Spontaneous by Aaron Starmer
Release: August 23, 2016
Publisher: Dutton
Goodreads
♥♥♥
Mara Carlyle’s senior year is going as normally as could be expected, until—wa-bam!—fellow senior Katelyn Ogden explodes during third period pre-calc.
Katelyn is the first, but she won’t be the last teenager to blow up without warning or explanation. As the seniors continue to pop like balloons and the national eye turns to Mara’s suburban New Jersey hometown, the FBI rolls in and the search for a reason is on.
Whip-smart and blunt, Mara narrates the end of their world as she knows it while trying to make it to graduation in one piece. It’s an explosive year punctuated by romance, quarantine, lifelong friendship, hallucinogenic mushrooms, bloggers, ice cream trucks, “Snooze Button™,” Bon Jovi, and the filthiest language you’ve ever heard from the President of the United States.
People blow up. Not just people, specifically high school seniors. That’s what Mara Carlyle, a senior in high school, deals with – the fact that she may explode before she graduates. It’s just her and her dwindling class as they try to figure out why it’s only the seniors in her high school. With a town slowly losing it’s population, either from abandonment or combustion, Mara is slowly losing herself and her friends. But she meets Dylan, a boy with many secrets, and wonders if she can have love, friendship, and her life.
I was so excited to find this at Half-Priced Books. When I heard about it on All the Books! I knew it was right up my alley and was happy to get a chance to read it. While reading it, I was a little disappointed.
While the writing was wonderful, I truly hated Mara Carlyle. Everyone she’s know since she was little is blowing up around her and I’m not sure if she’s even capable of speaking in anything but jokes and sarcasm. Although, it did make me wonder how anyone has been able to put up with me for the past twenty-six years, I just wanted the story to move to another point of view and that Mara herself would explode.
I found Mara annoying, blunt, and unrealistic. At some point someone calls Mara a child and it was then that I agreed with the character, thinking Mara acting childish when this was a moment for her to grow up. I found her relationship with Dylan to be unbelievable and forced. I didn’t think they had any chemistry and the relationship had no solid foundation – but that just might be the basis for a high school relationship. The only redeeming qualities were all the other characters, like the best friend, Tess.
But I did love the writing. That might only be because it was a tone I wish I used when speaking, all the sarcasm. I saw my thinking throughout this story, I saw things that I would say, feelings I would feel, and while it was fun it was also annoying. The writing did make it seem like this whole Spontaneous Combustion thing was a joke to Mara and that turned her heartless to me.
Spontaneous was heartbreaking. It didn’t try to be heartbreaking but it made me think of my last year in high school. Good 2009. It made me wonder and worry about my high school best friend (who is still my best friend seven years later) and how that would have affected our world then if Spontaneous happened to us. I’m certain we would have been blown to smithereens in the beginning but we both have little faith in ourselves.
I did find the story a bit slow in the beginning and near the end. There wasn’t much grit to sink my teeth into. Sure, it started off bloody with the first victim but it didn’t hold it’s momentum. The story came in waves and at a point went very still and it got to a point where I was forcing myself through it.
I truly wished I loved this book, I really wanted to love this book, but it was just okay to me.
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