Last Chance For Paris

This post originally published August 10, 2010.

Author: Sylvia McNicoll
Published: November 2007
Publisher: Fitzhenry and Whiteside
204 pages (paperback)
 
Fourteen year old Zanna is “banished” to live with her father and twin brother, Martin, in Last Chance, Alberta while her father the professor conducts research on ice fields and glaciers. Her mother felt that Zanna’s newfound boyfriend Zane was controlling her, not to mention that she was furious over Zanna’s strawberry tattoo she got without permission, and hopes that a change of scenery will change Zanna’s perspective on things.
For Zanna, this is the worst summer vacation that could ever happen to her. Except to me, it’s really not that bad — most of the bad things that happen to Zanna are situations she created herself (such as her dumb decision to wade into the rapids and then getting swept away by the icy water, or deliberately ignoring her mother’s e-mails only to later realize that her mother was asking her to come to Paris, and then Zanna had the audacity to complain that it’s her mother’s fault that she missed the airplane seat sale). Zanna is a perfect representation of what a fourteen year old adolescent is like; unfortunately, this means she is self centered, incredibly whiny and very hard to like. She’s also seems to suffer from the delusion that she and her boyfriend of a few weeks will last ‘forever’. Anyway, I did not like Zanna or her special snowflake name.

For a young adult novel, I expected more than bare and minimal writing, but as it is right now, I’ve read children’s novels with more complex writing than this book. I was also not fond of the story. It was, for lack of better words, incredibly boring. The reason it took me so long to finish a mere 200 pages is because I did not like it and had to force myself to finish it, something that I could not do all in one sitting.

Things are supposed to pick up a bit more when Zanna finds the “puppy” under her deck and meets Tyler the park ranger (who she obviously starts liking; this novel is incredibly predictable), but it didn’t really. The climax of the novel is when Martin disappears, leaving Zanna and Tyler to search for him in the wild. That part was a little more interesting in comparison to the rest of the novel, but it was still the dullest search and rescue story I’ve ever read. At the end of the novel, Zanna is supposed to have experienced a change and see herself differently, but the ONLY realizations she makes is that her boyfriend is a jerk and her mom sucks being a mom; not exactly life-changing.

My Rating: 1/5