Trigger (N. Griffin)

Trigger
N. Griffin
Athenium
Fiction, YA Thriller
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Didi can't even remember her mother, but can guess why she left: it's because of her. Because she's not smart enough, not fast enough, not a good enough daughter. Every day, her father pushes her harder, even as he forbids her to get too close to anyone, in town or at school. She runs laps around their country property, she plays chess at championship levels, she gets straight-A report cards (which was fine until her father realized she could get an A+), she even shoots and hunts, but somehow she's never good enough. Somehow she always deserves the wrong end of the "trouble stick" above the fireplace. Somehow she's still unworthy of his love, let alone her mother's.
Then she finally learns what her father is training her for... and everything changes.

REVIEW: An isolated girl, an abusive parent, a brutal mental and physical training regimen under the fist of a mentally unstable and intrinsically angry man... this book has all the trappings of a solid thriller, but somehow it comes across as hollow, stretched, and increasingly hard to believe. The short, choppy, chaotic chapters (narrated by an often-frantic audiobook reader) depict Didi's desperation as she tries (and often fails) to earn her father's approval and not break his ever-shifting rules. She fends off the few people who realize something's amiss, though it starts seeming a little odd that more people don't notice her increasingly obvious neglect and impending mental collapse and not one of them even tries pushing harder or investigating the situation in some way. She finds some solace in books and even an imaginary friend, but even those refuges are stripped away until nothing stands between her and her greatest fears. Her father is a vague smear of rage, increasingly difficult to swallow as a real person with real motivations and not a plot-shaped bogeyman. (I can't get into more details without spoilers, but he's almost a caricature by the end, and nothing really adds up about what he's doing or even why he's doing it.) The story starts feeling stretched and repetitive by the halfway mark, and the climax, while tense and exciting, feels a bit contrived. At some point, I just wasn't believing it anymore. (There was one chapter in particular that, especially in audiobook format, darned near drove me to give up because it was not only very irritating but went exactly nowhere with all that auditory irritation.) I've encountered worse stories, but this one ended up feeling like one of those empty thriller movies with a lot of quick camera shots and tense music and action sequences that can't quite hide an ultimately forgettable script.

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