Showing posts with label conspicuous consumerism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conspicuous consumerism. Show all posts

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Unpredictable Webs by Darlene Quinn





Title: Unpredictable Webs
Author: Darlene Quinn
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
Rating: WARTY!


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 for this review.

After crashing and burning in an earlier novel in this series, I decided just to get to the actual story I'm supposed to be reading - which is this one. I was desperately hoping this would actually have entertainment value and that I could penetrate further than 25% into it without having my stomach turned. In this novel, which is, unfortunately peopled with some characters from earlier novels in the series, fifteen-year-old Marnie Taylor hooks up online with "Brad" who turns out to be not Brad and solely interested in kidnapping and ransom - and it's not even the first kidnapping in the family's history. This ought to have promised a laugh if nothing else, but since it was pretty much like the previous one I read, it wasn't be much of anything else, I'm sorry to say.

My problem with Quinn in this novel is summarized perfectly on p28, in the first paragraph in chapter 6:

The moment the delicious Versace rep wheeled his sample trunk out the front door of De Mornay's and onto the snow-covered Chicago streets, Viviana sighed and kicked off her Maud Frizon pumps…while standing flat-footed, flexing her toes and rolling on the balls of her feet, reality hit. He's the epitome of stylish perfection. There's little chance that young man is straight.

Seriously? How many kinds of wrong wrong wrong can you squeeze into seven lines? First comes the shameless and tediously snobbish name-dropping (which to be fair isn't quite as bad here as it was earlier), then follows the insult to the Maud Frizon shoes which the name-dropping is supposedly championing! If these often expensive (Maud Frizons can got for up to $400 dollars although many are less than that) shoes are so wonderful, why is she quite evidently having to take them off her poor, aching feet? If they hurt her feet, why is she wearing them? And as if that isn’t bad enough, then comes the slur that only gay men know how to dress! And/or only gay men would be caught selling Versace! Granted you can ascribe that one to the sad character represented by Viviana De Mornay, but even that aside Quinn manages to name-drop twice and then sequentially insult those same names! Impressive, huh?

The problem (with the name-dropping; I don’t even want to get into the double-barreled insult to men of all stripes) is that it's done solely for the free exercise of snobbery. We know this because a sentence including the clause "Viviana sighed and kicked off her pumps" would have been perfectly fine. It doesn’t need to be "Viviana sighed and kicked off her Maud Frizon pumps" yet Quinn insists upon that rather than the shorter alternative. I honestly don’t get what writers who write like this are trying to accomplish other than to promote how appallingly shallow they are in broadcasting that a name is more important than whether you like the item, or than whether it suits you, or than whether it’s value for money, or most importantly: more than whether it’s actually a comfort to wear - which it clearly isn’t in this case!

Unpredictable Webs is, predictably, another waste of time given my poor experience with one of its predecessors. The predictably dishonest book blurb puts the online interaction and subsequent kidnapping of Marnie front and center, but after 100 pages, nothing had happened save the shallow interactions of superficial characters who were already nauseatingly encountered in Webs of Power. I don’t care about any of these predictable people or their tattered web. They offered me nothing to care for. Worse than this, we're never actually introduced to Marnie in any meaningful sense. She appears as a bit player in someone else's story (I have no idea whose, this is so badly put together), so where's the drama? Why on Earth should we care what happens to her when the author herself is so dismissive of her, so uninterested in her?

The promo for this novel claims that it’s a stand-alone: that you don’t have to have read any of the previous novels in the series to be able to read this, but even that isn’t true. If it stands alone, it’s by mere millimeters and on insubstantial legs, because there's a history here of which you're necessarily aware, but never party to if you haven't read any of the previous stories - and that speaks volumes.

The basic story is a good idea - of twins, one of whom was kidnapped (why only the one isn't explained) and then discovered sixteen years later and reclaimed by her biological parents. It’s a story which ought to be rich with conflict, torment, and anguish, with dramatic moments and moving interactions, but none of this materializes. The sad truth is that there's actually no family here at all, only individuals, not relating, unrelatable, their familial interactions relatively poor. The story ought to appear as a horrible predicament for anyone to be put into, much less a mid-teenager, yet there is no drama here. There isn't even any interaction worth the name. We don’t get to see how Marnie fits or fails to fit in. We don’t see her in any meaningful or deep interaction with her bio mom & dad, her adoptive mom & dad, or her twin sister, which is frankly, shameful. It’s all completely flat, shallow, and unremarkable. Watching ducks on the still surface of a pond would be deeper and more entertaining even if you couldn’t feed them.

I was unable to perceive Marnie (or anyone else for that matter) as a real person because she was only ever a paper doll, so I really don’t care if she's kidnapped or not, or if she's having a hard time or not. I wanted to read this for the kidnapping, but given that she was already kidnapped before the story began, this supposedly original story of a promised kidnapping seemed at best like a re-run, warmed-over but served cold, and life is way too short for undercooked leftovers when there are new, inventive, original, and engaging stories elsewhere in which to become immersed. When page after page drifted by like wilted spring petals in a cold creek, and the promised kidnapping continued to fail to show up, my impulse to read the story dwindled further with every screen until it was extinguished completely. The author kidnapped the story and no one knows where it's being held. This rates only a 'warty' and I'm done reading Darlene Quinn novels.


Saturday, January 4, 2014

Webs Of Power by Darlene Quinn





Title: Webs Of Power
Author: Darlene Quinn
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
Rating: WARTY!


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 for this review.

I agreed to read a sequel to this, and I decided that if I were going to do that, I really ought to read the first book (in what is now a quadrilogy) beforehand. Note that these novels are, as far as I can tell, written as stand-alones even though they're connected, so you don't have to read them in sequence or have to have read one, two, and three before you can read four, but it seemed a good idea to me. Unfortunately I really disliked this first novel and could not finish it.

I made it through about 25% of the novel (the first 25 chapters or so), but even then I found myself frequently skipping screens here and there because it was utterly uninteresting to me. Maybe impoverished people who are desperate for some glamor in their lives might find this appealing in the way it's appealing to squeeze hard on the back of your neck when you have a headache and are waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in, but it's better not to do whatever it was that tensed you up and gave you the headache in the first place. If so, good luck to them, but it's not my idea of a good time and life is way too short to waste it on un-entertaining, un-engrossing unrealistic stories.

Set in the 80's, the novel focuses upon three women who's entire life (based on what I read) apparently consists of nothing but being an accessory to the men in their lives. They're obsessed with the high life and with designer clothes, and with snotty clothing labels and conspicuous consumerism, as indeed it would seem, is the author. I thoroughly detest and abhor the pretentiousness and snottiness of novels of this nature. I could not even remotely begin to identify with any of them, nor respect a single one of them, nor find any reason whatsoever to take any interest in, let alone root for any of these spoiled brats - so why read on?

Paige Toddman is married to a CEO of a mega-corporation and finds herself pregnant with a child which may or may not be her husband's (the writing made it hard to tell). But at least it will have a designer crib, and designer clothes, and designer toys, and designer foods. Maybe it's even a designer baby, and what on Earth could be more important in any child's life than that it has well-known and clichéd names in its all clothes and possessions?

Ashleigh McDowell is pretty much a cookie-cutout of Toddman. Viviana De Mornay is yet another cutout, but older and heavily into "cosmetic" surgery so she can maintain the lie of youth and steal the fabulously wealthy husband of some other rich chick. Who cares?

Every other line in this novel contains a name-brand or someone whining about something. No one drives away in a car, instead, they drive away in their [substitute conspicuous name such as Porsche]. The corporate exec kinda guy doesn't stand with his Chivas Regal by the pool, but by the Olympic-sized swimming pool, because just any old pool couldn't possibly be rich enough. He doesn't put on his tailored suit, but his Armani suit. It is seriously stomach-turning to read this page after page and paragraph after paragraph. Did the author get sponsored to write this novel? I'm sorry but I simply cannot get with a novel that parades sponsorship names like a racing car - they're always non-starters for me.

All three of these women are in crisis all the time when they're not obsessively lusting after the guy who owns them. Yes, owns them. If I had to draw a conclusion about Quinn based solely on this novel, I'd be completely convinced that she's convinced that no women has anything going on in her mind other than rich designer names and what they can do to please their owner next. That's apparently all they're good for: to be dressed up as dolls by a guy who owns their every thought, waking and sleeping. This novel is worse than an insult to women: it's evidently a 369 page rape and subjugation of women. Oh and there's some unimportant and irrelevant stuff about corporate take-overs in there.

This novel is WARTY. Hopefully the sequel I was originally planning on reading will be a thousand percent better than this one was.!