The Designer's Drugs

Medium: Literature
Stimulus: James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet – Witch and Wizard
Anno: 2009

A long time ago I promised myself that I would someday read one of James Patterson’s 50 billion books and review it, whether it was mystery or sap, for adults or for teens, written alone or alongside a member of his army of co-writers. That day has finally come. I have at last read a James Patterson novel.

Yikes.

Witch and Wizard is the opening book in Patterson’s newest series for teens, and while the concept of an aged writer attempting to ignore the generation gap and sound cool may explain some of the story’s flaws, it doesn’t cover everything. The premise is acceptable enough. A brother and sister develop magical powers after being arrested by a totalitarian government ruled by armed and psychotic Puritans, and the pair soon find themselves within the kids good, grownups bad, multidimensional revolution. The elements that make the book so unbearable are found in Patterson’s technique.

First of all, James Patterson is famed for his two to three page chapters, which both destroy his narrative flow and inflate the book’s page count. That tendency is in full force in Witch and Wizard, which is a 300 page book that by all rights is a 200 page book, with a cliffhanger behind every turn of the page. It gets old.

Furthermore, the writing in this book is usually painful, full of awkward descriptions and conversations. The story somewhat gels as it moves along, and the end of the book it approaches something readable, but there are some heinous moments along the way. The first of these comes during Chapter 8 – only 30 or so pages into the story, mind you. Here, the evil mastermind known, ridiculously, as “The One Who Is the One” confronts the family. Before the inevitable condemnation, Mr. One-One compliments the brother on being “Tall and blond, slender yet well-muscled, perfectly proportioned.”

I say again: Yikes.

Maybe Patterson lowers his expectations when he writes for kids, but somehow I doubt it. Books written for teens get a not altogether undeserved stereotype of being dumbed down and vacuous (especially the horde of stuck-up bitch novels written for teenage girls), but I’d expect better from an author who comes out with at least five novels per year. If James Patterson is truly the storyteller of the lowest common denominator – and there’s nothing in Witch and Wizard which casts any doubt as to this – the lowest common denominator deserves better.