Four voices, Four lives, One day.
Names Will Never Hurt Me stars four main characters in 1st person POV whose lives barely cross, if at all, in the same high school. The book spans the length of one high school day, divided into 1st-8th period, and it is the 1st anniversary of a day a kid got murdered on school grounds.
Lots can happen with a premise like this and there are indeed a few twists. The characters all have interesting qualities that lead to a tangled ending where you really don’t know what’s going to happen next. The ending was actually pretty fun, however this book may have actually been better if it leaned more into being a suspense novel.
Though, perhaps the author prefers a more literary leaning than genre. Don’t hire me to review literary fiction. XD
Writing:
Multi-POV 1st person:
Being written in four different POVs, it is important to keep every voice distinct. This is where I started to struggle. Every section is in 1st person and sometimes it take a few paragraphs before I could figure out which character was being read. This got frustrating until the end where the section headings finally included the character’s name.
If you write in multi-POV, this is something to pay attention to. I’ve seen controversy on the preferred way to write this style. I prefer to know what character I am reading before I finish the first sentence of a new POV. This makes me feel confident about the scene forming in my head.
Others prefer to find out as they read. I think that can be useful for mysteries or suspense, and sometimes I think that did work in this book, but too many times I found myself upset that I couldn’t imagine the scene right away.
You’ll have to figure out what effect you prefer. If you read this book to study this technique, pay attention to the clues used to identify each character each time and how it affected the scene to wait as long as it does to reveal these clues.
To add to this conversation on multi-POV, interestingly, there were some times when I felt like I was reading a roleplay–several characters taking turns reacting to the same dialogue. This was fun and not-fun at the same time. Slowed the story down, but connected us more the the characters and scene.
Verse Novel:
The book describes itself as prose-poetry. Ehhhh… Sometimes it worked, and other times it made no sense why some things where split up or capitalized. It didn’t add impact, and rather felt random at times.
Issues I had:
1) Uh. They’re just letting these news reporters run rampant through the school all day? On a one year anniversary of a murder? Asking “Are the kids really okay?” as their headline and bothering the kids about it?
2) What the heck was that “Important Commercial Message”??? It was a section break in the second half of the book that was literally just an ad for this pill that helps makes parents oblivious to their kids??? Like, it felt so out of place… This book wasn’t focusing on neglectful parents. It was a super dystopian commercial that had no place in the book… (but would have been great in a dystopian book!)
3) I still don’t know what was in the gym bag. 😡 I actually went to research the author a little more and they said they don’t actually know either. This decision to keep it ambiguous and lean into the meaning of the contents rather than the contents themselves didn’t work well for me. Rather, it made it feel like the author didn’t know, leaving the meaning a little emptier.
4) At least Dumbledore gets fired in the end.
All in all:
This is a 3/5 star book for me, though I keep considering 2.5. The multi-pov was a useful choice to progress the story. The different writing styles (prose, verse, screenwriting) were awkward, but worked for the most part. The ending was unexpected in a nice(?) way. The twists were nice, but the writing of climax’s action was lacking. However, perhaps I’m just a fantasy writer who loves fight scenes.
That’s all for this one! Next book in my Library Challenge is by the same author and I hope I will enjoy it more. 😅
N. K. Valek: Author 