Lexicon

I don't post about every book I read.  Occasionally I read one that is so bad, it's not even worth taking the time to make a post about it.  So I was on the fence about posting this book.  It commits the cardinal sin of staring out interesting and then falling flat in a terrible way.  It wasn't horrible, but because it started out so promising and became so disappointing I was unreasonably angry towards the end. It is a good airport book, which is where I started reading it. I was in three airports within a 24-hour period and this book allows for easy reading and frequent interruptions. So as an airport book, it's fine because you are paying light attention and the story works for light attention.  However, once I got to my destination and finished the book, I was keenly aware of all the plot holes and it made me mad.  I also realized that none of the characters were fully developed and I didn't care about any of them.

The book follows Emily Ruff who is a teenage runaway. She gets vetted by a 'special school' that teaches mind control with the use of words.  She becomes impatient and rebellious and instead of learning things as they are taught to her, she seeks out advanced knowledge.  Of course she gets all this advanced knowledge but has no clue what to do with it because she didn't take the time to learn the basics. She ends up killing another student through misuse of 'the words' and gets kicked out of the academy and banished to some dust town in Australia called Broken Hill for several years.  Throughout these years, she somehow becomes this promiscuous young woman.  A group of other women jump her one night and beat her senseless. She then falls in love with the paramedic who takes her to the hospital.  Literally this all happens in the span of about 5-10 pages.  This is around the time when I started really rolling my eyes and cursing every male author who ever tried to write a three-dimensional female character and failed.  Anyway, to make a long story short, it turns out this paramedic guy is immune to the mind control, and when the whole town is destroyed by words he is the only one who doesn't die.  He somehow gets to the United States and lives free of any memory of Australia because Emily wipes his memory.  Because of this special ability to be resistant to mind control, the academy wants him for research, but Emily wants him for love. So the academy is trying to find both Emily and her little paramedic guy. Blah blah blah....yawn.

The book is not told in a chronological order and there are several stories going on at one time. In between the chapters there are also fictionalized examples of how the media uses words to control the minds of the masses.  I found the fictionalized examples of media mind control a more fascinating story than Emily Ruff trying to seek out and save the guy she somehow developed a lifelong passion for in the span of a few pages.  The story just wasn't cohesive enough. You will find weak, poorly developed characters. The only thing the book does develop is apathy in the reader.  I will just say read at your own discretion.