Missing by Kelley Armstrong Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“Here I am, children. Right over here. Step off that safe, moonlit path and come meet me. You aren't afraid, are you?”- Missing, Kelley Armstrong

The only thing Winter Crane likes about Reeve’s End is that soon she’ll leave it. Like her best friend did. Like her sister did. Like most of the teens born in town have done. There’s nothing for them there but abandoned mines and empty futures. They’re better off taking a chance elsewhere.

The only thing Winter will miss is the woods. Her only refuge. At least it was. Until the day she found Lennon left for dead, bleeding in a tree.

But now Lennon is gone too. And he has Winter questioning what she once thought was true. What if nobody left at all? What if they’re all missing?

For some reason, whenever fantasy writers feel the need to branch out, it's always into the mystery genre. I don't really know why, but, in my opinion, it never really works. I'm sure their thought process is something like "I can write violence. I can write action. I can write a mystery novel" giving no regard to the fact that in order for most mysteries to really work, they need to be ground in reality. Sure, I'm not including books like Night Film, which include heavy paranormal elements, or other more supernatural based mysteries because those aren't trying to be realistic anyway. But fantasy writers, when they write mysteries, have a tendency to exaggerate reality while at the same time not include any fantastical elements, creating something that resembles real life but just... isn't.

I say this because, no matter how many mysteries Armstrong may have written, she's still a fantasy writer. I mean, when your heroine's name is Winter Crane, it's pretty obvious. Also, there was the whole bow and arrow hunting thing, to the point where I wrote down in my notes "is this The Hunger Games?". Because, being from a kind of hick corner of New England (it doesn't seem like it, but trust me, it is, you pull up to my old high school parking lot and you'll see an even mix of Audis and pick ups with Confederate flag bumper stickers despite being goddamn Yankees), I'm familiar with hunters. I also don't have an issue with hunters, as a whole. I love animals, but I ride horses and hang out around horses a ton and if you're around any kind of farm life for extended periods of time, even horses, some things stop bothering you as much as they used to. Like hunting. No, my issue with it was the fact that she was hunting with a bow and arrow. No one I know who hunts does it with a fucking bow and arrow. What is this, the summer between fourth and fifth grade doing archery at Girl Scout camp? Sure, some people use crossbows, but the majority of people who hunt do it with a good old fashioned rifle or shotgun. The reason for that should be fairly obvious. Who really wants to constantly stop and reload every time they make a shot? It loses precious time, and if Winter truly didn't want animals to suffer, she would hunt with a gun, because it's quicker than, again, stopping and reloading every time she wanted to take a shot. Also, a gun would have helped her a hell of a lot more when those feral dogs were attacking her, anyway.

Also, if the author is against guns she needs to get over it if she's writing a novel with a hunting character. Once you start killing anything, you've lost any moral ground in that area that you have to stand on. I would also like to take this moment to talk about the pack of feral dogs. First of all, what other book do we know of that includes a pack of wild dogs who repeatedly show up to almost kill the heroine? The Hunger Games, anyone? Also, feral dogs are rarely violent. We've done a pretty damn good job at domesticating dogs, and, with the exception of certain breeds- German Shepherds are pretty easily given into violence, as well as many guard dogs, because we've bred them to be- we've bred the violence out of them. However, even German Shepherds and the like have to be provoked to act violent, they wouldn't just attack someone out of the blue. Of course, the definition of provoke is up to the dog, some dogs, for instance, consider merely walking on their property a criminal act, others need you to actually lay a threatening hand on their owner. But even guard dogs wouldn't really be aggressive when strays, because they don't have anything to protect.

I'm going to come back to the name thing now, because it's one of the little things that get me mad. The two brothers are named Jude and Lennon. Winter gets the reference right away and Lennon is impressed. Apparently, few people- even teachers- get his name right. Winter attributes this to her mother's liking of old music, and I wonder when authors will understand that liking the Beatles or the Rolling Stones isn't some sign of the main character's quirkiness or intelligence. Especially because, even if you didn't get Jude, Lennon is as obvious as a slap in the face. I'm not even that big of a Beatles fan- I like them causally-, but I would have understood that both their names were Beatles references. Hell, even Jude on its own is fairly obvious, and I don't even really like the song Hey Jude. Or even John Lennon that much, for that matter (my favorite Beatle is the under loved George, because he was the cutest, but Paul was the genius behind the band, let's be honest here). And even if most of the kids didn't get Lennon, which is doubtful given that nobody I know doesn't know who either the Beatles or John Lennon are, the teachers at least should get it! I mean, come on now.

Also the mystery sucked. It was exactly who you thought it would be. Has anyone ever read Daughter of the Deep Silence? Because if you had, you know who the culprit was in this case. Not much risk taking here. And the book wasn't even that dark. I mean, sure, there's plenty of dog killing, deer killing, etc, but again, I'm not really that bothered by stuff like that, especially when the dogs killed haven't really endeared themselves to me in the first place. There was no real gruesome human murders, either. Maybe I've just let myself be colored by the recent books I've read, which had things like the hammer murders of 10 year old girls or an entire family being shot in a cellar or candy apples shoved up dead girl's vaginas to really be bothered by dog killings or girls who you just knew were going to live turn up, "tortured", but alive. As a result, I don't think the violence in this book was that bad, and it certainly didn't unnerve me or disgust me. I was more disturbed by the axe murders in Violet Grenade than I was by this supposedly twisted serial kidnapper/killer.

Winter Crane was another fantastically cliche heroine with a fantastically cliche goal. She wants to be a doctor and get out of her hometown. She wants to be a doctor despite having no real bedside manner. Maybe she should be a medical examiner instead. Of course her mother is dead and her father is a drunk who beats her and she's a stone cold survivor who knows how to live by herself in Appalachia. She's also gorgeous, so gorgeous people feel the need to comment on it repeatedly. And she's smart, too. And it all relies on her to fix everything, because everyone, especially the sheriff, in her small town is stupid and corrupt. I'm impressed by how much judgement Armstrong passed on Appalachia, when she was probably trying to do the exact opposite. Look, my dad's family is from Pennsylvania. The Appalachian part of Pennsylvania actually. His grandfather worked in the coal mines when he was a kid and the railroad when he got big enough to get out of the coal mines. His dad never went to college. And yet, believe it or not, he wasn't so stupid he would have kept calling someone a governor if he was corrected the first time that it was a congressman. I never really found making fun of someone's stupidity, especially when that someone is from the most poverty-stricken area of the USA, funny. Instead, it comes across as mean and doesn't do much to endear little miss Winter to me at all.

And the love interest in Jude! Holy hell, Armstrong wasn't skimping on the cliches in him, either. He was the tortured rich boy, who heroically eschews his adoptive family's fortune and shames his younger brother for going along with it. I don't see anything wrong with embracing the circumstances of your birth or fate or whatever, just as long as you are aware of how lucky you are to be born in that specific bed or however you want to fit that saying to your specific circumstance. It's like how the beginning of Gatsby goes "...just remember that all the people in the world haven't had the advantages you have". You don't need to complete reject your family, no, that reeks of what wealthy Bolsheviks did during the Russian Revolution, and most of them ended up shot anyway. And, let's be honest here, it does no good to be spending most of your time tortured by how wealthy you are compared to others. If it bothers you that much, do what Carnegie did and put your money all towards public works. And besides, does anyone really want to be pushed through the foster system? Honestly, if Jude was that concerned about he got to his current position in life, he could easily assuage his guilt by, again, putting money towards foster programs or means to help kids whose parents were killed. My point is, rejecting your family and going to live in a dingy apartment with three roommates isn't really doing anything productive, is it?

It's also written in a not very good way. Too much fantasy influence in my opinion, theatrical in a way that doesn't work for me. I mean, read the quote above. It comes across as third rate horror flick as opposed to creepy serial killer drama. 

So, if you can't tell, I despised this book. There is nothing I could find redeemable about it. Hands down, my least favorite book of the month, and probably the year so far. It'd be a cold day in hell before I pick up another Kelley Armstrong again.

2 out of 10