Chapter 2: The Circus

First off, apologies for the long silence!  I've been in the middle of moving and starting law school and working on a story of my own and (did I mention) starting law school, so things have been a little hectic.  For some reason making fun of bad books grounds me a little bit, so I'm going to try to be a little better about keeping this going.

Last time, we met our viewpoint character--Kelsey Hayes, a seventeen-year-old girl who voices every inane thought that enters her brain.  I mentioned before that I don't think the first-person viewpoint does this book any favors because I don't enjoy being in our protagonist's head.  First person narration is really hard to pull off unless you have a very likable protagonist.  Books like those in The Dresden Files are fun to read because Harry has an entertaining internal monologue (even though they do attract their fair share of criticism because of Harry's self-admitted chauvinism).  Kelsey offers very little insight to the events in the story, which will become very evident in this chapter, and she's not even fun to be around.

Granted, at least Tiger's Curse makes use of first-person POV by having a distinct voice, even if it's one I don't particularly care for.  It at least sounds like a single character narrating it versus, say, The Hunger Games, where Katniss is such a non-entity as a character that the viewpoint seems kind of pointless.  Or Twilight, I guess.

And at least it's not in present tense.  If there's a narration style worse than first-person present-tense, I haven't been able to find it.

(That's also personal preference, by the way.  I'm sure it's been done well, but I really don't care for it.)

Moving on from that tangent!

Chapter 2: The Circus

I hate this chapter.  Nothing really crazy happens in it, which is nice, but it's honestly kind of a problem.  At least bad plot is still plot.  Nothing important happens in this chapter.

Okay, she sees the tiger that's on the cover, but she doesn't interact with it at all.  Which makes the first twelve or so pages of this chapter pointless filler.

The chapter starts off like this:

My alarm startled me out of a deep sleep at 4:30 in the morning.  It would be warm outside today, but not too hot.  Oregon almost never got too hot.  An Oregon governor must have passed a law a long, long time ago that said Oregon had to always have moderate temperatures.

I think that speaks for itself.

Actually, no, it doesn't.  We have a couple of possibilities here: either Kelsey is making a deliberate joke here, or she is trying to make a sincerely clever remark about the weather.  It doesn't work either way.  If there's a joke, there's no clear punchline--is the funny part supposed to be that politics is involved in legislating the weather?  But it somehow works and makes things not hot?  What's the connection between gubernatorial decisions and the weather? Putting the two next to each other doesn't make a punchline, it's just a weird statement to make.

If it's supposed to be wry commentary, it doesn't work for the same reasons.  It's just a baffling statement that doesn't do much other than break my immersion in your story in a spectacularly odd way.

I've already written like 600 words about this chapter and I haven't gotten past the first paragraph.  Hopefully it gives a bit of a look into the vapid narration that I cut out a lot of during my summaries.

Kelsey starts to get ready for her first day of work at the circus, and it honestly rivals Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way in terms of how the clothing is described.  Here's a bit from My Immortal that describes Ebony's wardrobe:

On the night of the concert I put on my black lace-up boots with high heels. Underneath them were ripped red fishnets. Then I put on a black leather minidress with all this corset stuff on the back and front. I put on matching fishnet on my arms. I straightened my hair and made it look all spiky. I felt a little depressed then, so I slit one of my wrists. I read a depressing book while I waited for it to stop bleeding and I listened to some GC. I painted my nails black and put on TONS of black eyeliner. Then I put on some black lipstick. I didn't put on foundation because I was pale anyway.

And here's Kelsey's description:

What exactly does one wear to a circus job?  Not knowing what was appropriate, I tugged on a short-sleeved T-shirt and a good pair of work jeans.  Then, I slipped my feet into tennis shoes, toweled dry my hair, and wove it into a quick French braid that I tied off with a blue ribbon. Next, I applied some lip gloss, and voila, my circus primping was complete.

The resemblance is uncanny.

Kelsey takes the time to insult Sarah and Mike's lifestyle two more times before she leaves for the circus.  No joke, first she calls them crazy for going running in the mornings, and then she almost throws up drinking soy milk. It's not that bad!

The circus is apparently pretty run-down and gross.  "Circus posters hung everywhere; there was at least one large poster on every building.  Some featured acrobats.  Some had pictures of jugglers."  I can picture this so clearly.  Seriously, what's the point of writing a description if the descriptions are so devoid of any substance they don't do anything to tell me about the location?

And, suddenly, there's a return of an old friend: Kelsey's shitty joke about elephants!  "I didn't see any elephants and breathed a sigh of relief.  If there had been elephants here, I probably would have smelled them already." I love this joke so much!  It's the fourth time I've heard it in sixteen pages!

After more bland description of the circus, Kelsey finds herself at the ringleader's trailer, and.  Uh.  It's not great.

Black, curly hair covered his scalp, but the hairline ended just a little bit past where it should be. . . A thin black mustache with both ends waxed to thin points stuck strait out from either side of his upper lip.  He also had a tiny square goatee patch on his chin.

Wa-hoo!

Or maybe he's more like Luigi since he's pretty tall and his mustache is thinner.

I think Mario might less of an Italian stereotype than Maurizio, though.  He speak in the kind of broken English that only people who have never spoken to a bilingual person would write. You know, where random words and phrases are just replaced with the other language and then immediately repeated in English if the word is too different.  In addition to that, Maurizio speaks like an alien who has a rough approximation of this "hu-man spee-ch."

"Ah, Fantastico!  How propitious!  Welcome to the Circus Maurizio!  We are a little, how you say, short-handed, and need some assistenza while we are in your magnifica citta, eh?  Splendido to have you!  Let us get a started immediatamente."

Now, I'm no expert in Italian, but I don't think just sticking words in at random would be grammatically correct.

Other than that, what's the point of Maurizio being so...like this?  We're either supposed to take him seriously as a character, or he's supposed to be a source of comedy.

He's too much of a caricature to be seen as an actual character.  He's a big, boisterous Italian stereotype.  He's exactly what you would picture when you hear the phrase "Italian ringmaster," so he doesn't get anything interesting to do. He's a plot device that's so inconsequential to the plot he could be cut out entirely and literally nothing would change.

It isn't clear what is supposed to be funny if he's supposed to be there for comedic purposes.  Are we supposed to think he's funny purely because he's a (kind of offensive, honestly) Italian stereotype?  Are we supposed to say, "Ha ha, look at this big fat man!  He's constantly complimenting how pretty our seventeen-year-old protagonist is, and that's something that all Italians do!  What observational comedy and wit!"  Because I'm not comfortable saying that.  Are we supposed to think it's funny that his English is bad?  Because that's also not funny!

In short, this character has no dramatic or entertainment purpose and I hate him.

He introduces Kelsey to a girl called Cathleen and waddles off to go fight koopas or something.  Cathleen is also pointless, and only exists to introduce Kelsey to Matt, the son of the animal trainer at the circus, who is also pointless, so that Matt can introduce Kelsey to his dad, who is only slightly less pointless.

Actually, I take that back, Cathleen exists to make one (1) bad joke and for Kelsey to feel superior to.

"Welcome to the big--er, well, small top!"

Har-dee-har.

I could tell you about how Cathleen is related to a bunch of the acrobats at the circus, and that they're all related to Maurizio somehow, and that Cathleen has a crush on Matt, but I won't because it'll waste your time, since these characters poof out of existence the minute Kelsey leaves the circus in a couple of chapters.

"Hey, Matt," Cathleen said as we grabbed the bottom of the booth to help him.

She was blushing.  How cute.

Thus ends Cathleen's relevance to the story.

Matt and Kelsey set things up for the circus that evening, which is glossed over in one sentence.

Kelsey decides to complain some more about the back-breaking labor involved in moving boxes around.  She reminisces about her parents, which would be a good place to develop her character or talk about her relationship with her parents a little.  But this is Kelsey, so it's just pointless:

Dad always used to say, "Hard work keeps you grounded" whenever Mom would come up with a massive new project like planting a flower garden.  He was infinitely patient, and when I complained about the extra work, he'd just smile and say, "Kells, when you love someone, you learn to give and take.  Someday that will happen to you too."

Somehow I doubted this was one of those situations.

Then why bring it up in the first place?  It has nothing to do with anything that's happening!  It's just taking up space!  AARRRGGGHHH

Also, everything has to relate back to romance!  Note the SUPER SUBTLE FORESHADOWING.

Okay, so the circus starts and Kelsey gets swarmed by a bunch of children.  She complains about her work again.  You signed up for this, dummy!

I'll spare some of the details unless you really want to hear about blowing up balloons and which colors are the most popular, which is what I really wanted to read when I picked up a supposedly fast-paced whirlwind tour of India with a magical hot were-tiger.

After some more filler, the circus proper starts.  Thrill as a circus you didn't want to go to is described like a bowl of lukewarm oatmeal!

As we sat down, Matt's dad came into the ring to do his dog show.  Then the clowns came out again and played various tricks on audience members.  One threw a bucket of confetti over the kids.

It's like I'm actually there.

Now we actually get to see the tiger that's been built up this entire time.  Great!  But first we have to sit through an entire paragraph of badly-written broken English from our old friend Maurizio.  It is very frustrating to read:

"And now...the highlight of our programma!  He was taken from the harsh, wild giungula, the jungles, or India and brought here to America.  He is a fierce hunter, a cacciatore bianco, who stalks his prey in the wild, waiting, watching for the right time, and then he...springs into action!  Movimento!"

I hate him.

A cage gets brought out into the arena, "shaped like a giant upside-down bowl with a chain-link fence tunnel attached to one side."  So, like an igloo?

This time, instead of getting too little description in one sentence like the other acts, now we get too much description.  Nine paragraphs.  It's all just a dry list of things that happen, too, with very little reaction from Kelsey while it's happening.  It's pretty standard circus fare--jumping between stools, roaring on command, and letting the trainer stick his head into his mouth.

I clapped for a long time, totally in awe of the great beast.

What exactly is so awe-inspiring? Maybe it's just because I feel bad for animals in circuses because they're not really treated very well a lot of the time, but I wouldn't be so impressed by this.

But wait!  Something mysterious is happening!

Just at that moment, a soft breeze wrapped around me carrying the scent of night blooming jasmine and sandalwood.

Um, is there a distinction between night-blooming jasmine and just regular jasmine?  And you're able to tell the difference just by smelling it?  Okay.

Anyway, Kelsey is a little freaked out because no one else seemed to notice it.  She thinks, Huh!  I must have hypersensitivity disorder.  Fun fact, hypersensitivity disorder is another way to refer to arthritis, so I have no idea what she's babbling on about!

The show was over, and I was officially crazy.

You and me both.

Closing Thoughts

In just under twelve pages, this chapter turned my brain into a brain smoothie.  I would be a bit more forgiving of it if the entire story took place in the circus and these characters were actually present for more than a few chapters.  But as it is, none of this is important.  The only important thing that happens in this chapter is the tiger showing up. The characters introduced are all pointless, and are either such non-entities that I forgot they existed despite having read through this book a couple of times at this point or such intrusive caricatures that I can't stand them being there.  And they don't!  Do!  Anything!!!

Next up is Chapter Three: The Tiger.  At least plot happens there.  Not a lot, but some.