Title: Getting Somewhere Author: Beth Neff
Published: January 19, 2012
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 448
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Four girls: dealer, junkie, recluse, thief.
Sarah, Jenna, Lauren, and Cassie may look like ordinary girls, but they’re not. They’re delinquents whose lives collide when they’re sent to an experimental juvenile detention program on a farm in the middle of nowhere. As the girls face up to the crimes they committed, three of them will heal the wounds of their pasts and discover strengths they never dreamed they had. And one, driven by a deep secret of her own, will seek to destroy everything they’ve all worked so hard for.
This book’s first issues arrive early, and continue on from there. The opening is extremely vague and nondescript. Some girls are on a bus, they arrive at some place, and some women greet them. That’s it. There is absolutely no sense of place or setting or causality in this opening, and therefore no reason for the reader to keep reading. Honestly, the only real “answers” I got about Getting Somewhere were found in the book’s jacket copy. ITS JACKET COPY. If I have to read the back of the book to even know what’s going on, you have done something seriously wrong as an author.
The setting, in actuality, is some sort of alternative juvenile reform program, set on a farm. But Neff never explains this—it could honestly be the moon or 1850s Canada or modern-day Australia for all the establishment of place she does. Just because this is “contemporary” fiction doesn’t mean setting doesn’t matter; it does. Nor does she really establish any credibility. The women who run the farm don’t seem to have any training or past experiences with helping girls, and the program itself seems to consist of letting these four girls sit around and do whatever the hell they want for however long they’re there. You expect me to believe that some court system sent convicted teenage felons off to a farm that has no security or any clear-cut therapy/rehabilitation curriculum and is run by three odd women who don’t seem to know what they’re doing at all? REALLY?
Throughout Getting Somewhere, Neff deals with admittedly serious topics such as child molestation, teen prostitution, drug addiction, and cutting with no respect or seeming awareness of what she’s talking about. They’re just there in the story to make things for the characters horrific, but it’s not dealt with in a way that seems like it furthers the story. The cutting in particular was really upsetting to me. One of the girls, Sarah, is a known cutter (this is on her records), but for weeks the adults on the farm never check up on her, and they only find out that she’s cutting again by accident when one of her infected cuts oozes through her shirt. By this time, Sarah’s running a fever and should seriously go to the doctor, but do the adults who are IN CHARGE do that? No, they don’t. What. The. Hell. You run a program for juvenile delinquents who have recorded mental health issues, you don’t check up on them, act completely flabbergasted when you discover that said issues exist, and then DON’T GET YOUR UNDERAGE CHARGES MEDICAL CARE?!?!
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
Cutting is a serious issue. And it’s the adult’s responsibility to A) report it, and B) get medical attention for a girl whose wounds are infected and who’s running a fever. I can’t believe that Neff would treat the issue so flippantly, insensitively, and without any true comprehension of how serious the issue was. That’s just straight-up offensive.
This isn’t real life, this isn’t plausible. This is bad writing, sloppy plot-building, and a ridiculously infantile world-view. Shame on you, Ms. Neff. That is fucking ridiculous, and that’s when I stopped reading the book. I really don’t think that the court system is going to put these girls with three such apparently incompetent, oblivious, not to mention untrained, caretakers. They’re FELONS, for fuck’s sake.
There is, furthermore, no characterization or character depth in Getting Somewhere at all. The three adult women on the farm are mostly didactic mouthpieces through which Neff spouts off whatever “lesson” she wants readers to learn—usually about organic farming. The four girls in the program are virtually indecipherable from one another. I have no idea which is which. The only one I could tell apart was the hopelessly flat “villain” character, Lauren, who’s a raging homophobe for no discernible reason at all, and is obsessed with outing the women who run the farm. Why? No freaking clue. There was no depth or plausibility in her actions, it just seemed like Neff needed a “bad guy” kind of character. Getting Somewhere’s weak 3rd person narration does an awful lot of telling about these seven female characters, but reveals absolutely no insight into them, their lives, or their emotions. They were figurative paperdolls—indistinguishable ones at that.
Beyond that, there’s absolutely no sense of urgency to the novel at all. The only source of conflict comes from Lauren’s cartoonish villainy. Otherwise, the girls show up at the farm…and do nothing. Weeks pass. There’s absolutely no sense of urgency or tension in Getting Somewhere, and with the lack of characterization or setting and completely implausible “alternative reform center”, this book is left scraping the bottom of the barrel for any redeeming quality that would potentially made Getting Somewhere worth my time.
Hint: there wasn’t one.
As I mentioned before, I stopped reading in earnest once the completely offensive bungling of Sarah’s cutting and illness happened, which was at 45% into the book. I skimmed the remaining 55% of Getting Somewhere, and it was even more atrocious than the rest.
This is a seriously fucking awful book. I recommend it to absolutely no one, and would be quite happy to point out much better young adult novels that deal with similar subjects.
