The Secret of Ella and Micha
Jessica Sorensen
Sphere 2013
Ella and Micha have been friends forever, seeing each other
through their difficult childhoods.
However, after a series of tragic events, Ella realises that she needs
to leave her past behind and flees to college, leaving Micha behind with no
idea of where she is or whether she will ever return. While Micha has searched for her, suspended
in place by the night she disappeared, Ella has spent the year reinventing
herself but she can’t stay away forever and, come summer break, she finds
herself returning to a house full of bad memories and the boy next door who won’t
take no for an answer.
Ella is a character who will be quickly familiar to any
readers of the newly minted New Adult genre.
Damaged by a past that involves both violence and neglect, she’s trying
desperately to change her life. Brittle,
suspicious and fragile she’s also resourceful and smart – she got herself to
college, made new friends, funded herself and seems to generally have her head
screwed on the right way. However, she’s
clearly not come to terms with the events of her past and needs someone to help
her do so. So far, so NA protagonist. And she really doesn’t get much more
original. The best that can be said for
Ella is that she’s vaguely likeable and her character’s mental health is
handled with a degree of care. Her
treatment of Micha is understandable, while selfish, and her reluctance to
spend time with him a measure of her desire to escape a past she doesn’t really
understand.
Micha, sadly, is also all too familiar. When Ella returns he is understandably angry
and hurt, as well as worried. This could
have been a great way to create a sympathetic, conflicted character but instead
Micha reacts by turning into the rapidly emerging stereotypical male of the
genre. In order to get the attention of
a girl whom he knows to be deeply damaged, he flirts with people in front of
her, climbs unbidden into her bed (sadly another well-worn scenario in the
world of NA), slides his hand up her skirt in public and states that he “has to
have her”, seeming to truly believe that his moronic, testosterone fuelled
claim on her will somehow ease her troubled past. What a PRINCE! In the few chapters in which Micha manages to
get his mind away from his nethers, he actually comes across as quite a nice,
thoughtful guy and later does address Ella’s long-standing intimacy issues but
it’s too little, too late. To be honest,
the fact that he recognises that she has intimacy issues at all only sheds an
even nastier light on his possessive, pushy behaviour.
The Secret of Ella and
Micha is frustrating in that it has the potential to be so much more. The issues raised are interesting, the family
dynamics curious and the gorgeous best friend, desperately worried for his
neighbour should be breath-takingly romantic.
But this is New Adult, people, and so rather than focus on the
aforementioned plot points, The Secret of
Ella and Micha focuses largely on sex.
Now sex scenes are fun, hell, more books should have them, but New Adult
as a genre seems to use sex instead of storyline, regularly mixing it into
stories in which the girls are damaged and the boys are lined up to convince
them that therapy won’t work as well as a good dicking. Certainly, consensual sex has a role in these
storylines, with Ella and Micha it certainly represents her starting to
overcome some issues, but the way in which the men in NA push their desire onto
the women is, quite frankly, a bit icky – I don’t care how gorgeous they
are.
This isn’t the first NA book that has disappointed me. I keep reading the genre in the hope that one
will appear that will illustrate to actual New Adults (whatever they are) that
the start of your adult life isn’t necessarily filled with trauma and sexual
manipulation. Thus far, the best New
Adult books I’ve read haven’t been published under that particular genre label
but rather remained in the YA bracket.
Both Where She Went by Gayle
Forman and Lovely, Dark and Deep by
Amy McNamara look at issues surrounding a troubled past and an uncertain
future, both feature protagonists in their late teens/early twenties and both
feature sex; both, critically, handle it all far better than anything on the
NA shelves, including, sadly, The Secret
of Ella and Micha.
This review was brought to you by Splendibird who, in the pursuit of open-mindedness would like to state that she appears to be in the minority in her opinion. The Secret of Ella and Micha is available now. Thank you to the publisher for providing us with this title to review.
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