Book review: Marionette by T.B. Markinson

Paige Alexander is seventeen and has her whole life in front of her. One day her girlfriend comes home to discover that Paige has slit her wrists. Paige isn't insane, but she acts like she is. Why? 

After the incident, Paige agrees to go to therapy to appease her girlfriend, Jess. However, Paige doesn't believe that therapy will help her. She believes she’s beyond help. Paige doesn't want to find herself and she doesn't want to relive her painful past in order to come to terms with it. What Paige wants is control over her life, which she hasn't had since her birth. 

During her childhood, Paige is blamed for a family tragedy, when in fact, her twin sister, Abbie was responsible. Abbie doesn't come forward and Paige becomes the pariah of the family. 

To add to Paige’s woes, while attending a college in a small town in Colorado, the residents are in the midst of debating whether or not gays and lesbians should have equal rights. Tension is high and there’s a threat of violence. She isn't out of the closet and pretends to be straight at school since she fears what will happen if her parents find out she’s a lesbian. Will she end up dead like her best friend, Alex?

An e-book copy was given to me free in return for a review.

When I read a book like this, I can’t help but be a little bit critical when it comes to certain parts of it.  The fact that the main character is gay makes it something I probably would’ve read anyway if I had discovered it on my own.  I’m not going to say it necessary falls into the trap of one of those books that are about nothing but the main character’s sexuality, but that’s because it definitely rambles on about a lot more.  To the book’s credit it does acknowledge it, at least, but it happens so often that I found myself losing focus more than once.

There’s so much going on in this book that there’s never a dull moment, and it did keep me reading to see what would happen next.  The downside of all this is that Paige is so disconnected to everything that sometimes I wondered to myself why I should care about what’s going on.  We get pages and pages of her talking to her psychologist about her past, for instance, but the end comes out of literally nowhere.  I won’t spoil it obviously, but it has to do with Abbie, and all we know about Abbie is that she and Paige were never close, that she’s the one who left out a toy when they were younger that led to a horrible incident with their mother, and that before they left for college, she got into drugs and was friends with hippies.  Well we also know that she’s passionate about music but ended up going to college to be a doctor because that’s what their mother wanted.  But none of that actually gives us a good look into who she is, which might be the point since she and Paige were never close, but still doesn’t do well to not make the ending come straight out of left field.

I will give the book plenty of credit that the writing itself is vivid and, for the most part, clean.  There is the tendency to mis-format dialogue every now and then but that’s the worst offender.  Personally, though, I found that the fact that Paige’s great story-telling skills (she’s studying history at college but wants to be a writer) leaking into her sessions with Liddy made me feel like she might be an unreliable narrator.  I’m aware she dwells quite a lot on the past, but the fact that she’s telling these perfect narrations about the parts in her life she discusses with Liddy just seems too perfect

Overall I’d probably rate the book as average.  There was so much potential in it and what the author wanted to do with it, but the weaknesses hold it back from it being as good as it could’ve been.