Author: Amy Dunne
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Rating: worthy
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.
Amy Dunne was raised in Derbyshire, England, just like me, so how can I not review her novel?! Well, I wouldn't if it looked like it was boring or outside of my interest range, but I'd already decided that this one was worth a look before I knew from whence its author hailed.
I don't do book covers since the author usually has nothing to do with their design, and this blog is about authors and their writing, not about snotty publishers, illiterate editors, and artists who've never read the book they're illustrating, but I have to wonder about the title "Secret Lies" (as opposed to public ones?) which I assume is the author's, and the black band around that cover - how funereal! - which I assume isn't. Unfortunately, unless Dunne designed the cover herself, I may never learn the point of that, nor did I learn the meaning of the title! Maybe if I'm lucky, Dunne will visit the blog and add her own two pence in the comments? The girl on the cover is neither one of the two around which the novel revolves: the sleeves are way too short for it to be Nicola, and the hair is wrong for it to be Jennifer; she's wearing no wrist bands, either. See what I mean about cover artists never having read the novel? (I'll bet the model hasn't either.)
So this is, be warned, a very sexually explicit story of Nicola Jackson, an abused step-daughter with a weak mom and a god-awful stepfather (did you know that the German word for stepfather is Stiefvater?!) who seriously needs to be hung, drawn, and quartered. The sexually explicit partner is Jennifer O'Connor, a good - well...not so good - Catholic girl. She resents the relationships she feels forced into, in order to keep up her appearance as the hottest girl in school. These two bump into each other one morning on the way to school, after Nicola almost lost her virginity to said evil stepfather. They end-up skipping school and spending the day together despite being from different social groups, and despite never having spoken before that day. Their relationship takes off from there. I liked this story and found it a really easy read, but I do have some issues with it, that I want to take a few to explore.
My first concern is the simplicity of the writing. Sometimes that's a good thing, and in many ways it works for this story, but the feeling it left me with was that this story was written by a younger brother of one of the two main protagonists (both of whom are seventeen), and neither of them had such a sibling! Worse than this, though, was the all-too-ready resolution to everything, with no ragged edges, no loose threads, not a hair out of place. It was unrealistic, like a half hour TV sit-com, and it reminded me very much of some of my own first drafts. Given the starting points from whence the various characters launched themselves into this tale, it was really quite insulting for me as a reader to see the story travel the route it did, but having said that, I'm rating it as a worthy read because overall, it deserves it. Secret Lies deserves to be read and the author deserves to be encouraged to keep on writing because there was a real story here, and whilst it may not have been told in its best light, I'm hoping that the sophistication will come, and we'll get ever more and better stories from Dunne.
Meanwhile, let's look at the issues I had with this one as I review it. The first thing which bothered me was the improbability of the encounter between Jennifer and Nicola which led to the start of their relationship. It came right out of the screen-play for the movie The Cutting Edge with them quite literally running into each other, and the even greater improbability that they'd end-up spending the day together. They live in completely different worlds. Jennifer comes from a really nice home with loving (if somewhat naïve and ignorant parents) whereas Nicola comes from a lowly and (more!) dysfunctional home. I don't get how it is that they would run into each other on their various routes to school, since it's strongly implied that they're not exactly neighbors.
I can see pathways by which the two of them could reasonably have come together (so to speak!), but I didn't see that happen here, so it was a bit too much insta-friends for me. As I said, the two have never spoken before, and Jennifer is a bit of a snob (in high-school terms), hanging out with the rotten-end of the higher-class students (pupils? Whatever they call them in Britain these days!), so her path literally and figuratively never crossed with Nicola's. Indeed, Nicola is an outcast at school, wearing strangely inappropriate clothing for the weather (and there's a good reason for that) and spending all her time by herself there. There was too abrupt of a shift from being completely alienated from one another, to being acquaintances, to becoming fast friends. It seemed way too fake and amateurish to me, but the story itself turned out, despite this poor start, to be really quite interesting and engaging. It made me want to keep reading, which is all I require from an author, let's face it!
I do identify with Nicola though, coming from the lower end of the scale myself. I was never beaten, so I can't claim to know what that's like, but I did have really strict parents who were not known for refraining from slapping their kids, and from whom I felt quite alienated most of the time, so I feel like I have a foot in her door at least.
Which brings me to the respective issues from which these girls suffer. I didn't quite see the point of having both of these girls be the way they were, one of them appallingly abused, the other abusing herself. I know that offers a route towards friendship by having them both have secrets, but why make this the starting point? Other than to get them together, it didn't seem to play any role in the story at all (apart from one overly-dramatic later incident), so why not make them much more average people? That would have had a far greater impact for my money. Putting them in this position seems to me to serve to create more obstacles than it serves to knock down fences.
Jennifer is a cutter who is trying really hard to divorce herself from that behavior with the help of a therapist - about whom her parents evidently know nothing. That's one thing, but she's also had some bad, even shaming sexual encounters with sadly trope-ish boys, which offended me for its genderism: as though a girl can't be lesbian without having had a rather abusive experience with a boy, and there's no such thing as a sensitive and decent boy anyway, so why not be a lesbian! It's almost like Dunne is trying to justify lesbianism by blaming it on uncouth males. I found that offensive on several levels, and dishonest with regard to lesbian motivation. Queers are queer because that's the way nature made them, not because some guy or some girl somehow "warped" them that way!
I have a book on my groaning library shelves titled The First Time by Karen Bouris, who interviewed some 150 women about losing their virginity, and many of them had a bad experience (which I think is more than adequately explained by society's god-awfully repressive attitudes towards sex!). I have no way of knowing how representative a sample this was, but it seemed to me that many of the women who were interviewed and who are lesbian, had a bad sexual encounter with a guy before they settled on their preferred sexuality.
This struck me as interesting, but in no way can it be deemed to be diagnostic, definitive, or causative! It seems a bit of a cliché (and a stereotypical male wishful-thinking cliché at that) to have Nicola take this road-less-traveled because lesbianism is 'nothing more than a result of a bad heterosexual encounter'! Sexual preference needs a hell of a lot more respect and realism than that. I'm not saying that Dunne believes this, or that she's trying to suggest or promote this agenda, just that writing this way might put the wrong idea in some people's minds, or imply things which were not intended. Then again, it's Dunne's novel - she can write what she likes, and I wouldn't try to suggest that no queer relationships ever began like this.
I can see that Dunne needs a way to bring the two of them together, and that she's doing this by giving them common ground to meet upon; it just seemed a bit clunky to me. I'm not the writer of course, so it's not my choice, but this overkill in background story detracts too much, for me, from the main story which is coming, and which is the reason I'm reading this!
So having spent the day together, Jennifer invites Nicola to stay over for the night when she learns that her new-found friend has left home and has nowhere to go. They make up a lie to tell Jenny's parents which improbably nets them a month together. It's early that evening that Jennifer accidentally espies the burn marks and bruises on Nicola's back, where her stepfather has stubbed out cigarettes. This, of course, leads to confessions and revelations, and eventually the two of them discover the truth about each other, and that truth is that they're falling in love.
This is a bigger problem for Jenny than for Nic, who has nothing to lose. Jenny has her mom and dad, staunch (not stanch!) Catholics. Jenny at this point is living much more in fear than Nic is, which was a fun reverse direction for this story to take. And talking of fun, there wasn't much humor in this novel. Yes, it's a serious story about serious things, but that lack of a fun element with these two young characters, both of them awakening to a brilliant and totally unexpected new love, was a bit glaring. The "stupid o'clock" comment at the start of chapter 25 was hilarious and every much appreciated, but that was it for notably funny bits, and I couldn't see that two Brit high-school girls like this wouldn't have more humor going on than they did, even given their circumstances.
Also, Nicola seemed to come out of her repressed shell far faster than seemed realistic given what she'd been through. In fact, the entire relationship was surprisingly just like any relationship I've read about, homo or hetero written by male or female writers, which struck me as odd, given the premise that both of them had these secrets and both secrets were way off the beaten track for most relationships. I mentioned this earlier - that the cutting and the abuse were merely a starting point, and played no part in the rest of the relationship, and this seemed to me to be a betrayal of those things - cheapening them into insignificance. I found that sad. Indeed, the pointed focus on the sexual rather than on anything else was a bit disturbing, too. I was expecting something rather different here, given the characters were coming out not only to each other, but to themselves, and given the awful back-story secrets they both had, but that was never delivered. It was like their sad pasts were magically washed away and mattered no more.
Then comes the evil stepsister - actually not even step, just sister (of Jenny's) - who seemed really odd to me. She went from being hugely vindictive, exhibiting stalker behavior, to total unconditional acceptance of Nicola and Jennifer pretty much literally overnight which was entirely unrealistic, and which stood out rather glaringly and amateurishly.
So why am I not rating this warty? Well, as I said, I liked the story, and I'm willing to forgive the writer a lot of warts if they tell me a worthy tale. I freely admit that Dunne really pushed me to the limit of what I would put-up with, and if the story had not been the one it was, and Jenny and Nic not been the characters they were (and Dunne had not hailed from Derbyshire, of course!), I might well have been nudged over the other side of the fence. I don't do stars, you see, so a novel is either a worthy read or it's warty to me, and this one is worthy, because I liked it despite a few warts, and yes I'd be open to reading more by Amy Dunne. Indeed, if she's looking for a truly independent (apart from the Derbyshire connection!) beta reader, I volunteer right here and now!
