Katzenjammer by Francesca Zappia

Review

I usually reserve 1 star for books I actively despise reading. While I would not say I despise this book, I had absolutely no investment in the characters or plot for the majority of this novel. I kept waiting for the explanations of the creepy world Cat finds herself in during the present timeline. We finally get the answers in the last 20 pages, but I didn’t particularly care about anything else in the story until then. This is why I’m splitting my review into my thoughts pre- and post- reveal (plot twist? ending?)

I bought this book on a whim one day, intrigued by the cover and the premise as well as a passing interest in one of Francesca Zappia’s other novels. Mostly, I bought this book because it reminded me of the horror games my friends and I were obsessed with watching when we were in middle school. For the majority of the book, those vibes were all I really got out of it, plus a frustrating reminder of how YA can be such a vague genre when it caters to so many age groups. Pre-reveal I did not think I was at all part of the target audience for this novel. Honestly, I still think this novel would’ve gone over better with at least my high school self (some of the more serious topics that come up later plus the gore may have been too much for middle school me.) Though the reveal does make the novel a lot more present and relevant to our society as a whole.

I'm focused so much on the target audience because the characters, storyline, and writing were all incredibly simple. The past timeline, what happened before in the normal world, follows our main character Cat as she grows up and goes through high school. Cat is an outcast and a bit of a loner. She’s that weird girl with one friend and a talent at making creepy and disturbing art. Her best friend Jeffrey is a plain, chill dude who sticks by Cat through all the bullying, especially at the hands of his older brother, the attractive and ever popular Jake the jock. All of these characters feel like stereotypes I’ve seen in high school media countless times and the bullying Cat suffers from, while horrendous, is still a story I’ve heard before. There was nothing interesting or different about this past timeline, no new commentary besides the dangers of bullying. Zappia just wrote Cat a sad backstory.

The present timeline, in the horror reflection of Cat’s high school, held my attention the most, but it still left a lot to be desired. If Cat’s past was just an exhibition of all the ways her life went wrong (with the exception of her relationship with Jeffrey), then Cat’s present just tries to one-up itself with creepy student transformations and increasingly bloodier and gory-er murders. The crux of this storyline is finding out who or what is killing the transformed students (the outcasts) with a minor desire to escape the prison the school has become. The escape mostly falls to the wayside. It’s framed like a mystery, but it’s really not.

During this climax of violence, Cat finally remembers what happened at the end of the past timeline.

Excluding the last 20 pages, I felt like this novel had no substance to it. The ending read like a last ditch effort to make all the bullying, gore, and murder mean something. It tried to impart some wisdom about death, violence, and closure. But there was no development towards a meaning. It felt like an afterthought, rather than a building theme throughout the novel. Senseless human violence -- that's what Zappia gives us in this book, but her efforts to fight it fall flat.