Alabama: The Splendor Falls by Rosemary Clement-Moore

Book Overview via Amazon.com: Can love last beyond the grave? Sylvie Davis is a ballerina who can’t dance. A broken leg ended her career, but Sylvie’s pain runs deeper. What broke her heart was her father’s death, and what’s breaking her spirit is her mother’s remarriage—a union that’s only driven an even deeper wedge into their already tenuous relationship.

Uprooting her from her Manhattan apartment and shipping her to Alabama is her mother’s solution for Sylvie’s unhappiness. Her father’s cousin is restoring a family home in a town rich with her family’s history. And that’s where things start to get shady. As it turns out, her family has a lot more history than Sylvie ever knew. More unnerving, though, are the two guys that she can’t stop thinking about. Shawn Maddox, the resident golden boy, seems to be perfect in every way. But Rhys—a handsome, mysterious foreign guest of her cousin’s—has a hold on her that she doesn’t quite understand. Then she starts seeing things. Sylvie’s lost nearly everything—is she starting to lose her mind as well?

This is my first review for the “Reading Across America Challenge” I discussed yesterday. Rosemary Clement-Moore is pretty prominent in the YA community. She wrote the Maggie Quinn: Girl vs. Evil series and in 2011 wrote “Texas Gothic”, which has received accolades by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA).  I have not read her other works, but Clement-Moore is considered to be a fantastic romance writer. So I was excited.

This novel has great potential for young readers. Sylvie Davis is a great protagonist and very relatable. Even I can somewhat relate to her predicament. I grew up playing soccer and had hopes of playing varsity in college; however, an accident on the field my Freshman year of high school landed me with a sprained ankle. This proceeded to ruin my conditioning and making my ankle weak to this day, as I re-sprained it several times afterwards. During this time I had a slight depression like Sylvie and her ballet career, wondering about my future and what I was going to do about it. It isn’t necessarily the best situation to be in. 

Relatable characters are what keep readers entranced by a book. Many authors write a character that tends to be…well…bland to allow readers to project their own personality onto the character. Sylvie does not feel like a placeholder and develops wonderfully throughout the novel. She learns more about her family history and more about her connection to the supernatural world, which leads to her gaining confidence and becoming a braver person. I appreciate this in a character, to mirror us as people who develop and change. 

All that being said, I have to discuss the crazy plot that is this book. To compare, I will talk about a show that came out last year, “Terra Nova.” This show could have been amazing, but it seemed to have too much going on. It was a dystopian future that met prehistoric times, plus family drama and relations, plus teen hormones, plus science fiction, PLUS a weird JJ Abrams-esque mystery. In other words, TOO much is going on. The Splendor Falls is similar in that respect. There is supernatural witchcraft, ghosts, geology, southern history, teen hormones, and the journey of finding oneself. Yeah….TOO much. Granted with younger readers a lot of plot can be refreshing as it keeps them involved in the story. For me, it felt overwhelming.

Additionally, there were times where I thought the ghost mystery in the book was like an episode of Scooby Doo. This small area of Alabama was built on a Native American burial ground (haha) and Shawn Maddox’s (one Sylvie’s potential love interests) family wants to develop the area to make money and save the town. Sylvie is seeing ghosts and having strange sensations in the Bluestone Hill Inn. I mean, come on, this makes sense to have it all be a play by Shawn Maddox to make outside investors think the place is haunted, to shut down protestors against his development of the area.  I could even imagine a Velma character saying “It’s old man Maddox!” Yeah well I bet he would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for those meddling teens and their crazy dog Scooby Doo Gigi! I think it is obvious that Sylvie is Daphne, Rhys Griffith is Fred, Professor Griffith is Velma, and...hmmmm…Cousin Paula can be Shaggy.

SPOILER ALERT: It turns out, the whole supernatural ghost and witchcraft plot was actually supernatural. Not gonna lie, I liked my version of a Scooby Doo mystery much better.  The book itself was over 500 pages, but it did move quicker than most books that size, which I appreciated. I would still recommend this a book for the YA genre as many teens could still relate to Sylvie’s predicament.

Well that is one review, only 49 to go!