Dead Air is a YA novel that riffs on the craze for true crime podcasts: MacKenzie Walker receives an anonymous tip on her college radio show that a decades-old murder at a horse farm may not be quite as solved as everyone believed. As she begins to investigate, aided by the son of the Dead woman, she finds herself enmeshed in a world of horse-racing dynasties, secret societies, and dirty cops. Plus, there’s an accompanying podcast where MacKenzie shares (some of) her discoveries. (This was actually what lured me in on Dead Air. What can I say, I’m a sucker for multimedia storytelling.)

Since I’m not a true crime buff and have never listened to a single episode of Serial (YEAH YOU HEARD ME), I can’t speak to Dead Air‘s success as a fictional piece of true crime. But the podcast is slick and fun and very good at imitating the genre of podcast it’s selling itself as. True crime people, please let me know your views.

Where Dead Air really shone for me was as a mystery. I love mysteries that explore weird subcultures, so I was really into all the stuff about Peg (the dead lady) trying to clean all the doping out of the horse-racing business. The authors also have fun with the metafiction of MacKenzie’s podcast: Because she’s trying to solve this murder in a podcast format, there are repercussions for her, the people around her, and the crime she’s investigating. Which is fun! As a reader and listener, I felt delightfully (because it’s fictional) complicit in the consequences that came from the podcast. I also love that there are some intense last-minute revelations. From the word go, MacKenzie has a good guess at the murderer’s identity: The husband always did it. The more she investigates, the more she finds ways that this crime touched her own life and the lives of her family members. It’s personal. Those reveals are parceled out nicely, leading up to a terrific climax.

For me, the romance worked less well. I don’t mind the frequency of romance plotlines in YA novels, but I was never terribly committed to MacKenzie’s romance with Ryan. When she begins to suspect him of being involved in Terrible Events (I won’t specify what those are), I couldn’t understand why she was still romantically interested in him. He never seemed interesting to begin with!

A bigger failing for me — and this should also serve as a trigger warning — was the depiction of suicide in Dead Air. A character appears to die by suicide over the course of this book, and MacKenzie thinks it was actually a murder. I know the apparent-suicide-actually-murder is a staple of murder mysteries, but a few recent irresponsible portrayals of suicide in popular media (looking at you, A Star Is Born and A Million Little Pieces) have me feeling twitchy about using it as a plot device/plot twist.

MacKenzie learns the method the person used, and she describes that on the podcast in specific, explicit detail. There is a lot of research indicating that explicit depictions or descriptions of the method someone used to kill themselves correlates with an increased risk of suicide contagion; multiple organizations that deal with suicide have therefore recommended that media outlets not do this. I really, really wish Dead Air had also not done it, even though — spoiler! — the character ends up not really having died by suicide.

Another trigger warning: This story deals with drug addiction, albeit in a more engaged and thoughtful way than how it deals with suicide. MacKenzie’s cousin died from a drug overdose, and that motivates MacKenzie’s behavior and choices in various parts of this story.

Note: I got Dead Air comped to me by the folks at Serial Box for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

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Hilary McKay’s The Exiles and The Exiles at Home

Not as good as the Casson books.  In particular, The Exiles was not as good as the Casson books.  The eponymous kids are not as fun and sympathetic as the Cassons, and I identified passionately with the paucity of books the poor girls were experiencing, though not to the enhanced enjoyment of the Exiles books themselves.  Only two books each for a summer vacation, they had.  It’s iniquitous to deprive children of books to that extent.  The Exiles at Home was touching, because the protagonists wanted something I also wanted them to have, and it made me cry.

Noel Streatfeild’s When The Sirens Wailed

Merciful God, this book was depressing.  Normally Noel Streatfeild’s books have fully realized children characters, but this did not.  Normally they allow a certain degree of stability for the children as far as housing is concerned, but this did not.  It was a vivid depiction of England’s suffering during World War II, and it made my heart sad.  Except occasionally there would be a particular detail that charmed me, like when all the boys in the village where the kids got evacuated were told to turn the street signs in the wrong directions, and the girls in the village were taught to tell Germans lies about how to get to London.  That sounds awesome.

Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth

The conclusion is inevitable.  Zombies are not for me.  Here I have seen all these reviews all over the blogosphere in love with The Forest of Hands and Teeth.  If I do not love it, what conclusion can be drawn?  Only that zombies, they are not for me.  Zombiepocalypses.  I do not love them.  Zombies are not all about redemption.  Dystopia and branding of sentient aliens and human women, I’m all over that (that was spoilers for something but I’m not saying what and thus it doesn’t count).  Zombies, no.

Trying to Get Some Dignity: Stories of Triumph Over Childhood Abuse, Richard & Ginger Rhodes

Yeah, I know.  There was no way this was going to be not depressing.  I was reading it for research, and it didn’t even tell me anything I didn’t already know.  I should have confined this weekend’s research to books about gender roles in fairy tales.  Because there is nothing at all depressing about gender roles in fairy tales.  If there’s one uplifting subject of study in this world, it’s gender roles in fairy tales.

Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories

Oh yes, and I read this as research too, not at the library but at Bongs & Noodles, in a comfy armchair in the Christian Inspiration section because it was the only free chair, and not really read it but more zipped through looking for things that I would find useful.  For a book about evolutionary psychology, I found this book to be surprisingly understandable, and of all the books herein mentioned, On the Origin of Stories is the one with which I was least discontented (by far).  My favorite thing that I wrote down for myself to remember from this book is that people find stories most memorable when the characters of the stories cross ontological boundaries.  That is an interesting fact.

Noel Streatfeild’s Tennis Shoes

I read this the night before leaving home, and I stomped around the house for a while carrying on about how disappointing I found it. I did find it extremely disappointing.  The father pressures his kids into playing tennis because he wants them to be tennis champions for the glory of England, and none of them are particularly fantastic at it.  There is no excuse for such blatant badness as there was in Tennis Shoes!  She wrote it in between two of her most excellent books, Ballet Shoes and Circus Shoes (or The Circus is Coming as it was also titled)!  Why, Noel Streatfeild?  Why?

Does it count as a reading slump if you are reading loads of things, and they are simply failing to satisfy you?  Also: Given my extreme dissatisfaction, might it not make sense to order Monsters of Men after all from England?  And just buy it again when it comes out here in the fall so that I will have matching copies of the whole series?

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