YA readers who like good books must avoid bestselling poet Lang Leav’s tearful fiction debut

As the Screen Junkies team did for Fifty Shades of Grey, so shall I do for the EL James of non-erotic fiction, Lang Leav. I shall make a list of quotes that demonstrate the unappreciable, lazy, tedious, and unoriginal quality of her work – in this case, her first novel, Sad Girls.

• “It’s almost like there was only an up and down before him, but now I have discovered you can also go sideways too. Does that make any sense?”
• “Tears welled up in my eyes.”
• “Memories came to life around me like a ghostly matinee.”
• “Tears began welling up in my eyes again.”
• “I would have done anything for him, Audrey. Hell, I would have followed him right off a cliff. That’s what boys can do, Audrey; that’s the power they can wield over you. It’s like being under a spell.”
• “Tears welled up in my eyes.”
• “Sam promoted me (a teenager) to senior journalist, which involved interviewing famous authors and a bigger pay check. There was nothing I loved more than sharing a cup of coffee with a writer who had years of wisdom to impart.”
• “I don’t want to fight.”
• “Tears welled up in my eyes.”
• “Things with Rad were better than I could have imagined. There was a magical sense of discovery between us, like an archaelogical dig.”
• “I crashed into his chest with a soft thud, and my coffee tipped over the edges of the mug and spilled onto the linoleum floor in splotches like inkblots.”
• “Audrey Field sounds like a writer’s name. Like Charles Bukowski or Virginia Woolf. It’s almost like they were preordained.”
• “Tears welled up in my eyes.”

I’ll do anything within my power to stop people from buying and reading this book. The first thing I can do is pose a hypothetical scenario to you, readers, and ask you if you would do what a young man in the story does. Imagine this: you have, against your own intentions, been the direct cause of a person’s death. So at one point, you pour it all out in a Word document on your laptop, lending some abstract shape to your guilt.

So, now that you have put it down in words that you killed a person, would you or would you not go to the furthest extent possible to make sure no one ever found out? Would you just send the file to the Recycle Bin and be fine with it, like you were deleting a Skrillex song downloaded by mistake?

Losing the plot

Yes, our young man in Sad Girls (which should, in all honesty, have been called Sad Skills) does exactly that. After owning up to the fact that he has killed his girlfriend, he – most appropriately named Rad – sends the file to the Recycle Bin and stops there. What kind of lazy, unthinking device is that to move the plot forward? Of course someone stumbles upon it, rushes out into the night to show his friends, and ends up dying in an accident. Leav’s debut novel is more formulaic than shampoo.

I’m sure every 17-year-old who thought no one could be more interested in heartbreak than them was surprised to read Lang Leav. Because, lo and behold, here’s someone and she looks like she has already patented DIY Heartbreak kits and Ready to Eat Heartbreak-fasts. Jokes apart, the recurrence of sadness, romantic heterosexual frivolity, and purposefully unexplained emotions mounts to nothing short of a monomaniacal take on the concept of young love.

Leav writes in her novel, “Your first love isn’t the first person you give your heart to. It’s the first one who breaks it.” I wouldn’t personally single out Ms Leav for what she has done – plenty of writers fall prey to this tendency of having their characters philosophise like idiots. But since hers is the book I am reviewing, I have to say it is an incredibly unimpressive quote, with no reason to be reprinted on the first page of the novel. It is only going to make vulnerable teenagers write sentences that they’ll then call poetry.

I would urge everyone who has an urge to read Lang Leav to read an article by Joshua Lee, titled The Real Reason Why Lang Leav’s Poetry Is So Toxic. Lee writes about Leav’s poetry making her readers wallow in unrequited feelings: “I say ‘wallow’ because this is exactly what her poetry does. By describing her feelings rather than explaining them, Lang Leav tells us not to think.”

And it’s true. She does tell you not to think. Consider this four-liner: “What never was, what could have been, was more to me, than anything else.” There is a direct foreclosure of communication here, an indolent focus on hoping around, just imagining, probably twirling a lock of your hair around your fingers if you’re like one of Leav’s young women (I am just a little bit proud that I don’t know a single person who twirls their hair around their fingers when they are thinking.)

Stereotypes abound

Leav’s universe in Sad Girls is littered to downright filth with stereotypes of fiction-writing: there is a tight-knit group of three friends, one of whom is “naturally” the nurturing type, one the pensive type, and one the brash, unthinking type, and that’s all they are, respectively. There is a boyfriend whom the protagonist doesn’t love, and a “dark, brooding” guy with whom she cheats on said boyfriend.

Our protagonist, Audrey Field, by the way, is the most unappealing fictional character I have encountered in a long, long time. Not that Leav’s fiction is the kind of fiction I would ever pick up. But characters like Audrey Field are precisely the reason why. Audrey commits a mistake at the beginning of the narrative, and I had expected that across the novel, I would grow to understand why Audrey did what she did. By the end of the novel, all I ended up doing was loathing Audrey. The mistake she commits is such a bizarre one that it immediately precludes any possibility of empathy.

Audrey starts a rumour that she saw her classmate Ana having sex with her own father. Towards the end, when asked why she started the rumour, Audrey answers, “Kids say stupid things.” How very convenient. But I will agree with Audrey. She is a kid. She is annoying, cruel, selfish, and incapable of thinking. Lang Leav’s Sad Girls – in addition to her poetry – is rife with people who cannot help but be destructive and, if I’m to be snappy about it, incredibly suburban and white. The instructive side of all this doesn’t go away. Leav’s method of having her characters decidedly make all the wrong decisions has to mean something to her young readers, of whom there are many.

The thing is, sometime, we willingly pick up bad fiction. For a guffaw. Or because we’re bored. We flick through a Fifty Shades toilet paper roll, we stare at Twilight spines, and try to remember all the characters from The Princess Diaries. But Sad Girls is a book that won’t even make it to bad fiction, because it’s boring fiction, and it can neither provide a guffaw, nor a quick flash of insight, nor a burst of enthusiasm or excitement. It’s nothing but a sad fact that Sad Girls is now a book that more young people can buy and devour.

Sad Girls, Lang Leav, Andrews McMeel Publishing