Horrifically Normal

I just finished reading The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls the debut novel of Claire Legrand (who has some of the coolest Pinterest boards). It is a MG book that is equal parts, creepy, disgusting and unfortunately frustrating.  I already know that I am in the minority for my lack of complete and utter love for this book, which is good, I like it when people read and love stories, even if I don't so if you read and loved this book please, please, please take note of my post No Apologies.  That being said I did not hate, or even dislike the book, I just had some issues with it, but more on that in a little bit, first the synopsis.  As always Spoilers Ahead!

Victoria Wright (which is seriously the most perfect name for this character) likes order, her room is neat as a pin and organized to the point even Martha Stewart would be proud. Victoria has the need to be perfect in all things, appearance, grades, tone, voice, everything.  Victoria only has one friend, well actually she considers him more of a project then a friend.  His name is Lawrence Prewitt and he is something of a musical genius, he is also sloppy, loud and much more relaxed then his friend "Vicky" (He is the only one
who can get away with calling her that).  One day Victoria goes to Lawrence's house as usual so that they can walk to school together.  She is informed by his parents (who are acting odd) that he has gone to visit his grandmother.  Victoria goes to school where she notices most of the teachers and some of the students are also acting oddly, kind of super smiley and stiff.  Victoria also starts to notice that certain kids are missing, Donovan who purposely downs bags of treats in flagrant violation of the school rules, and Jacqueline who is a bit of an odd duck, creative, dreamy and not at all "normal" (lot's of air quotes in this post folks).  Some feeling leads Victoria to go visit the Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls where she is greeted by a creepy gardener by the name of Mr. Alice who appears to be puffy with moving skin.  Victoria is taken to see Mrs. Cavendish who gives her some chewy butterscotch candy and assures her that her children are all very happy.  Although she can not see the children, Victoria hears talking and laughter and gets a warm fuzzy feeling that all is well.  As she leaves a paper airplane if flown to her and she takes it with her.  When she gets home she opens it and finds the words HELP US written on the inside. She decides to investigate and goes to the library where all the adults are acting weird. She goes to the archive room and tries to find out anything about the Home and does not have a whole lot of luck.  Her favorite teacher Professor Alban comes in looking frightened and tells Victoria that he is being watched, they find an old picture that looks just like Mr. Alice and Mrs. Cavendish but that is impossible because it is over 100 years old.  As soon as they find this her teacher freaks out and tells her to hide.  The room starts oozing and a ton of shiny black pincer bugs come out of the walls and take Prof. Alban away.  Victoria heads home and realizes that her parents are starting to act strange, just like the rest of the town.  She goes to a Mr. Tibbalts house who informs her that Mrs. Cavendish takes all the children who do not fit the strict standard of normal and "fixes" them...or if she can't fix them they disappear. The townsfolk are all partly bewitched or something and partly allow it to happen because of there need for normalcy.  Victoria heads to the Home where she is promptly captured and placed in a pitch black room full of the pincer bugs.  She is eventually let out and see's that all the missing children are there.  Mrs. Cavendish and Mr. Alice then proceed to do some pretty horrible things to try and make the children "normal", like
forcing Donovan to eat sweets until he is sick and then starving him, or whipping Jacqueline every time she tries to get creative with her art work.  They also punish Victoria's friends every time she stands up to them.  This all gets pretty sick and twisted for a while.  Victoria eventually figures out that the structure of the Home itself is alive and is trying to help her.  The children are served a weird mix of eggs and stinky meat for every meal and they are served by weird deformed little creatures called gofers.  She notes that they have the exact same shape and color eyes and the chewy candies she ate before...gross.  She also discovers that the children that can't be "normalized" are cut down to the hideous gofers  and the extra parts are fed to the kids.  Victoria convinces the others that they have to escape.  She goes to the garden and discovers that the adults that defied her have been turned into trees and they are the ones who have been helping her.  She goes to a hut where Mrs. Cavendish has made puppets out of the adults (I guess this is how she is controlling them) and cuts all there strings.  Mrs Cavendish turns into a giant spider and chases Victoria until she, the Home and the gardens are all swallowed up into the earth.  The epilogue shows Lawrence going to music school and Victoria heading off to college. The End.

Let's jump right into this shall we, lets start with what worked for me.  I did like the character of Victoria a lot, she was a good girl who saw the sense in following rules (which is a nice refresher from the firebrand rule breakers that have been big in heroines lately), she was a good student and wanted things to be orderly...she also found out that she had a core of steel and could use her stubbornness and sheer determination to the benefit of her new found friends.  I also liked the potential commentary on how we overlook bad things, things that just are not quit right as a community as long as we can keep our illusion of "normalcy", we have seen examples of this in the real world, and this was a creative way to comment on that.  The book was
creepy for sure, and the imagery was beautifully written.  Now on to what did not work so much for me.  I did not feel that this was a complete story, there was absolutely no explaining who, what or why Mrs. Cavendish was.  The only real thing we got was she set up shop in this particular town because of the peoples need for order.  There was no explanation given to what she got out of transforming boys and girls into shining examples of good behavior, therefor to me the villain had no real motivation which put a huge damper on it for me.  There were also parts of the book that felt like it skipped around and I found myself flipping back and forth wondering if I missed something.  I also felt (and this is a completely personal thing here) that to much of the potential creepiness turned into out and out disgusting horror.  I don't mind when certain things are put in to illustrate just how evil the situation is, but when I get inundated with them, the horror level goes down and the ew that's just gross factor sets in. The unknown noises that go bump in the night with the occasional confirmation of grotesque horror is much more effective at maintaining the the tension. The ending was abrupt with a bit of hurried resolution that did not show hardly any of the aftermath of such a huge event, most importantly what happened to all the little gofers and trees?  Overall I got a very strong Coraline vibe, all the way down to the sweet motherly figure that goes all spidery on the heroine and the ghost children voices.  I have to admit I liked Coraline much better.  Like I said earlier, I did not hate the book, it's just that all of the aforementioned issues kept taking me out of the story which made it a not so happy read.  I do think the author has potential and I will be looking at her next books because I think she is just going to keep improving with time.  I am glad to see so many people liked it, and hope it encourages her to keep writing.  I give this book 5 out of 10 butterscotch eye candies.

What did you think of this book?  Am I way to nit picky about a children's book?  Who are some of your favorite authors that got off to a rocky start?  Does this book give a whole new meaning to the term eye candy?