Paper Valentine by Brenna Yovanoff: I should have known

Paper Valentine 

by 

Brenna Yovanoff

I’m a fool guys. I could not stand the Replacement by Yovanoff but did I learn from my past experience? 

Look I picked this book up because it promised a girl solving a serial killer murder mystery with the help of the ghost of her best friend. And I stupidly figured ‘maybe the Replacement was just a bad egg’, ‘maybe this one will be okay’, let’s just get something out of the way first Y’all I was WRONG. 

Apparently Yovanoff’s go to plan is to promise mysteries and ghosts and lots of creepiness only to deliver on a strangely paced book that’s primarily about high school drama.

I don’t do High school drama books okay guys! High school is quite bad enough to live through without having to read about a fictional character’s terrible time of it. 

Look I’m going to say that my dislike of this book is all my fault. 

I should have realized that the things I didn’t like about the Replacement (the characters and frankly the way it was presented) weren’t things that Brenna Yovanoff would change from book to book. So yeah my pain is all my fault.

    Characters

Hannah: I didn’t like her. I though that main characters were supposed to be active. Even if they don’t want to be or they think they can’t they still have to do something! Look the book is 304 pages long (at least my version was) and when does our bonnie heroine decide to do something about the girls who are being brutally killed. Page 248. 

And why did she make this decision? Not because she wanted to help the girls or stop the psycho NO! It was because her delinquent boyfriend found one of the bodies and is now a suspect.

Hannah was a brat okay. She never stood up for herself, even though she was angry at her dead friend Lillian for doing the exact same thing. She was hypocritical and mean but she thought of herself as some sort of martyred saint 

I could not stand her.

Lillian: Okay so you see ‘ghost of best friend’ and ‘serial killer’ in the same sentence and what do you assume. That Lillian was killed by said serial killer and now she and Hannah will go on a wonderful little revenge trip. NOPE! Lillian was anorexic and she starved to death because NOBODY DID ANYTHING ABOUT IT! But . . . any sympathy I had for her was washed away by how much of a monumental jerk she was. 

She was a terrible person in life and she was a terrible person in death. In fact I swear she came back from the dead specifically to continue her life’s work of bullying Hannah.

Finny

 Hello meathead boyfriend. Honestly I couldn’t work up any sort of feelings for him. I couldn’t even hate him much less like him. He was there and he was boring.

Ariel: The kid sister who was really the only character I was actually concerned about. Probably because she was the same age as all the girls that were being stalked and killed. Did Hannah care? Nope. I feel like I’m saying ‘nope’ a lot. Anyway Ariel was adorable and absolutely hilarious. Actually she was probably the only person who had a sense of humor.

Likes

Frankly the whole premise was amazing: Now I still think that Lillian should have been murdered instead of just . . . haunting Hannah for no particular reason. 

Still I love the idea of solving murder mysteries with the help of ghosts. Too bad the book spent most of its time ‘building up’ some Insta-love between Hannah and Finny or trying to talk about ‘difficult’ topics that I don’t care about. You know how you had to read books in high school literature classes that seemed to care more about their agenda/moral-point than actually crafting an interesting story.

 That’s this book.

At least for me it is. Without the emotional connection I just can't get myself to care about the message no matter how 'amazing' it is. 

Dislikes

Lillian: I just NO. This is not how friends work. She was a bullying, nasty, little witch and I swear as hard as I tried to work up some sympathy for her it was dashed away every time she spoke. 

As far as I can tell YA has two major problems with their friend characters. They’re either useless (Dorian and Ivy from the Girl at Midnight come to mind) or they’re just downright terrible friends and often terrible people to boot.

Once Hannah started to act it took her about five pages to put together who was the killer: Which was really kind of anti-climactic. I waited for two hundred and fifty pages for her to do something and that I got . . . five minutes? maybe? of detective work.

The Freaking serial killer was the stupidest part of the entire book: Spoilers for the ending FYI but don’t worry too much I will reveal no names. Look if you’re going to build up this terrifying mysterious person who enjoys killing middle school girls and scattering toys around them you’d better delivers something amazing. What I just wrote up there, that’s creepy as all get out. 

What’s not creepy is that it was done by two high school boys. Why they decided to start killing kids? Who knows it’s not really explained. 

Okay it actually is but it’s a terrible explanation.

So this punk kids says that he started killing because the adrenaline was addicting (that is actually true). But how did you get addicted in the first place? And those silly toys weren’t explained either. Hannah says that they represent childhood but what? First off how do you know that and second WHY? 

Honestly it’s like Brenna Yovannoff just sort of looked up a bunch of stuff on serial killers and stuck them together. Frankly the second boy, the one who actually put out the toys and the said paper valentine, was the more interesting from a psychological point of view but I was never given the opportunity to see into his head. The first boy was just some sort of psychopath who did it for fun or something which was terribly boring.

Alright I feel terrible. 

I shouldn’t bash the book. After all I didn’t like the author’s other work so why should I think I would like her others? So there is nobody to blame but myself for disliking the book. 

I expected a mystery a la Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie but I shouldn’t have. What Replacement and Paper Valentine have in common is that it’s more about exploring certain characters as opposed to the actual plot that’s on the blurb. Which is fine I suppose because in the end it really is all my fault.