Harbinger

Harbinger by Sara Wilson Etienne

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


”Whether you know it or not, each one of you is at a critical turning point. If you are willing, there is still time to turn back from the terminal paths you have chosen. But Holbrook is your last chance. In the peace of these woods, we can lead you back to society, show you how to assimilate, nurture appropriate behavior. But if you turn your back on this final opportunity, the rest of the world will not be so kind.”

Well, they weren’t exactly kind either. Faye Robson has been fighting with visions and nightmares for years. Instead of trying to find ways to help her at home, or simply listen to her, her father brought her to Holbrook Academy, a glorified mental institution, and just left her in the not-so-gentle hands of Dr. Murdoch. At Holbrook, Dr. Murdoch maintains order with the help of her vicious Caretakers, armed with Tasers and pepper spray. They punish and degrade students at the slightest provocation, but Faye’s group is targeted even more often than the others, and something is happening to them at night while they’re under the influence of sleeping pills.

There are authors who write descriptively and atmospherically like it’s the easiest thing in the world because it comes naturally to them, and some of those authors are among my favorites. However, there are also authors who’d like to belong to that group but can’t quite pull it off. Sarah Wilson Etienne is one of them. Her prose screams that she was trying too hard. I’m not sure what she was aiming to accomplish with the first three or four chapters of Harbinger, but I can tell you that she failed spectacularly. As much as she tried to make her descriptions of Holbrook and the surrounding woods stunning and memorable, her sentences simply lack colorfulness and depth. She doesn’t even have a distinctive style like Tahereh Mafi, for example. (Hey, you can like Mafi or not, but you can’t deny that her writing is different.) As far as I can tell, she tried to find her voice and failed.

The worldbuilding was also a mess. (Wow, I’m being especially eloquent today.) In the not-so-distant future, people don’t live in cities anymore, they are organized in Cooperatives. What are these Cooperatives? Who runs them? If not in the big cities, where do they live? What caused the society to move and reorganize in such a radical way? Etienne mentions something about oil, and then around 25% she mentions Peak War, but the real explanation doesn’t come until later, and even then it’s a lot of telling and no showing, and I just couldn’t see the point. Why would she set her story in a dystopian world if she wasn’t going to develop it properly? Halbrook Academy could have existed in today’s world with a few minor adjustments. In fact, that would have been so much better because the focus needed to remain on the institution alone. I really don’t see the point of throwing your characters in a world that you leave unexplained until the very end. Bits and pieces of information were thrown in randomly, but it was too little and much too late.
The second part of the book was even more confusing and it showed that an excess of ambition can be a very dangerous thing indeed. I’m sure the story about the Red Paint People sounded fascinating in theory, but the end result was confusing and… well, I was trying not to use the word terrible, but it seems that I have no choice. It was a disaster.

In case all this wasn’t enough to keep you away, there’s also the small matter of instalove. Faye and Kel meet and they instantly know that they’re special to each other. Her powers work differently on him and he isn’t at all uncomfortable around her like everyone else seems to be. At one point, she suspects him of spying, but she’s drawn to him nevertheless. She doesn’t really trust him or confide in him, but of course he’s gorgeous so they must be made for each other.

In my opinion, Harbinger isn’t worth your time. If it were a self-published book, I’d say it’s one of those that gives self-publishing a bad name. I struggled to finish it, and I had trouble keeping up with the abrupt changes in pacing. Sarah Wilson Etienne has great imagination, but her writing needs more work.