WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW
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| “It's a kind of death when you don't go home the same.”- Shot-Blue, Jesse Ruddock |
Rachel is a young single mother living with her son, Tristan, on a lake that borders the unchannelled north – remote, nearly inhospitable. She does what she has to do to keep them alive. But soon, and unexpectedly, Tristan will have to live alone, his youth unprotected and rough. The wild, open place that is all he knows will be overrun by strangers – strangers inhabiting the lodge that has replaced his home, strangers who make him fight, talk, and even love, when he doesn't want to. Ravenous and unrelenting, Shot-Blue is a book of first love and first loss.
There are three things that matter in books: plot, characters, and writing. These three things aren't weighted equally, however, as some people, myself included, prefer characters over plot, others like the opposite, but the most important thing is the writing. In Shot-Blue, Ruddock decides to cut out the whole plot and characters part almost entirely and focus purely on the writing.
And that is both this book's biggest asset and also its downfall. Because the writing is, without a doubt, beautiful and is really the best part of the novel because Ruddock seems to have little interest in both fleshing out her characters beyond their physical attributes and doing something with the plot. This is not so much an issue in the first part of the story, also known as Book One, but in Book Two, Ruddock's lack of talent in both the plot and character aspect of writing becomes painfully apparent, and that beautiful, dreamlike writing quickly grows tiring. In that, I am reminded of books like The Night Circus, another book that prioritized writing above all and as that book progressed, it quickly became apparent that the writing was all the talent Morgenstern possessed.
What sets Shot-Blue apart from The Night Circus, though, is the ambition behind this book. It proclaims to be a book about loneliness vs being alone and first loss and love, and it ends up drowning in its own pretension. By making it so ambiguous and so literary, it ends up really being about nothing except how smart Ruddock is for writing this. What she's missing is that there's a fine line between beautiful ambiguity and beautiful nothingness and this book crosses it.
I see a lot of comparisons to Emma Donoghue's Room, but the book I thought of the most while reading Shot-Blue was actually The Road. Both have a similar premise, except the father in The Road is switched to a mother, but The Road is the far superior novel because it had a concrete plot as well as characters. By the end of the novel, I found myself deeply caring for both the boy and his father, whereas by the end of this book I couldn't bring myself to feel anything for any of the characters, or even seeing the point to most of them. The only non-superfluous characters in this novel were Tristan and Rachel.
I was also confused somewhat as to when the book was supposed to take place. All the characters spoke like they were from a time long ago, had names that were odd and somewhat futuristic-seeming, and every so often they would drop a modern slang word like when Tomasin exclaimed "oh, sick!". That just made the book seem muddy and confused.
So, do I recommend Shot-Blue? To be honest, no I don't. I mean, if you love dreamy literary nonsense, sure, go for it. I don't see Jesse Ruddock really going anyplace far as a writer unless she drops her pretensions, but I'd be curious about the follow up novel. In my opinion, though, this book should have ended at the first part.
5.5 out of 10
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