Why Some Books Really Can be a Bad Call

https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Call-Stephen-Wallenfels/dp/1484768132

Why Some Books Really Can be a Bad Call

       Bad Call by Stephen Wallenfels is a young adult novel about four teenagers going on a backpacking trip in Yosemite. Colin, Grahame, Ceo and Rhody are all on the tennis team at their school, and they had made a bet over a game of poker to go on a camping trip together one weekend. However, Rhody dropped out, so, to the other boys’ surprise, Ceo invites a seemingly random girl who he met at a summer camp named Ellie to come along with them in place of Rhody. After pulling a lot of tricks and sneaking behind their school’s and parents’ backs, they finally leave for Yosemite. 

I started reading this book and found it mediocre. I kept reading, and the more I read, the less I enjoyed it. Despite having little interest in the story, I decided to keep reading a bit further into the book before I quit. It is quite rare that I do not read through an entire book, but this one I really just had some issues with, so I will explain why I eventually just dropped it. 

The first reason that I wasn’t enjoying Bad Call was that I honestly just found it boring and slow. Many books are slower paced but may still be interesting or have an important point to make, but this just seemed too drawn out without much interesting content. One example that displays this is that Wallenfels takes nearly 80 pages, or 17 chapters just for them to arrive in the park which is approximately a quarter of the book. This section is focused just on them packing up and making plans to go. Some of the book is dedicated to showing how Ellie is getting ready, and her thoughts on the trip, which I thought was nice to have two perspectives, but this too is drawn out. Reading about about past tennis tournaments, what kind of bug spray they Grahame will pack, and who will carry the food, for a quarter of the book doesn’t seem to have much significance to the overall plot. One of the things I look for first in a good book is its ability to hold my attention and keep me waiting for more, which I have to say this book simply failed at. I didn’t see any way that I could really benefit from this book, so I stopped reading. 

The next aspect of Bad Call which I found annoying was how unoriginal it was, and how many cliché aspects it had. The first character that displays very cliché behaviors is Ellie. She doesn’t ever wear makeup, wears cargo pants, is very passionate about animals and the environment, and an avid feminist almost to the point of having a strong bias against men. While none of these things are actually bad, and some of them I would even argue are positive traits to see in books today, all of these combined and the general way the author describes her definitely fits the stereotype of the super progressive, nature-loving girl. When explaining to Colin some things she doesn’t like she says, “Cigarette butts, They take ten months to ten years to biodegrade and are a fire hazard. Why isn’t that considered littering? […] number one on my all-time love-to-hate list: elephant poachers. Don’t get me started on them,” (Wallenfels 133). These characteristics fit perfectly into the stereotype. The other character was Ceo and he fir the “playboy” stereotype pretty clearly. In the book he is described as “picking up girls” left and right, constantly in a relationship with some new conventionally attractive girl and being somewhat of a womanizer. While how cliché something is can be hard to concretely describe and show through specific quotes, I definitely got the feeling that the author just copy and pasted his characters leaving them with no depth. Watching as these characters were described, I couldn’t help cringing at the lack of originality.

Overall, I don’t think this is inherently a terrible book, I just didn’t find it worth my time and believe there are many books out there that are actually written well. I wanted to show that it is ok to be critical of the literature we read and that sometimes books really aren’t worth finishing, which I could demonstrate through Bad Call.