Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines
Lyn is having a hard time of it. Her seventh father, Tommy, a gladiator, is killed in battle, leading to a particularly sad chain of events. As she watches the arena from her seat, her father’s hand is lopped off, along with a bracelet that she had given him the night before the fight in order to bring good luck. Her father’s opponent picks up this bracelet. Now, since it belonged to Lyn, she must marry this man- her father’s murderer- under the rules of the gladiators.
Okay, so here goes a review of Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines that will knock your socks off and make you want to go out and buy the book right this instant. Naw, just kidding.
The first thing I noticed in the book is the way Haines addresses the matter of dialogue. There are no quotations. She uses a dash to signify when someone speaks as opposed to the quotation marks that we all know and love, as is shown in this excerpt:
-You okay? he asks me.
-What’s going on? Lloyd says.
-I think she needs more padding, Mark says.
That quote is typed exactly as it is in the book. I find three issues with this quote alone. First of all, she gives no way of showing when the speaker stops talking. In order to cover this up, Haines usually uses something like he/she said, which gets repetitive and boring and leads to her writing style becoming nearly unbearable to read (which is the second issue). The sentence structure doesn’t change much, either. The third problem is that Haines plays funny games with capitalization throughout the book. This is especially true when considering when Lyn thinks, which is expressed in italics (not weird at all), but there are no capital letters used (weird). She simply writes it as something like i went to the store. The fact that she didn’t capitalize the ‘I’s drove me crazy.
Moving on, the next thing I observed was the world itself. It seems incomplete and silly, to be completely frank. The idea of bringing the gladiators back is a really interesting one, but Haines didn’t quite pull it off. The way I feel about the whole thing is hard to explain, but I’ll try. In the novel, she depicts the gladiators kind of like they’re a joke in their world, but at the same time she depicts them like the battles are the balance between life and death but only really matter to those who are interested. To the outside world, it’s a game, but to the gladiators, they’re all praying that they don’t die before their contract is up. By expressing it like this, it becomes difficult for me to have sympathy for the characters because they choose to become gladiators for the sake of entertainment. There’s also kind of a funky prologue that’s long and boring and makes you feel like you are reading a history book for school as opposed to a novel to enjoy. The fact that this is necessary shows that Haines doesn’t introduce her world as well as she should have gradually throughout the book.
Next comes the characters. This is the one thing I actually kind of like about the book. Lyn is a fairly well-developed character. From the first few pages, you can find out who she is and Haines builds on this throughout the book. I absolutely love Lyn’s mentally challenged little brother, Thad, who makes psychic predictions (but that’s beside the point). There is only one character that I did not like, and that was Allison, Lyn’s mother. I could never quite grasp exactly who she was because Haines jumps around so much with her personality. By the end I still couldn’t decide if Allison was a selfish and superficial woman, or a sweet one. There’s no real distinction. Also, as a side note, the way Haines names the characters is weird. Some names sound like gladiator names (like Uber and Thad), while others are completely normal (like Mark and Tommy)… and a guy named Mouse? What?
Finally, I’ve got the overall reading experience. I groan when thinking about the day I wasted reading through this 324 page novel. The synopsis on the back cover gives you the illusion that the story is about Lyn becoming one of the very few female gladiators, when it’s really more of a psychological story about her family’s struggle. This angered me... a lot. The cover art depicts a girl clad in battle dress crouching down with a shield and ready to fight with a sign in the background saying Fight to the death tonight at 8pm. It makes you think she spends the whole book in battle with courage and a beautiful head of shiny, flowing hair. Actually, she spends pretty much the whole book bald, working in a fast food restaurant, and playing a video game called Second Life that I'm fairly certain was ripped off the manga (manhua, maybe?) 1/2 Prince. She only actually fights as a gladiator in the story for around two or three pages at the end of the novel, which totally crushed all of my hopes. Through the whole book I was forcing myself to keep reading in high hopes that it would all end with a bang, but what started as a lukewarm ember of excitement at the plot fizzled down to the temperature of a refrigerator by the last page, leaving me disappointed and angry that I’d wasted my afternoon.
In the end, there isn’t much good to say about it. I strongly advise you not to buy or read it, despite how good it might look from first impressions. I couldn’t concentrate because of the weird dialogue and bland writing, and the world and (some of) the characters are underdeveloped. I felt like it was a depressing ripoff of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, which I felt was a ripoff of Koushun Takumi's Battle Royale. What can you really say about a ripoff that was ripped-off a ripoff? Overall, I’d give this book a 0.5/5.
