Book: The Sound by Sarah Alderson

Published August 2013 by Simon & Schuster|275 pages

Where I Got It: I own the e-book

Series: None

Genre: YA Contemporary

When aspiring music journalist Ren Kingston takes a job nannying for a wealthy family on the exclusive island of Nantucket, playground for Boston’s elite, she’s hoping for a low-key summer reading books and blogging about bands. Boys are firmly off the agenda.

What she doesn’t count on is falling in with a bunch of party-loving private school kids who are hiding some dark secrets; falling (possibly) in love with the local bad boy; and falling out with a dangerous serial killer…

The Sound is another book I’m not sure how I feel about.  I’m glad I’m reading, especially after not reading anything for over a month, but this is the 2nd book I’ve read where I don’t completely know how I feel about it.

Now that I think about it, Ren didn’t do a lot of nannying.  We barely see her with the kids…or even interact with the parents.  It just seemed like a weird way to bring over to Nantucket, and an even weirder way to connect her to something that barely seemed to matter.  Why have the mystery of a serial killer if it’s pretty much mentioned in passing? It didn’t really add anything to the story.  Also, only two girls were killed, and for me, that’s too few people to be considered a serial killer.

Back to the nannying for a second: the few times we did see her with the kids, she doesn’t actually do her job. One of the kids is in day camp for the summer, and I fail to see why she needs a nanny.  We don’t even see her with the younger kid, and even when Ren goes out with the family (especially at parties), Ren tends to wander off and do her own thing.  The nanny thing makes no sense to me.

And the dark secrets?  They’re horrible, but I was expecting something different than the one major thing we got.

I don’t mind if characters are a little bit cliche, but most of the characters weren’t memorable, and I couldn’t tell most of them apart.  Ren, Jesse, and Brodie, one of the kids that Ren is a nanny for, are the only ones that actually stand out.  Ren, because she’s the main character, Jesse because he’s the bad boy Ren can’t stay away from, and Brodie because she is so incredibly unbelievable as a 4-year-old.  Jesse put a guy in a coma, and Ren is warned to stay away from him, and yet she still talks to him.  He would actually be okay if he didn’t put someone in a coma and I get why he put someone in a coma…but he still put someone in a coma.  And Brodie?  A four-year-old should not know about “bases” and ask you if you got to a particular base with someone.  Also, 4-year-olds should not be calling people skanktrons.  She either should have been older, or not acted the way she did in the book.  If that’s how she’s acting, then we have a serious problem.

Also irritating was the fact that girls were slut-shamed…and Ren’s best friend telling Ren that she just needed to have sex and get it over with and that waiting was stupid.  The name-calling in the book also got irritating by the end of the book.

1 star.  I wasn’t sure how I felt about The Sound at first, but now that I’ve written down what I think about it, I’ve found that I really don’t like it.