Review: H2O

Guys, sometimes I wonder if I'm too nice on this blog. I've never given anything less than three stars, and even if I personally hated a novel, I'll still try to be objective and say nice things about part of it so that way the review is relatively balanced.

And then I read H2O.

Lord forgive me for what I might say in response to this book.

First things first, H2O won't be released until October - I got an ARC from my mom after she found it at work. Maybe my disdain will die down by then and I'll remind you guys about the release date. (Doubtful.)

Anyway, to summarize: this is the diary of Ruby Morris, comprising the events of the last two weeks or so. She was at a party with her friends and her almost-boyfriend when the world as she knew it got blown to smithereens thanks to a thunderstorm.

A thunderstorm? In England? Shocking, I know, but this storm had a teeny tiny extremophilic bacteria in it that makes water unsafe to the touch, even after boiling or freezing. No one's really sure how much of it needs to get in or on you before it kills you, but even running through the rain to grab your cell phone out of the nearby barn is unsafe, as Ruby's almost-boyfriend discovers.

Ruby gets back to her house safely from that party, but everything goes downhill from there: her mom and stepdad lock her in a separate room for the night just in case she's contaminated, and when she finally gets out, she learns her mom accidentally touched the rain, killing her and Ruby's baby half-brother. All Ruby has left is Simon, her annoying stepfather, and maybe her bio dad, but he's in London.

Ruby and Simon make it through a few days together, scavenging through grocery stores and other people's houses to find food and drinks, but then Simon gets tricked into drinking unsafe water. Now Ruby's all alone and across the country from where her only living relative is. She decides she'll drive to London, picking up stray dogs, hamsters, and humans along the way.

The two stray people she meets are Darius, a nerdy kid from her school, and a mute girl they call Princess, who looks about nine. Darius and Princess have nowhere better to go, really, so they end up tagging along, saving Ruby's life a couple of times in the process. (She saves theirs in return, so it all balances out, really.)

Ruby loses the animals, Darius, and Princess once they come along an army base - she's not willing to go without her dad. She makes it to London alive, only to discover that her dad isn't in his apartment after all. She turns herself into the base there, which turns out to be one of the biggest errors she's made so far. Will she and her dad ever cross paths? That will be for you to find out, potential reader, if my personal opinions of this book don't turn you off.

What are those personal opinions, you ask?

First of all, I have never wanted to strangle a protagonist more in my life than I have when I was reading Ruby's story. She should not have lived through this novel, because she is an idiot. I want to give her the benefit of the doubt - after all, I probably wouldn't live through a disaster of this kind, either - but she's just so lacking in common sense that I'm amazed she's lived to be fifteen. Looting makeup supplies and nice outfits isn't a priority, Ruby! I understand wanting some clothing, but you focus way too much on that and not nearly enough on survival needs!

On top of that, Ruby spends a lot of this book talking about the way things were, even when she says she's not going to. Again, I'm trying to attribute this to shock and stress, but it's really grating to hear about how no one can ever know that she kissed the nerd when no one is alive to care. It feels more like blindly hoping that tomorrow will make everything go back to How It Should Be than a teenager's coping mechanism.

Thirdly, Ruby's writing style is juuuuust quirky enough that I never really settled into it, but that's definitely more of a personal preference than a stylistic fault, in my opinion. She uses little butterfly emoticons in place of swears out of respect to her mother's memory, but I spent more time attempting to figure out which cussword fit best in the blank than actually processing the story whenever I saw one. Her turns of phrase - "brother brat beloved" - and egregious overuse of caps lock also make me wonder if Virginia Bergin, the author, has talked to a teenager within the last decade. (Seriously. I cannot abide overuse of caps lock, especially when it's used in conjunction with italics. You get one.)

My last complaint is that the summary of this novel is incredibly misleading. The description sounds like the whole novel is a thriller based on Ruby's journey to her father, when the journey doesn't even begin until approximately page 180. The whole book is only 327 pages long - half the novel is left out of the summary entirely! There's also a statistic included, 0.27 percent, that we find out in the text isn't even accurate, which annoys the fact-loving college student in me.

I will say that at least the science behind the poisonous water is compelling. There was apparently an asteroid attack heading for Earth that got diverted, but the fallout introduced the extremophiles to the water system, spurring a global meltdown. It felt believable and well-researched, which was about the only thing I could really appreciate out of this novel.

Overall, H2O probably isn't worth your time, unless you suffer fools better than I do. Ruby is a twit, and her somewhat willful ignorance of the facts in front of her bothers me greatly. The novel as a whole is also much slower-paced than I was lead to believe, so I spent a lot of it waiting for something to happen. Two stars.