meganbmoore | Dark Visions by L. J. Smith (Reply)

Kaitlyn is a smalltown girl regarded as a witch because she has strangely colored eyes and creates weird, prophetic illustrations, until she receives a scholarship from the Zetes Institute to study with other psychic teens. Specifically Anna, a First Nations girl who…talks to animals (I was going to say “Oh L.J. Smith…” and then I tried to remember a single YA I read as a teen with a First Nations character where the book wasn’t “Lookit Me Being Progressive And Writing About The Oppressed. Usually with a white kid edjumacating hir!” Which, granted, is still “Oh, L. J. Smith…”) Lewis, who is telekinetic, Rob, who is Pure and heals people, and Gabriel, who is the Angsty Bad Boy With A Dark Past and is a psychic vampire.

Guess who Kaitlyn’s love interests are. Go on, guess.

Anyway, the folks running Zetes are, naturally Evil and I seem to recall reading a lot of books as a teen about psychic teens on the run from evil institutes, but that didn’t make this any less fun, especially once it starts randomly inserting mythology references for kicks. I probably shouldn’t have read it right after Forbidden Game, though, because I kept thinking that, while it really was technically better, it wasn’t as fun, and the story type wasn’t based on a mythic metanarrative that I’m very attached to.

I did have problems with the end though.

At first, I thought I was bugged by the Gabriel/Kaitlyn ending because, up until the last 10 pages, I would have put money on the ending being Kaitlyn/Rob? But I suspect it was because I can already tell that it was deliberately going against type by LJS, though I doubt it was the original intent of the series. But then I slept on it and woke up really, really annoyed, and realized that it was because, while I had no real character or pairing preferences between Gabriel and Rob for most of the series, I didn’t care much for him in the last book, even though I got where he was coming from. Like, in addition to everything else, he spends the whole book with Frost while thinking about how he doesn’t like or respect her and basically shoves her in Kaitlyn’s face, while comparing her to the (in his mind) Pure Kaitlyn.

But also, I think there are two basic “bad boy” character types? One is the kind that doesn’t get along with groups/authority but is more rebellious than bad, and usually ends up a “good guy” either because he becomes attached to a good guy, doesn’t have many choices, or already is a good guy with iffy social skills. This type I usually like? But then you have the more romanticized Bad Boy who tends to put the heroine/love interest on a pedestal and have Expectations and there’s always this feeling that they end up together more to fix/save the guy than anything else, and it seems to usually be written from the perspective of what he wants, as opposed to what will make her happy. I feel Gabriel started out mostly in the former category and ended up fairly squarely in the latter. (For other LJS characters I’ve read, Nick vs. Julian, maybe?)

Disclaimer: At 15, I would have madly shipped Gabriel/Kaitlyn, so I probably can’t really say too much. (Plus, I think it’s more the trend than this specific case.) Also, it did result in Anna getting what she wanted.