Touching Melody

by Rashelle Workman

[Leah]

I love the New Adult genre, it’s been an interesting and very enjoyable genre to get into and I’ve enjoyed most of the books I’ve read. There’s been one so far that hasn’t floated my boat, and I can now add a second to it in Touching Melody. I wanted to like the novel, I thought the premise sounded utterly amazing – and it’s so long, you’re basically desperate to read the novel once you’ve finished it because it’s described SO well. But, the synopsis is wildly misleading. Wildly misleading. I thought the weeks of seclusion between Maddie and Kyle would see them sort their differences (mostly, for Maddie to sort out her differences with Kyle, very relevant differences considering his dad killed her parents), but they aren’t secluded anywhere and there’s very little time dedicated to their piano duet.

I thought the novel was just too much. The synopsis above doesn’t justify the novel at all. It doesn’t mention how Maddie goes from being desperately in love with Kyle to wanting to stay away because of what his dad did. How she doesn’t fall in love with him again, it seems to be a constant state from page one, same for Kyle. I just thought the whole entire backstory was ridiculous. Kyle’s dad killing her parents, the whole way that entire bit ended, it was all absurd. I’m not joking those last thirty pages are so did more than jump the shark. It went from a New Adult novel to some weird Criminal Minds episode. I thought I’d switched to a wrong book. The ending just felt thrown in, and it just made what was a pretty bad book even worse. It was just horrifically unrealistic. I like a love story, I like when two characters who maybe shouldn’t be together end up together, but Maddie and Kyle just didn’t work for me because it was all so instant. Despite not having seen each other in several years and despite Maddie suffering massively with the loss of her parents and hurting so bad the only way she can shake it is to get a tattoo, she seems to quite happily give herself to Kyle, and know he’s The One. It was too flipping much, too flipping soon.

Another really awful part, is the attempted storyline for Maddie’s so-called best friend Gina. I say so-called because Maddie’s a pretty crappy friend, allowing her friend to do drugs (hard drugs), and knowing she was raped but not telling anyway. Instead it was brushed under the carpet and left hanging. Who the hell knows what happened to Gina because her storyline wasn’t relevant enough to complete it. Despite the fact that rape and drug using are major topics, Maddie’s love for Kyle was way more important it seems, and that disappointed me. If you’re going to use rape and drug taking in your novel, then have the balls to carry it through, to see some form of punishment take place because it sends out a really bad message when Gina’s answer to being raped was that she was asking for it. That’s the wrong message entirely. Gina didn’t ask for it. At all. And it made me sad to read that, really sad.

The whole novel just didn’t work for me at all. The book sounded good, and it had a pretty cover but it was so poorly executed I could barely finish it. I think if your entire premise of a novel is a girl falling in love with a boy whose dad killed your parents you need to rethink your premise, because I don’t know how a person gets past that. No, Kyle wasn’t his father and a bad dad doesn’t equal a bad son, but Kyle would have looked like his dad and surely it’d be a constant reminder to look at that face every day, a face so similar to the one that shot your parents? I dunno, I’d find it pretty weird. Touching Melody didn’t touch me at all. It was poorly executed, written in quite a juvenile way, and it tried to throw in some serious topics and failed all around in that area by not dealing with them properly enough and then throwing in a ridiculous ending that you have to read to believe. But, take my advice, don’t read it, it’s not a very good novel, sadly.