Author, Shevi Arnold, sent me a copy of her novel Why My Life Sucks (The Legend of Gilbert the Fixer).
Description from Goodreads:
Gilbert Garfinkle is the ultimate tech geek. He has a compulsive need to take apart, figure out, and fix things; and he dreams of one day fixing the world. But a funny thing happens on the way to the future. Gilbert encounters the one thing he’ll never be able to figure out: a gorgeous, teenage vampire girl named Amber, who wants to turn Gilbert into her platonic BFF–literally forever! This leaves the ultimate geek pondering life’s ultimate question: “Why me?”
Review:
I have to admit to being caught completely off guard by this one. While I wasn’t expecting it to be bad or anything, otherwise why read it, I was expecting it to be really juvenile. (In he sense of written for younger readers, not written by a juvenile writer or someone with juvenile skill.) And while I have no doubt tweens could read and enjoy the book, as a 35 year old woman I did too.
Gilbert has a royal sense of humour that works really well as a narrator. He got quite a few laughs out of me. I also really liked him as a character. He is an über geek and comfortable with that. It’s a persona he cultivates and enjoys. It would be really hard not to like him. That pretty much made up for the fact that I so disliked Amber. She is well written and the author gave her just enough history to be forgivable. I think the reader was supposed to buy into the idea that she was so desperately in need of protection that her actions were excusable. But I didn’t like her. Personally I never was able to let go of her determined naivety and amazingly selfish behaviour and mindset—borderline narcissistic really. She made herself a sugar daddy (or maybe just a father) as far as I was concerned, though I’m fairly sure I wasn’t supposed to see it this way. I think it was supposed to appear preordained and therefor the ends would have justified the means. Bah!
I also quite enjoyed all of the geeky media references. There are a lot of them and some are quite subtle. I probably didn’t even catch all of them. I did think Gil’s genius and tech were a little over the top. Good for for comedic value but too advanced to be believable. I really look forward to the next in this series. There is definitely something hinky about Uncle Ian and the Liebermans. I have my guess and I can’t wait to see if I’m right.
On a side note: the cover does make sense after reading the book.