A Book Review - The Body by Carol Ellis (Point Horror)

Having just reviewed Carol Ellis' Silent Witness, I feel funny about giving this a lower score, because it's got a much more interesting plotline. Melanie is new in town, and gets a job reading to Lisa, a teenage girl who was paralysed after a fall a few weeks (or months?) back. Nobody knows quite why Lisa fell, but she's scared of something or someone. Through a series of incomprehensible (to me) events, Mel realises that Lisa is trying to tell her something, and they work out a system where Mel reads to Lisa - Jane Eyre - and Lisa makes subtle (so the cameras  - she lives in a mansion with security cameras everywhere - don't catch them) hand signals when there's a place in the book that pertains to her accident.

Lost? Yeah, so am I.

I like the idea. I do. I just think it's too ambitious for a short teenage book. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person, but I'm fairly sure that if I were reading to a paralysed, mute girl - Jane Eyre or any other book - I wouldn't interpret her lifting her hand on certain sentences to mean anything other than that she was trying to move. And I'm almost certain that I wouldn't be conspiracy-minded enough to make a list of all the places she signalled - sentence fragments like "somebody has plotted something" or "and dangerous he looked: his black eyes darted sparks" or "the stranger who might be dying" - and put them all together and work out that Lisa's "accident" was a result of her fleeing from someone who'd already murdered someone else.

I actually do like this plot. I just don't like it for a 195-page teenage book. I think it would work really well if it were a) 200-400 pages longer; b) aimed at a slightly older audience; and c) the characters either had some sort of pre-existing relationship, or the protagonist was a codebreaker or a linguistics specialist or something that would give them an edge on solving puzzles.

But I can't buy that an eighteen-year-old girl, with no experience at this sort of thing, who had never met the paralysed victim, could firstly figure out that Lisa was trying to communicate, secondly place the fragments together to work out that a crime had taken place, and thirdly work towards figuring out who the criminal was, just because Lisa lifted her hand a bunch of times.

Mel does do all this, though, and discovers that Lisa fell while running to get home because she herself had discovered a terrible secret - that someone had committed a murder and buried the body on her property. Worse, Lisa knows who the murderer is - and s/he's close to home...

So yeah. Readable, even intriguing, but not believable.

Verdict: Too ambitious, although points for trying. The bare bones would be a good start for a longer adult novel.