Cobwebs

I've read book after book of young adult literature. They ranged from moderately ok to really excellent. Then the last book I read breaks the string; it was a bad book, not answering any of the logical questions that would arise to any reader's mind, not really making any sense, doing a lot of nothing, in essence.

So I start reading Cobwebs, thinking that the odds were in my favor that this book would be better than the last one I had read.

Nope. No such luck. Actually, it's worse than the last one I read. At least the last one had its interesting moments.

This one is boring and illogical. Not a really good combination.

And, if memory serves me, spider-beings have already been done, and done well.

Anyhow, in this story Nancy is a young girl whose parents and grandparents seem to be keeping secrets from her. Her mother refuses to leave the house. Someone is writing about the "Angel of Brooklyn". A woman is dying. Someone in Nancy's family has healing powers, or maybe more than one person. The husband of the dying woman wants to use those powers to heal her and will stop at nothing to get his way.

So you have people who are part spider. That would have been a story in itself. You also have people who are healers, which again would have been a story in itself. Instead, in this book you throw the two things together and never bother to explain at all just how in the world did some humans end up part spider?

At least Peter Parker had a reason (the radioactive spider, if you remember).

These people have no origins. No explanations. Just a variety of powers.

This doesn't count some other problems, such as when one of them actually physically turns into a spider and apparently remains lightweight. Why? There's the law of conservation of mass. If the human body was condensed down to the size of a spider then it's density would increase but the weight would stay the same. If the person changes and the weight decreases to the weight of a spider, then what happened to all the extra mass? Further, when the person changes from the spider back to the human then where does the extra mass come from?

There's also the issue of shaving legs. Yep. Shaving legs. Nancy is told not to shave her legs, but nobody bothers to tell her why. Then she shaves her legs and finds out that the hairs were serving as sense organs for movement of nearby objects and people. Which isn't a totally impossible thing, (think along the lines of whiskers on cats), but Nancy often wears tights. When she doesn't, she wears long socks and a skirt.

Then, basically, her legs would have been covered by something for most of their length virtually all the time and she wouldn't have felt anything anyhow. The idea would only work if she never shaved her legs, wore long socks or long skirts.

Picky, yes, but reading such a mishmash of a book tends to do that to a person.

So, what do I do now? Stay with what works. The next book I'll read and review will be the fourth book in a series. The other three have all been really good and so, hopefully, the odds will be in my favor for once.


Main Index

Young adult Index