Title: Damaged Author: Amy Reed
Published: October 14, 2014
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 384
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:When Kinsey’s best friend Camille dies in a car accident while she was behind the wheel, she shuts down completely, deciding that numbness is far better than mourning. She wants to be left alone during the last few weeks of high school, but Camille’s mysterious boyfriend Hunter, who was also in the car that night, has a different idea.
Despite all of Kinsey’s efforts, she can’t shake Camille, who begins haunting her in dreams. Sleep deprived and on the verge of losing it, she agrees to run away with Hunter to San Francisco. As the pair tries to escape both the ghost of Camille and their own deep fears, Kinsey questions how real her perception of her friendship with Camille was, and whether her former friend’s ghost is actually now haunting her. Hunter, meanwhile, falls into a spiral of alcoholism, anger, and self-loathing.
Ultimately, Kinsey and Hunter must come to terms with what they’ve lost and accept that they can’t outrun pain.
Amy Reed is one of my favorite authors. Roadtrips are one of my least favorite plot devices. So I guess in the end things kind of balance out and we’re left with a book that’s pretty okay, but nothing more. I think I enjoyed most of Damaged, but I definitely had some fairly hefty issues when all was said and done.
This is a book about grief, this is a book about a roadtrip. This is a book about seeing ghosts and allowing them to manipulate you. Reed has the talent to pull this off, but I’m not sure she did, especially considering these characters. A lot of the time, they’re the very definition of “unlikable”, especially Hunter, but also Kinsey from time to time. And because they spend a good portion of the book trapped in the car together, I think the worst aspects of their personalities got brought to the fore (not to mention they’re both really screwed up anyway). So in terms of characters, I found it very hard to connect or empathize with Hunter and Kinsey.
Our narrator, Kinsey, is an uptight, judgmental introvert who hates change, is emotionally shut down, and is dealing with a lot of survivor’s guilt after her best friend dies in a crash where she, Kinsey, was the driver. And she’s also seeing Camille’s ghost. I didn’t have a lot of problems with Kinsey for much of the time, honestly, but towards the end of the roadtrip, she got cranky and childish and I was just done with her for a while.
Hunter, on the other hand, is a jerk, and I really fail to see what Kinsey saw in him that would make her pursue him romantically. He’s an alcoholic, suicidal, is rude, and has mega daddy issues. While it’s obvious that both of them were hurting throughout the book, and Kinsey was sometimes in the wrong, it was usually Hunter who came out with an absolutely nasty comment, time after time. And he only apologized once, when he’d gone so far as to make Kinsey cry; otherwise, Reed seemed to kind of brush past his assholery because of his sob story. Which was annoying. Yes, having a sucky life can make your attitude sucky, but that is a choice, as demonstrated by Damaged’s bonafide manicpixiedreamboy, Terry.
Terry is this kid whom Hunter and Kinsey find in Nebraska and give a ride to. He’s unnaturally cheerful about everything, is unrealistically childlike, and hopelessly nice. He pops into the story, teaches Hunter and Kinsey something about being happy, and then pops right back out. It was such an obvious plot device and I really had to roll my eyes. Only in ridiculous roadtrip novels does this happen.
Another issue I had was concerning Camille’s ghost, who is present throughout the narrative. Not only is Kinsey seeing and hearing the ghost, but was actually physically interacting with it, and often there would be bruises, etc. left behind after a visitation. Now, considering that Kinsey’s mother is bipolar, I thought it would have been very plausible for Reed to introduce a mental health component into Damaged, but she didn’t. At the end of the book, Kinsey “lets Camille’s ghost go” and then boom, all troubling psychological symptoms cease, with no further explanation. I was left confused and questioning, rather than satisfied by the character’s final closure.
Amy Reed is an excellent writer, and I will always hold to that. But Damaged by and large, was somewhat dissatisfying. The characters were too messed up to be emotionally reachable or sympathetic, and a lot of the plot devices weren’t well done. I enjoyed bits and pieces of the story, but it didn’t come together for me like I would have wanted.
