There was a question I kept asking myself while reading Into the Blue by Emma Brodie, and after thinking it over I’ve decided that the answer is fifteen. The question is: How young would the author of this book have to be in order for me to find this impressive?
To put it mildly, I was not a fan of this book, which reads like a self-insert wish fulfillment piece of fan-fiction. AJ, our protagonist, is the kind of girl who grows up dreaming of writing on SNL, not performing, and she just can’t understand why all these people keep telling her she’s good at acting and really beautiful even though she doesn’t see it, and she’s just so nice too, and so smart, but she’s a nerd! She likes this old sci-fi show that no one else cares about, so how could the rich and handsome Noah Drew fall for her? That’s so ridiculous, guys!
AJ, who is irritatingly called “Age” by most of the other characters, meets Noah Drew when they are both working at a video store. He is the scion of a famous acting family, so I guess he’s just working for kicks or something. And his aunt Eudora was in the old sci-fi show AJ likes! And he’s spending the summer with her, so AJ gets to meet her! Isn’t life crazy!
Of course, AJ and Noah do fall in love, but wait! There’s a complication! And they break apart, and come together, and break apart, and come together again and again and again. And there’s a terrible secret that totally explains Noah’s avoidant behavior! Except it really doesn’t because these two are very bad at communicating, like comically so, except everything is treated deadly seriously!
AJ and Noah cycle through their relationship pattern in increasingly unlikely best-case scenarios, from starring in a reboot/continuation of their favorite show to him hosting SNL while she’s writing there, to performing a partially improvised stage show together, during which they hash out their own relationship issues in such a way that could not possibly entertain an audience of paying customers.
Brodie populates the novel with a series of paper-thin non-entities, further heightening the unreality of this world. The sci-fi reboot cast is replete with characters whose entire part in the story is “bad friend”, “good friend” and “Asian woman who doesn’t ever speak and whose only character trait is sleeping with a white guy.” Whereas AJ’s family is comprised of “drunk dad”, “gamer brother”, “vaguely disabled sister”, “mom” and “sibling who suffers a tragic event for narratively convenient reasons.”
Everything in this book just feels like what a teenager would put in a book if they didn’t know what they were doing. Which, frankly, makes the numerous sex scenes quite jarring. I don’t object on prudish grounds, but the contrast between them and the rest of the book is quite jarring.
Into the Blue is clearly meant as a bit of escapism, though with a tragic edge, but it’s amateurish plotting and unremarkable prose will keep a lot of readers from joining in on the fun.
