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Formats
Ebook Details
  • 09/2014
  • B00O2BBLJW
  • 264 pages
  • $4.99
Jesse Arnold
Author
Alethea
Jesse Arnold, author

Adult; Mystery/Thriller; (Market)

Alethea Cooper is a sixteen year old gymnast gearing up for the 2012 London Olympics while her family still deals with the repercussions of the financial collapse from several years before. A car accident derails her career and while she comes to terms with a life where she never went to the Olympics and is now physically handicapped she develops super powers. The stresses of both the collapse of her life and development of her supernatural powers cause her mind to slowly fragment. Alethea’s perception of reality shifts and warps around her making her unable to tell what is real and what is not.
Reviews
Indie Reader

ALETHEA has perhaps the most gripping opening of any independently-published novel in recent memory.

A young boy and his father are out on what appears to be a pleasant, bond-forming rock climb, when out of nowhere the boy’s rope is abruptly severed. As the boy appears to plunge to his premature death, we meet the unnamed, chuckling villain who cut the rope. His motivations for this act will not become clear until roughly halfway through the book, at which point the narrative has become invested with the story of Alethea, an Olympic gymnast-trainee who suffers a catastrophic car accident on her sixteenth birthday. As she begins to recover from her near-lethal encounter with a guardrail, windshield, and a frozen lake, she starts to marvel both at her changed body and her peculiar therapist. The accident hasn’t crippled her, exactly: It has somehow bizarrely strengthened her. Why is her therapist so keen to help her remember the accident that she has blacked out of her memory? And why does she feel so strong?

The answers to these questions open up a second, far wilder narrative that transforms the book from conventional YA into supernatural fantasy/torture-porn mode. Suffice to say that Jesse Arnold not only knows how to tell a riveting story, but also how to blend genres without losing the thread of the narrative. Alethea, her parents, and her friends are so believably written that their evolution and transformation in the second half of the book are simultaneously shocking and seemingly natural.

ALETHEA’s combination of genuine emotional investment, intricate storytelling and off-the-charts imagination makes it one of the most unusual (if occasionally off-putting) reads of the year.

Kirkus Book Reviews

In this action-oriented debut thriller, a teenage girl suffers grievous injuries only to later discover that she has superpowers.

Sixteen-year-old Alethea is a superstar gymnast whose highly disciplined training has given her a cold, emotionally restrained manner. Unfortunately, her years of preparation for the Olympics come to naught when she’s in a traumatic car accident. She spends her recovery fending off the probing questions of psychiatrist Dr. Allen; she also tries to discover what it means to be a normal teenage girl, as she starts dating popular boy Chad. However, after a home invasion forces her to fight for her life, she discovers that she isn’t normal after all—she has superpowers. Specifically, she has superior strength, speed and stamina, as well as the ability to quickly recover from injuries, and she soon uses these traits to fight off otherworldly monsters that are invading her Michigan hometown. However, Dr. Allen still won’t leave her alone, and Alethea starts to wonder: Is she really a superhuman fighting evil monsters, or is it all just a hallucination caused by traumatic events? The answers are often confusing, frequently frustrating and occasionally compelling. Arnold offers a refreshing protagonist who’s not only a tough, strong girl, but also fully aware that she’s not very likable. Alethea’s attitude will appeal to readers who are sick of Bella Swan–like pushovers and hungry for darker, angrier heroines. And dark this story most certainly is: The number of pages devoted to torture (both psychological and physical), murder, rape and other unpleasant events may make it inappropriate for many young readers. Although it’s not a book one would want to curl up with before sleep, fans of dark, twisted genre fiction may find themselves absorbed in the mysteries of Alethea’s world and deeply invested in her fight to unravel them.

A deeply disturbing look at one girl’s battle with an assortment of demons.

Self-Publishing Review

Alethea Cooper considers herself a practical and average high-school girl, if a world-class gymnast on her way to the Olympics. Sixteen and already focused on her career, her life takes a hard turn as a car accident leaves her wheelchair-bound. Through her slow and painful discovery she begins to learn that there’s more to life than just her career as an athlete, but also love, the joys of youth, and hideous green monsters that only her emergent superpowers and the unwanted guidance of an overly-knowledged doctor can keep at bay.

Nobody ever said growing up was easy.

In general, Alethea by Jesse Arnold is a quintessentially ‘young adult’ fare, focusing on the ordinary life-turned-extraordinary of a teenage girl. Despite this usual set-up, it’s happily devoid of the popular stereotypes perpetuated by many of the top sellers of recent years. The book is genuinely rather realistic and unflinching in its descriptions of the lives and personalities of its not-entirely-likable characters.

Sixteen-year-old Alethea is vain, over-accomplished and decidedly bitter, and she doesn’t hide it. Her friends are shallow, her parents are work-obsessed, and she’s surrounded by people with an eye for results over happiness wherever there’s ever an overlap. However, they’re never shown as two-dimensional cut-outs to prove some jaded teenage viewpoint, instead real people who aren’t perfect and don’t need to be. There’s a reason for everyone being how they are and they’re not in a position to change as long as everything’s working right now, even when things start to change drastically and slide into the fantastic, for the most part. From able gymnast to trying to find a way to use the bathroom without embarrassment to reluctant defender against the supernaturally malign, Alethea maintains a dry, unashamedly teenage view of the situation that if nothing else crutches the emotions she has yet to learn how to handle, in a palpable way.

If John Green rewrote Buffy, Alethea might have had a kindred spirit – at least for part of the book. While starting rather typically, things become far more disturbing with time and the fever dream of reality begins to shudder and twist in dangerous ways. In a way the genre itself lends to the plot’s eventual shift and the style of writing and characterization slots into later questions about previous events. It’s well-planned, but very alive.

The book isn’t without its issues. The editing, especially during early chapters, leaves behind sentences that seem to skip a word or line-break where it would be expected, making verbal double-takes a little more frequent than they should be. The book also goes from cynically heartbreaking to genuinely dark, terrifying and potentially upsetting over time, and more sensitive readers shouldn’t feel ashamed about checking this book’s reviews before delving into a pretty disturbing text. Physical and mental trauma are a significant part of the book’s theme, and while it handles those with understanding, it doesn’t hold back. The biggest twists in plot and tone alike aren’t easily predicted from the start, for better or worse, but if the first chapters are denser than expected, the reader won’t find themselves over the hump any time soon.

Alethea is strange and surreal and yet all-too-familiar as a recognizable experience of teenage trauma in a world of conspiracy and darker things best left unquestioned. It’s a solid, mind-bending read for the more mature reader in touch with their cynical teenage side. A great idea well explored, and with an especially fantastic cover that totally wins my vote. A work that deserves to be picked up by those with a particularly intrepid mind.

Formats
Ebook Details
  • 09/2014
  • B00O2BBLJW
  • 264 pages
  • $4.99
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