Since “Summer of my Fourteenth Year” was clearly Jim Meaders’ first novel, I tried to cut it some slack. Despite its flaws, it had some clever ideas, funny scenarios and was overall a creative story. All of that seems to have been thrown away in the next installment of James’ whacky adventures, “Hitchhikers in Each Other’s Mind,” resulting in a sloppy story with poorly developed characters and unprofessional workmanship.
The most glaringly obvious problem with “Hitchhikers” is the text setting and the writing. The formatting in “Hitchhikers” slowly deteriorates through the course of the book so that passages alternate between appearing as ordinary text and Heading 1. On top of that, italic and bold fonts are constantly forgotten, as are the indentations at the beginning of paragraphs. Not only did this lead to the presentation looking sloppy, but it became increasingly difficult to identify who was speaking since the narrative voice relies heavily on alternating fonts to let the reader know who is talking. In addition, the writing itself was difficult to get through since so much of the story is told in bland, run-on sentences. If an author is to keep the reader engaged and alert, it is crucial to vary sentence length and style more often than every other page. As is, the writing sends the reader’s mind into a dull, repetitive lull that makes this book difficult to read and nearly impossible to engage with. The poorly constructed plot and one-dimensional characters only make matters worse. The plot is aimless and spastic. It seems like Meaders just wrote the first ideas that came to his mind, left it as-is and published the result. The aliens are boring, juvenile, and underdeveloped. The whole book reads like a middle or high school student’s self-insertion fan-fiction rather than a book that is mean to appeal to anyone other than Meaders himself. It didn’t feel like the story was on a mission to tell me about events of any real consequence, which defeats the entire purpose of constructing a plot in the first place. The only end goals seemed to be turning James into an alien and having him end up with Harmony. Neither were resolved with the slightest bit of character effort or growth. James becomes an alien without facing a single serious challenge or personal obstacle and the abysmal love story involving Harmony ends up being a moot, poorly executed point because Lilith shows up and is just as bland and uninteresting as her rival, or the protagonist for that matter.
The plot is aimless and spastic. It seems like Meaders just wrote the first ideas that came to his mind, left it as-is and published the result. The aliens are boring, juvenile, and underdeveloped. The whole book reads like a middle or high school student’s self-insertion fan-fiction rather than a book that is mean to appeal to anyone other than Meaders himself. It didn’t feel like the story was on a mission to tell me about events of any real consequence, which defeats the entire purpose of constructing a plot in the first place. The only end goals seemed to be turning James into an alien and having him end up with Harmony. Neither were resolved with the slightest bit of character effort or growth. James becomes an alien without facing a single serious challenge or personal obstacle and the abysmal love story involving Harmony ends up being a moot, poorly executed point because Lilith shows up and is just as bland and uninteresting as her rival, or the protagonist for that matter.
James is insufferable as both a narrator and a protagonist. He has no definable characteristics outside of his fixation on, “cars, girls and sex,” which does not come together to create a complete personality. Instead, they formulate a cliché stereotype that makes me want to stay far away from James, not read about him and certainly not sympathize with him.
I understand that fixation with one’s sexuality is a key part of one’s teen years, but that is not the only thing that defines a person between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. I think James’ fixation on girls could lead to a lot of laughs and conflicts as a character flaw, but the problem is that it’s one of only three things that James focuses on and takes up the majority of his internal thought process. We never learn about any of his other interests, except maybe art, but the author dedicates virtually no time to the subject, resulting in a bland, forgettable, and annoying protagonist. When you only focus on one characteristic and it’s something as mind-numbingly basic as a teenager’s sex drive, you do everyone involved a disservice.
First of all, you cheat yourself out of an opportunity to write a dynamic, interesting, sympathetic character, which would help you grow as an author. Second, you cheat the reader out of a story that engages their minds and imaginations. Contrary to this narrative’s apparent belief, we’re not stupid. We know teenage boys are more than their hormones. We know and have been teenaged boys who were capable of more than James has yet to accomplish in the course of two books, which is why teenage boys are the third group that you are failing.
You have given them nothing interesting, admirable, or inspiring to identify with or think about. You are reinforcing the idea that they are only their basic sexual urges, which is belittling and, quite frankly, insulting. I have seen teenaged boys be mentors to younger kids. I have seen teenaged boys build robots and write computer programs. I have seen teenage boys act in plays, write poetry and stories, paint, and create other diverse works of art. If you’re going to write about them, do better by them.
While James is by far the biggest offense in the character department, his love interests aren’t much better. We learn absolutely nothing about them as people except they are conventionally attractive, they are in love with James, and they are mind-reading aliens. Outside of that, they are hardly people at all. They are paper-thin, uninspired, fantasy-fulfilling dolls, which is probably because they are not even real in the fictional universe they reside in. If the predecessor to “Hitchhikers” is anything to go by, this is probably all a dream, which makes the book that much more frustrating.
“Hitchhikers” reads a lot like “Summer of my Fourteenth Year,” so I have a growing suspicion that this is going to amount to nothing more than one of James’ dreams. If it is, I’m going to feel like I’ve completely wasted my time because there is nothing to gain from only reading a character’s dreams. You don’t see them grow. You don’t see them face real challenges. You don’t see who they are, only what they want. There is nothing at stake and, unless it takes place in a children’s cartoon, there’s nothing to gain. No lesson, no goal to achieve, no anything. The character simply wakes up and everything disappears, leaving me with next to no knowledge about the character in question other than their fantasies, which is not nearly enough for me to care about them or what they do.
Much like “Summer,” “Hitchhikers” has potential. If Meaders focused on the sci-fi-meets-memoir element, this series could be something truly enjoyable, creative and original. As is, it’s a mess. The formatting and writing are sloppy, the plot is in shambles, and the characters are horrible and downright insulting. The effort to bring this idea into its own is going to take some serious work. Meaders needs to work on the fundamentals of writing and ebook formatting, write out a decent plot outline, reconstruct the characters from the ground up, and, for the love of all that is holy under heaven, never type the phrase “ample breasts” ever again (it wasn’t funny in the first book and it’s not funny in this one). Until those issues are tackled, I’m not interested in following James on his alien-infested adventures any further.
This book was given to us for free in exchange for an honest review.