Awoken is, put most simply, a Young Adult paranormal romance novel in which Cthulhu falls in love with your standard Not-Like-Other-Girls Ordinary Girl protagonist.
I’m three years late to this party, so I won’t bother with the pretence. To put less simply, it’s a stealth parody with razor sharp critiques of the YA fiction we’ve come to expect since Twilight changed the world.
Awoken was written by a group of Internet personalities and featured in a series of videos titled Booze Your Own Adventure. I haven’t watched this series, so any speculations on sources of parody are purely my own. And oh man, does Awoken deliver with the parody. As a regular reader of YA even well into my 20s, this was cathartic. Every despised trope was played to extreme with careful attention to detail. I can tell the four women behind this book were also exhausted by the direction YA (especially American YA) has taken, so exhausted it became laughter, then became a beautiful trainwreck of a book.
Here’s the story. Andromeda Slate (Andi for short) is a normal American teenage girl who’s simultaneously not like other girls. In the midst of her woeful musing about how plain and ordinary she is (in both appearance and personality) she sharply critiques all other female characters, mostly based on appearance, for being too vain and hard to understand like ‘normal girls’, not like her. It’s a constant paradox of misogyny. Her parents are marine biologists. She lives in an old shipmaker’s residence. Her favourite book is Phantom of the Opera. She has a male best friend who’s ‘like a brother’ but clearly wants to date her. Her female best friend is endlessly supportive, offering ‘comic relief’ in a series of fat jokes. Then a new kid turns up in town, named Riley Bay (no, really). He shakes up Andi’s life; she’s dreamt of him, and now he’s real, and he won’t stop following her everywhere staring at her! Much is made of his green eyes in every synonym an online dictionary can give you.
Eventually, Andi finds out Riley Bay is Cthulhu in human disguise. Originally Riley was to kill her and destroy the world, but in the process of stalking her he fell in love. Now the two have to save the world from a villainous woman scorned. Scorned by what, or who? Why are you asking questions? The more urgent question is: will Riley get to take Andi to the Pumpkin Ball?!
You’ll recognise elements from Twilight for sure, because everybody knows Twilight more than they’d like to. However I think it mostly draws inspiration from a less popular YA paranormal romance called Hush, Hush. Terrifyingly, Awoken manages to be more coherent plot-wise, better structured narratively, with a less horrifyingly codependent and forced romance than Hush, Hush.
The way Awoken is constructed is very careful. Even at the sentence level, you will see the hallmarks of this genre: superfluous words in places you wouldn’t even think there’d be room for ones; synonyms after synonyms until they’re using words that only barely mean ‘green’ or ‘small’ if you squint and tilt your head; sentences just as long as this ones itself. It’s clear a great deal of effort and planning went into making Awoken as terrible as it is. At which point, I have to wonder: is it still terrible?
Yes. Yes it is. But it’s certainly funny all the while.
Making it even funnier are the characters around our protagonist and her squid-faced beau. There, we see brief but striking hints of realism. Andromeda’s best friends warn her away from Riley after it becomes clear he’s stalking her. Her parents even call the police when Riley takes her to New York city for a weekend! As I said, these moments are brief, but they really highlight a lot of the problems with the direction this genre took in the Twilight era.
Of course, to our protagonist, this is all people cruelly misunderstanding her love, or jealously standing in the way. Still, we see her go through moments such as catching Riley reading her emails and being horrified, only agreeing that he has the right when pressured to. The whole time reading this, you can see there is something fundamentally wrong and undesirable about Andi and Riley’s relationship. The same can’t be said for, say, Patch and Nora in Hush, Hush. You aren’t supposed to envy Andi, and these hints of realism keep you from being able to. You are supposed to envy Nora, and her sincere immediate acceptance of every horrible thing Patch does to ‘protect’ her while everybody else nods along like ‘yes, this makes perfect sense’ is supposed to encourage that. Whether or not it works is a matter of the reader. Awoken is too self-aware to allow the reader to take it as a desirable fantasy.
It says a lot about the genre that Awoken managed to slip in so easily, with a lot of people (according to GoodReads reviews I’ve been skimming) not realising it is a parody. It also says a lot about what people anticipate from this genre: people look at Awoken and scream about it ruining Cthulhu with no respect for Lovecraft, their tones smacking of ‘when will these women stop ruining monsters?? monsters are men’s stuff!!’
But I digress from audience reception.
In 2016, Awoken is less on point. YA has shifted away from Paranormal Romance, but the romances which remain still carry a lot of the same tropes: the same codependence, the same strange star-crossed vibe of “okay, you’re intensely in love and destined, but do you even like each other?”, and the same abusive behaviour being passed off as protective. Rewrapping a product doesn’t change its contents, and that is why Awoken remains beautifully cathartic.
Put most simply: Awoken is the group of people behind Serra Elinsen looking at this genre, pointing out its current state and flaws, all while screaming:
This is a book that cannot be fully appreciated without its context. Its context is significant to it on every level. I’m glad this book exists because it really is an amazing insight into the genre at the time of its publication. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, definitely check it out. You won’t be disappointed and you’ll have a lot of laughs along the way.
I gave it 4/5 stars on GoodReads!
Sues Cummings 