No, you're more like Number Two.

[cyrano]

It would be difficult for me to spoil anything about "I Am Number Four", largely because I only subjected myself to six chapters of it. Eye gougingly bad. What is seen cannot be unseen. Apparently Ebonlock and I had similar conclusions: How can books (and I'm fairly certain this wants to be an epic series) like this keep getting published when nearly all of my writing friends could eat typewriter ribbon and paper, and crap a better story?

The conceit, perpetuated by the fact that the author's name is the protagonist's name, is that this is all terribly real and is all happening RIGHT NOW. Which is unfortunate, given that the story is about a team of aliens hiding on Earth from another team of aliens, and he's sort of given away his position here.

Reading about the good aliens, from Lorien, is kind of like reading about Tolkein lathering on about elves and how cool they are and how much better at everything they are. Except not only are they really cool and way better at everything, but also how much we suck in comparison and how heroic the aliens are for defending us all. (I didn't get to the part where anybody defended Earth but it's probably in there.)

The writing utilizes short sentences. The sentences often contain overlapping information. The information is repeated, in case we missed something. Like how cool the Lorien kids are. Or about how they have superpowers, called Legacies. They also have lots of cool magic, called Loric Charms.

The writing is also painfully sophomoric. It reminds me of really bad Mary Sue fan fiction. The kind where there's this one kid who nobody understands. But this kid is really super special. And there's this bully that he totally beats up, because he hates bullies. He's also super powerful, and can beat up bullies, but he has to restrain himself most of the time. And then the cute popular girl totally falls in love with him. And it's super special True Love.

And that's when I had to set the book on fire, your honor.

Comments

[jadelennox]

tahnan sent me here, and it's actually worse than that. The author's name is NOT the protagonist's name. The protagonists, and first-person narrator, is one character: "number four". The ostensible author, "Pittacus Lore", is another person in this fictional world altogether.

In other words, whoever decided to make "Pittacus Lore" the so-called author (which may not have been the real author, because this book was produced in James Frey's children's books sweatshop and that's the kind of decision that was probably made at a marketing level), didn't understand that in order to maintain that kind of fiction, the fictional author and the fictional first-person narrator have to be the SAME PERSON.

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I heard about the Frey connection when I was posting this on GoodReads. Apparently, the poor sod who wrote this travesty got $250 and '40% of something'. Which is far better than what I would have given him.