, I think the plot had potential. I really do. But with the flat characters and cliches, the inconsistency of the world building (Oliver knows about fire extinguishers (82), megaphones (82), helicopters (46), and orthodontia (95), despite living in a medieval-inspired fantasy world, yet has no idea what a radio (84) or a sandwich (248) are), the poor writing quality, and the flippancy of the conclusion, this book fell flatter for me than if I'd kicked it down the stairs myself. And believe me, I wanted to.