This title was provided by #NetGalley and Ungurait House Publishing in return for an honest review, and honestly: had this been a book I'd simply picked up for fun, I would not have finished it, and it was not because I wasn't interested in the story (well, not at first it wasn’t) or its premise, and it wasn’t because of the typos, which were many. At the beginning, much of desire-to-quit was due to the writing style (mostly, a lack of conciseness in the text), but also because the main character, Kodak is just a little too overdramatic for my taste (more on this below). Later, however, the plot itself began to seriously irritate me, and upon completion and overall: I feel like someone should have pointed a couple things out to this author prior to publication, and so I intend to do so here. THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

A NOTE ON THE STAR-RATING:
To be completely transparent, this edition was also riddled with typographical errors, so a technical editor could also be blamed for a lot of the textual issues which kept distracting me from enjoying the story, with the ability to read it straight though. I won’t take stars away from a novel for technicalities when it’s an ARC and I can instead just leave the publisher a note about them on NetGalley, but it’s still distracting (especially when there are so many—and I hope future readers end up with a revised copy). I will take away stars for issues I have with the writing style, pacing, delivery, etc., some of which can be helped with a good editor, but ultimately are of the author’s own doing. I won’t take away stars when events transpire that I don’t like or approve of happening because I didn’t want them to, or because they made me sad or angry, etc. The way I figure it: sh*t happens in real life, so I don’t have issues with it happening in the stories I read, either, unless I find said-happenings to be unbelievable or silly in some capacity. In most cases, but not all, this could be because the overall development is lacking in order to make actions and/or feelings of a character believable, or because an event is simply too implausible.

REASONING BEHIND A 2-STAR RATING:
I really wanted to like this story from the beginning. I have a lot in common with Kodak (other than his name being my own with an extra “K” at the end). I consider myself sensitive (and have been even more so in my youth), am also of mixed Mexican-and-Anglo heritage, am a homosexual man (yeah, Kodak, I had a girlfriend once, too), and also identify as a writer. I even grew up in the south and experienced bullying in my youth (although for unknowingly being gay, rather than for being of mixed races). My point is: I thought I would really identify with this main character. About the only thing we’re not having in common at this point is that I’ve never been to Oregon (but it’s geographical and seismic details are easily researched, and we’ll get to that later).

But from the get-go, I had trouble connecting with Kodak. This was largely due to the fact that I found the main character's internal dialogue to be, well, whiny. I was really trying to get on board with this kid's trauma, but the author relies on the narrator's internal dialogue (thoughts-of-inadequacy…misery over his "abuse" as a mixed-race individual in the south) to convey the impact these events have had on him, without giving us many detailed examples of the actions taken against him by his bullies. The specific examples of abuse that are given, I didn’t feel were harsh enough to have affected Kodak to the extent that he was vocalizing within thoughts. Mostly, we learn that he was teased verbally for being of a mixed race, and for not belonging to any (naturally segregated!?) group. I’m sure this still happens in some places, but I questioned both the plausibility and normalcy of this social-segregation within school systems, to the extent of which it’s alluded to. Is this really such a big issue in current times? Do high school kids hang out in groups solely of their own race? Every place is different, but I grew up in a small town in the south, and this isn't something I noticed even twenty years ago as a mixed-race high-schooler. Maybe I just didn’t notice, or maybe it’s a difference of setting, but for this to be believable, I needed more context. At this point, the extent of trauma that Kodak (tells us he) has seemed much more serious to him than I believed it would be for an average person, and I couldn’t help judging Kodak for being over-reactive. I honestly wondered why no one taught this kid "Sticks and Stones".

It's important to tell you that another struggle I had with this book was that the writing is just not as concise as I would have liked. Some writing techniques and certain sentence structures feel over-used, as well. The preposition "as" (e.g.: As, this happened, so did this. This is happening, as this happens also.) is a good example. “As" phrases aren’t something that typically stand out to me in a text, nor has this preposition ever been an issue for me before, so I eventually started highlighting every time it appeared in these capacities, just to make sure I wasn't being over-critical. The result was having to highlight instances of "as this, this" and "this, as this" as frequently within in the same sentence, but more often on the same page or in the same paragraph, two or three times over. Combined with the other technical errors I've mentioned, this just created another distraction when it came to being able to just read through the story, but it did solidify my belief that I wasn't being over-critical, after all. In fact, the writing in this story, in general, consists of a lot of repetition, run-on and incomplete sentences and thoughts, and a lot of unnecessary "fluff": which I'm assuming was the author's attempt at writing beautifully, and at a literary level, but in most cases, just feels like it's trying too hard (or trying to hit a higher word count?).

That said, there is some beautiful writing in here. Ungurait definitely has a talent—but it is one that needs nurtured and refined, in my opinion. Not only could many of the lines in the text be either combined or cut without losing any meaning, I also had issues with Kodak telling me how events and situations were making him feel in cases where that information should be gotten from the description of those events. Even in cases where the prose did give me that emotional insight through dialogue and character-actions/-reactions, Kodak still constantly reminds us with his internal dialogue how those events are affecting him both emotionally and as an overall character. These are things we already know or should know without being told, and including these thoughts often leads to a lot of unnecessary repetition and redundancies, making this novel much longer than it needs to be (not to mention, contributing to the impression that Kodak is a huge whiner).

For the first 60% of the novel (or so), however, I wasn't disliking the direction the story was going. Sure, I’d had a few issues with the writing style and pacing by this point, much of which could have been helped with some good editing advice and revision, but I was invested in Kodak's developing relationship with Quinn, and I looked forward to seeing what panned out with that part of the story, despite of Kodak’s constant incessant whining. There were some inconsistencies with the character development, specifically with Kodak (e.g.: there’s one place in the story where Kodak is infatuated with Quinn and praising his character, and then shortly after wonders if Quinn is a murderer), but I’d decided that regardless, the story was still worthy of 3-Stars, since I still wanted to know where it was going.

During this portion of the story, we learn that Kodak was in a serious car crash before moving to Oregon, in which his friends and girlfriend were killed. In terms of character development, this works—giving Kodak a psychological reason to be so generally miserable. Maybe this is why he’s returned to thinking about his high-school trauma so heavily; possibly he’s trying to find ways to add to the weight of the self-professed guilt he feels over the cause of the crash; perhaps he’s an emotional sadist. I was starting to hope that what I was finding to be a flaw in Kodak’s character would be addressed eventually within the story—maybe it was an intentional flaw, and we would see Kodak in therapy later in the novel, working out his self-esteem issues. Maybe Quinn would contribute to his emotional healing in some way (or call him out for being overdramatic), or Kodak would end up writing about the car crash, and the aspect of him being a writer would become far more important by the end of the story (Because at this point it’s just a detail. The piece of writing Kodak has received an award for within the story is about his experience in high school concerning the bullying, and feeling like he doesn’t belong, and how he has overcome all of this— Although, that doesn’t really make sense, does it? Because he’s clearly not over it; it’s all we hear about in his thoughts).

Receiving this information also works for pulling the reader back into the plot. We don’t know a lot about the crash, other than the fact that Kodak wasn't driving, and so we don't understand how he could be at fault (but surely there’s a more valid reason than he has for carrying all that high school trauma, right? And maybe they’ll tie together somehow). Did he actually do something to contribute to the cause of the crash, or is this internal blame the result of his obvious self-esteem issues? Again, lots of whining internally and blaming life/God for condemning him to go through so much trauma. Despite this, I really wanted to see Kodak tackle his inadequacy issues and maybe let go of at least the trauma caused by being bullied, and I also wondered why he blamed himself for the car crash. Surely all this will come together with the relationship arc and there will be a poignant theme about being okay with oneself, or something, and accepting ourselves being the only acceptance that matters…(blah blah)…right?

The answer is “No.”

Abruptly, at about 70% into the novel, the story severely loses the plot, when a technically-possible-but-not-at-all-plausible natural disaster (told you I researched) abruptly derails all the elements of the story that were keeping my attention. You see, the build-up of Kodak and Quinn's relationship is fairly done in terms of romance and plot, and I'd hoped we were going to see this evolve (remember: Kodak had a girlfriend prior to all this) and possibly address the sudden development of feelings and sexual attraction for a male as a formerly-straight man, as side-theme, while confronting and healing our trauma and—I don’t know…writing about it?

I couldn’t have been more wrong, and from this point the story’s main focus is survival of an earthquake, tsunami, and their aftermath (which is described at a nearly post-apocalyptic level). The entire last 30% of the novel is so far-fetched and off-course, I wondered if the author even knew where he was going with the story in the first place. The events that take place during and after the disaster, the circumstances Kodak finds himself in, the decisions made, are so completely implausible, that I spent more time highlighting and rolling my eyes that I did actually reading through the text—and I really didn’t want to read anymore of it by this point. The death of Quinn’s mom (and the affect it has on Quinn being severely minimal), the separation and reunion of Kodak and Quinn, the descriptions of the aftermath, Kodak’s medical intuition (Really, one ibuprofen tablet for an infected gash??)… all of this was unbelievable (especially the only other survivor they come across being a gun-wielding psychopath). There are two instances where Kodak breaks into a building which are so similar I thought I was rereading a previous chapter accidentally.

Eventually (and far later than is realistic), we end up rescued and at the hospital, where we can (kind of) continue with the story we thought we were reading. However, we haven’t dealt with anything in terms of Kodak’s self-esteem or other trauma. In fact, we’ve just added more trauma to the mix (and lots of it), and it seems that that might have been the cure—that, and Quinn’s love (eye-roll)—because by the end of the book Kodak professes to be okay with himself and to have learned to accept trauma as a part of what makes him who he is (wasn’t this theme abandoned?).

After the last chapter—as if we haven’t suffered (haha) enough, we are met with an epilogue which attempts to address some of those lost themes and wrap up the I’m-a-writer-thing, by giving us a glimpse of Quinn and Kodak’s success in their relationship, as well as Kodak’s achievement of getting his new story (about surviving the Oregonian earthquake/tsunami disaster) published in book form. Again, Kodak vocalizes the growth he’s achieved even though we haven’t really seen evidence of it on the page.

As a whole, this story just simply doesn’t work. I wouldn’t call it a story about dealing with trauma. It doesn’t have anything to say about overcoming adversity, or healing emotionally. It’s not really about relationships, and I can’t say that it’s a natural disaster story, either, simply because that plotline was not set up in the least before it came literally crashing onto the page. Sadly, I would not call this level of writing literary, either, but that is, of course, my opinion. Essentially, this story just tried to incorporate too many different ideas, and as a result, it didn’t deliver on any of them. This might all sound harsh, but once again, I really wish someone had pointed these things out to the author prior to publication. I think this story had potential, and I believe the same about James’s capabilities as an author. I just think he needs some honest feedback like this in order to understand where he needs improvement in future writing.

I'm The Same
by James Ungurait
Description
I'm The Same is a powerful novel about the experience of being bi-racial in America and the feeling of loneliness while being torn with nowhere to feel welcome. The novel explores grief and the willpower to survive not just your past, but Mother Nature's fury.
I so love this book. It shocked me I was through in one sitting. Not your everyday same-old read, but neither are people the same.

Thank you Netgalley for the arc of this upcoming read!

Although this story is told through a perspective much unlike my own, I found common ground with the sense of identity and self. To yearn to belong is human, and that was just stunning.