Graveminder, Schraveminder

A new installment in my infrequent yet verbose series of disappointed book complaints reviews. Maybe someday I'll learn to be positive.  Maybe.

In an idyllic small town, the Graveminder tends the funerals and graves of the dead to make sure they "sleep well and stay where I put you".  When the Graveminder is killed, her granddaughter comes home and finds out that the position is now hers and she has to deal with the restless, hungry dead. Awesome, right!?  I was hoping Melissa Marr's Graveminder would be a sort of magical Our Town with zombies.  No. Such. Luck.  There was so much potential to dig into a unique lifestyle, lore and community and instead I felt like I'd been tricked into reading a bland relationship drama with a promising but dully written background.    

PROBLEMS

Who Cares if Rebbekah and Byron Get Their Romantic S@$* Together?

Frankly, my dear, I didn't give a damn.  I thought a huge amount of space was wasted detailing the main characters' past, present and possibly future relationship.   Marr starts to explore an interesting, created mythology only to shove it to the back burner so we can listen to her whitter on about how frustrating it is that Rebbekah just can't LOVE.  Guess what, Melissa?  It was frustrating for me, too.

Maybe Their Love Is Boring Because They're The Same Person?

Poor Byron, his story arc is the exact same as Rebbekah's: finding out your older relative's weird ass mystery title has been passed on to you.  So the "holy shit, what am I!?" shock/learning/readjustment process is uselessly doubled - his "different" perspective didn't feel interesting or useful, just extra.  I would have been perfectly happy if his character had been cut out entirely.

The Land of the Dead is Lame

The Graveminder can go between the worlds of the living and the dead.  The Land of the dead is  full of mixed up time periods, weapons, violence, death, commerce, dinner, intrigue, sex, a handsome and charismatic leader named Charles, and we're told it's so beautiful and overwhelming to the Graveminders that they sometimes forsake the world of the living.  And yet I found every scene set there to be frustrating and boring as hell.  I never got a sense of why it's so great for the Graveminders other than I'm told it is and that it's...colorful?  Flowers...feel nicer? And all the other bits just created a LOT of (unanswered) questions for me. I could tell I was SUPPOSED to find the LotD interesting, but it just wasn't the case.

SUMMARY: TOO.  F-ING.  MUCH

There was a LOT going on and a LOT of people saying it and there really didn't need to be (I can remember at least 7 POV's).  Who or what were we supposed to spend time with?  If you're flitting from story to story, person to person, the reader can never invest in anyone or anything.  If your novel is about Graveminders through time, go ahead and introduce a lot of characters/settings/stories, we're expecting an overview.  If your novel is a thousand pages long, go nuts jumping around.  If you're writing the story of a single Graveminder and it's just 300ish pages, then I think you've got a lot less leeway.   Stick with Rebbekah, she's the frickin' Graveminder.  If you absolutely MUST have a romance (siiiigh), cut the years-of-pining crap.Finally, forget the Land of the Dead; Rebbekah can settle the dead without having to physically go on a day tour and meet-n-greet of the place.  It's OKAY to leave some things to the imagination, it really is.  I promise. Marr wanted to put so much in as an author that I got very little out as a reader.

Maybe it's just me.  Maybe she's the best writer in the world and this really is the "dreamy" "creepy" "gothic" "romance" that everyone's gushing about and I'm just a whiny little creep, but I was badly disappointed by this detail-heavy yet weirdly uninteresting book.

Lest you think I'm an interminable grump, LOOK, I like books. I've liked these books this year!  Neverwhere! The Passage! Touch! The Eagle of the 9th! The Help! Bloodroot!