In the Skin of a Monster by Kathryn Barker Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“We've all got good in us and bad in us, and miles of murky greyness. I suppose the difference is what you choose to focus on.”- In the Skin of a Monster, Kathryn Barker

Three years ago, Alice's identical twin sister took a gun to school and killed seven innocent kids; now Alice wears the same face as a monster. She's struggling with her identity, and with life in the small Australian town where everyone was touched by the tragedy. Just as Alice thinks things can't get much worse, she encounters her sister on a deserted highway. But all is not what it seems, and Alice soon discovers that she has stepped into a different reality, a dream world, where she's trapped with the nightmares of everyone in the community. Here Alice is forced to confront the true impact of everything that happened the day her twin sister took a gun to school ... and to reveal her own secret to the boy who hates her most.

Remember how I said Aussies were the rulers of contemporaries? The reason I specified contemporaries was because I haven't really read anything else by them. Sure, I attempted one Justine Larbalestier mystery, but didn't find it too great. But if I was looking to expand my knowledge of Australian books to include fantasy, I think I began with the wrong book.

So, has anyone read the Skinjacker trilogy? Neal Shusterman's middle grade into YA trilogy? I have. I don't know if Kathryn Barker has either- it's a bit more obscure than his other YA serieses, like Unwind or Scythe- but this book strongly reminded me of that trilogy. 

I mean, on the surface they don't have much in common. The Skinjacker trilogy is about a land where dead kids get stuck when they are knocked off course on their way to the next world. This book is about a nightmarish dream world in the Australian Outback. But once you get past that, there's a ton of similarities. Like the fact that in both books, the main "enemy" is a girl in a school dress, how the items in both worlds get there, the idea of monsters who kill the kids caught in the world, the way the kids forget their names and old lives and so on. Hell, even Lux reminded me of Mikey McGill. So already, I'm proving Melina Marchetta wrong by saying that this book isn't nearly as original as it appears at first glance. But I liked the Skinjacker trilogy, not nearly as much as Unwind but you know, I still had fun reading it. So I ventured forth into In the Skin of a Monster, hoping it'd be another indie hit for me.

I know the summary makes a big deal about the whole dreamscape thing, but I thought it would be metaphorical and clearly not a real thing, just a journey for Alice to go on to discover her grief. Nope, I think the dreamscape is supposed to be a real thing. Ugh. In this case, it would have been better if the dreamscape was an imagined thing, because then the book's messages would have hit a lot harder, but then again, we couldn't have had Lux and Alice fall in love! Wonder what their ship name is- Luxice? Alux? (oo, I like that one!) In all seriousness, Lux is like a leftover from paranormal romance novels circa 2010, back when Lauren Kate's Fallen and Becca FitzPatrick's Hush, Hush were all the rage. 

Also, the actual messages were, frankly, nothing I haven't read in the many school shooting books I've read before. The whole no one's all good or all bad, can you mourn someone who did such a horrible act, etc, is all well-worn territory, making what could have been an utterly unique book (though one I probably still wouldn't have been that fond of, to be honest) into just another school shooter novel. 

Although, I do wonder how much more effective the book would have been if it had been a straight up contemporary. Sure, I get that the whole selling point is the dreamscape, but the parts I was more interested in was the contemporary stuff, about Alice and her sister and their past and the shooting. In a lot of ways, I think Barker wanted to have her cake and eat it too, so to speak. She wanted both the contemporary school shooting novel and the paranormal desert dreamscape book. In the end, they felt muddled, and I left the book unsure of the point of it all. She tried to explore the reasons for the sister to shoot up the school, but they felt unrealistic and like Barker was trying too hard to make the sister endearing. Too much about the dream world, I think, and even then I wasn't that clear on the whole "dream world" thing. Not very good world building, in my opinion.

This all being said, I admit Barker's writing style is very nice. Great descriptions, interesting original ideas, just lacking on the execution. 

It's funny that, in my opinion, a big selling point is the originality of the story. Simply because once you get past the dreamscape idea, there's very little actually original about it. The dreamscape reminds me of the Skinjacker trilogy. The school shooting reminds me of a million other school shooting books. The romance reminds me of paranormal romance novels back when they were the shit. In the end, I don't think I'd recommend this other a million other books with the same basic idea but are done much more skillfully than In the Skin of a Monster.

5 out of 10