Review: Fair Coin

Fair Coin by E.C. Myers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is, for the most part, a capably-written YA novel with a speculative present-day setting, and I did enjoy it.

I had a couple of problems with it, though. The first was one of belief. I seem to be having a lot of those lately, for some reason; I just find it hard to suspend my disbelief when I'm confronted with something that doesn't make sense, particularly when it seems as if it doesn't make sense because it's been created entirely in the service of the plot, and not because it arises in any way organically from the situation. I'm going to need some spoiler tags here.

(view spoiler)[
The situation eventually turns out to involve alternate worlds, which the protagonist can travel between because he's an analog of an interworld traveler sent to explore them, who has (in a way we never really find out about) vanished from the scene. Now, why would anyone send a sixteen-year-old kid to explore the multiverse? Well, they wouldn't, and so we get the entirely nonsensical idea that in some of the alternate worlds, time runs at a different rate, and so his analog was an adult. But obviously he was still born to the same parents at roughly the same time, so time seemingly didn't start running at a different rate until after his birth. Which makes no sense whatsoever.

Also, in all the alternate worlds, he and the other kids who he mostly interacts with all live at the same addresses as they do in his original world. His keys even work to get into his apartment. Now, someone's exact address is one of the most arbitrary and changeable things about them, so it doesn't make a lot of sense that in worlds that are, in some cases, very different, this is the thing that stays the same. For example, in one world his mother is an alcoholic barely holding onto a supermarket checkout operator's job, while in another she's a responsible person with a much better job, yet in both worlds they have the same apartment.

Also conveniently, someone's cellphone works in a world in which she herself doesn't exist. Even though she's calling emergency services, which I think works from all cellphones, even ones that can't make other calls, it still seems a bit unlikely that a handset brought from another world would connect so easily to the network.
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The other thing I had a problem with is that this book exhibits a strong Wyldstyle effect, by which I mean that the protagonist is rather dense, not particularly courageous, and fairly self-absorbed (though he experiences some growth in moral courage and concern for others in the course of the story); meanwhile, there's a female character who is much smarter, more effective, more interesting, and in all ways more fitted to be the protagonist, but never gets to be anything more than the love interest and protagonist's prize.

(view spoiler)[One version of her also gets rather gratuitously humiliated and then murdered. (hide spoiler)]

I put this on my "await ebook price drop" wishlist some time ago because of a recommendation from somewhere, I think a blog or podcast, based partly on its having won a major award. But given those two significant issues, I don't think I will go on to read the sequel, and while it was good enough to deserve four stars, it doesn't get any awards from me.

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