This week's book is Pivot Point, a young adult novel by Kasie West.
Addie lives in a compound for people with special abilities, where she lives a surprisingly normal life doing normal high schooler things, except that some of the football players are telekinetic and her dad can tell when she's lying and her best friend is always offering to erase her bad memories for her. Addie's gift is that, when faced with a decision, she can look into the future, living out the two two options. When her parents announce they are getting a divorce and her dad is moving out of the compound to live with the norms, they leave Addie the decision about where she'll live. She then lives out both possibilities, both of which have love interests and adjustments and high school shenanigans.
Even though this has a high concept sci-fi set up and even though half of the characters have powers, the novel has its roots firmly in contemporary YA. The people in the compound have abilities, but since they all have abilities and they all know everyone has abilities and they've all grown up in a culture of people with abilities, it's almost a non issue. It's just side notes that the cheerleaders are using their emotion powers to make the crowd excited at football games. It's so normal to Addie that it's not a big deal on which the narrative focused. Instead, the focus is on the characters' interactions as they do normal teenager things.
In fact, it's kind of like two contemporary YA stories as she lives through both time-lines, with the chapters switching back and forth. In one she's a new girl, trying to make new friends, discovering that the football players from her old school are purposefully injuring good players from other schools, and hearing through ever more infrequent phone calls about how her best friend's life is imploding. In the other story, she's wooed by the popular quarterback, has great times with her best friend, and deals with her newly terse relationship with her mother.
This is a story about Addie and how she wants to live her life, and her life is a mostly fluffy romp where most of the conflict is relateable teen drama. She doesn't have world shattering problems, and uses her power in an analogously low-stakes way.
It would be a completely different book, but I do wish she would use her powers to solve murders. Having lived through both time-lines, she (and the reader) get enough of the information to piece together what happened in a murder case happening in the background. Any one time-line only gets half the story, but together she gets the full picture. It seems obvious to me that she should report what she knows and stop it from happening. She argues that failing to live out the future exactly as she's seen it will cause the whole thing to fall apart, therefore all she can do is decide which of her two choices she'll make. But I would argue that she could report a crime and then do the search again to see that she hasn't messed up anything too badly.
My other hesitancy about this book is the emphasis put on football. I'm from Texas. Football was a big thing. My school was not this into football. The players were not in a clique that all the ladies pined for and could get away with anything because football. Maybe it was because our football team sucked, or maybe it was because everyone was a nerd (including the players), but for me the trope of the popular football players who rule the school rings false and feels like a cliche.
That's probably just me, but there was an awful lot of football for not being a novel about football.
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Next week: This Savage Song, urban fantasy by Victoria Schwab.
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