From the Bookshelf of What's the Name of That Book???…

Crash is not a good book but I find it kind of fascinating and agitating as a specimen.

The version I read was the one that was edited to remove the most egregious offenses mentioned by other 1-star reviews. Even with those changes, it still is a problematic book in many ways.

Take Lucy. She’s advertised as a do-gooder, involved in clubs and rehabbing dogs, etc. But she’s also supremely judgmental and “above” almost all that goes on around her. She’s never called out on her judgy attitude, excep

Crash is not a good book but I find it kind of fascinating and agitating as a specimen.

The version I read was the one that was edited to remove the most egregious offenses mentioned by other 1-star reviews. Even with those changes, it still is a problematic book in many ways.

Take Lucy. She’s advertised as a do-gooder, involved in clubs and rehabbing dogs, etc. But she’s also supremely judgmental and “above” almost all that goes on around her. She’s never called out on her judgy attitude, except when said attitude is directed at Jude (view spoiler)[ and by proxy, his friend Holly. (hide spoiler)]

Jude has a hair-trigger temper and is extremely possessive. He threatens other people constantly and physically attacks quite a few. Jude’s devotion to Lucy is meant, I think, to prove that there’s more to him than his criminal and “womanizing” ways. But with the combination of her snobbishness and his anger issues, you basically have a couple that openly despises the rest of the world.

Now if the book had played this differently, the characters’ bitter worldview could have been explained as a natural outcome from Jude and Lucy’s respective pasts. However, the author makes sure to populate this world with side and background characters who behave in implausible ways so that they “deserve” to be judged, and/or “deserve” to be physically threatened or verbally insulted. Almost all the other girls are sluts and bitches, almost all the other boys leer (or worse), and almost all the adults are ineffectual. In order to make the other high school students extra hate-worthy, most of them are wealthy and flaunt it. (And yet, they inexplicably attend a rundown public school with poor academic standards.) Basically, Jude and Lucy are portrayed as special snowflakes, just about the only “real” people in a world of posers.

Crash is constructed so that the romance between Jude and Lucy constitutes the only “meaningful” relationship for either of them. There’s a little bit involving a friend of Jude’s and Lucy’s father that might have fleshed out Jude and Lucy’s characters, but both relationships are underdeveloped, and both of those characters are mainly there for plot contrivances and/or to encourage the reunion of Jude and Lucy. There’s one mention of Lucy’s dance teacher who she admires, but that teacher never makes an actual appearance.

The isolation of Lucy from other types of meaningful relationships is particularly odd. How does a girl who threw herself into clubs at her old school and new school, and attended a dance academy for years, not have any friends worth mentioning by name, other than her new frenemy, Taylor? There’s no extended family, no friends of the family, no one that a girl who wants to “save the world” has meaningfully bonded with? Near the end of the book, Lucy observes her fellow high school students embracing each other at graduation and swearing to be friends forever. For her, this is all bullshit, and I think we’re meant to assume her assessment is correct. Why is friendship valued so little in this book? I read half of Nicole Williams’ Eternal Eden, and it was a similarly friendless landscape for the female character there. It’s poor character development and also sets it up as if romance is the only type of bond that matters.

This is also a book where apparently the best case scenario for Lucy, romantically, is that Jude had no emotional attachments to his previous sexual partners. At one point, he calls them “faceless women”, but unless he was sleeping with adults, they were actually girls, faceless girls, disposable girls who supposedly agreed to or deserved to be disposable. It’s implied he’s slept with at least 20 or 30 girls, I think, so again, this is a world where there are that many disposable teenage girls, only good for screwing. The one past conquest who shows up in the book is a convenient caricature, to prove that though, yes, Jude was a player, the girls he slept with were much worse, so don’t worry about it.

Which reminds me - in the beginning of the book, a sunbathing Lucy unties the string of her bikini on a public beach to attract Jude’s attention. But after that one moment of provocation, any revealing clothes Lucy wears are accidental or “forced” on her by her frenemy. And meanwhile, she judges how other girls dress (and eat, and talk, and have fun).

To close out my one-star screed: Crash is kind of a mean little book underneath all those romantic declarations. I write this review to commiserate with others who might feel the same.