Nowhere Yet

Edward
Cozza
Genre: 
Contemporary

Grant receives a call from his best friend/school mate Rex after years of no contact, inviting Grant to meet up with him and Annie—the girl who got away— for a weekend in Palm Springs. While Grant, Rex, and Annie reconnect and resolve some tensions and hurts lingering from the past, they make new friends who change their lives for the better. A loud-mouthed, brash, arrogant troublemaker, Rex draws Grant into his crazy schemes. Grant, a depressed hermit, lives a quiet lifestyle, longing for Annie and regretting the mistakes and choices he made that broke them up.

In this story, the author's greatest asset is the often fast-paced and witty dialogue. However, sometimes it seemed stilted and unnatural at times. It may seem to a reader that nothing much happens in the novel aside from the characters drinking, eating, and having endless conversations in which they talk in circles, joke around, and trade barbs and sarcastic comments. Although Grant is the protagonist, the story is told from several viewpoints, with shifts between the characters mid-scene without any warning or buffers for most of the novel, making it difficult to really become invested in the story or characters.

 

This novel reads like a script that was reworked into prose, with far too much circular dialogue, more telling than showing, and inefficient character development and exposition to keep the story moving along at a good pace and make it interesting. Important scenes that would work better as dialogue are glossed over and told in exposition while other unnecessary scenes are drawn out conversations that go nowhere.

 

Lacy Hill