Title: H2O
Author: Austin Boyd and Brannon Hollingsworth
Publisher: AMG Publishers
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of my reviews so far, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley, and is available now.
I am not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, I don't feel comfortable going into anywhere near as much detail over it as I have with the older books I've been reviewing! I cannot rob the authors of their story, so this is shorter, but most probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!
It's funny I should start reviewing this tonight when it's pouring down with rain outside as a humongous and adorable thunderstorm comes rolling through!
After reading only only a couple of sentences of H2O I thought I would dislike it. The florid language just turned my stomach, but I pressed on and was rewarded with a story which grew more fascinating as I progressed, but as I progressed it became obvious this was Christian fiction and there was no mystery over what the protagonist was experiencing. I was interested to note that it takes two guys to write a novel from the female perspective! lol! I'm an atheist, but I have no objection to religious fiction as long as the author(s) don't try to make too much sense out of it or take it too seriously, so I began in a state of curiosity as to where they would take this.
The main protagonist is Kate Pepper, a senior (rank, not age!) employee of an aerospace software corporation who is flying high in her world. She's also well-known for her sashimi and for the charity affairs she puts on with her boyrfriend Xavier. I love Kate Pepper. I know someone whom I really respect and whose maiden name is Pepper, and I used to date someone whose nickname was Pepper, and I love the Pepper Potts character in Ironman, so this effect hardly comes as a surprise to me, but the character is written well, even though she's sometimes infuriating to me. Unfortunately, that wasn't going to pan out too well!
I don’t know what it is about women with a soft belly, but Kate has one, amd I would take one of those over one with a washboard stomach - all other things being equal - any time, anywhere! OTOH, I'd take the washboard if she had a mind behind it, and the soft belly didn’t (and I had a choice!). But that's just me. Where this soft spot for a soft spot came from, I have no idea, but it’s a part of me and I don’t care to discard or abuse it.
Kate Pepper is an over-achiever, which didn’t win any points with me. Much worse than that, though, is that she's in an abusive relationship - of the mental, not the physical kind, but the physical kind is more than taken care of by Kate herself! She slices her hand making sashimi. She flies off her motorbike and is hospitalized because she's going way-the-hell too fast in the rain. She passes out in the shower, and goes temporarily blind making rice balls!
The one thing all of these events have in common, which Kate is evidently too slow to figure out, is water. There is something about water on her skin which transports her - and as the story progresses evidently does so quite literally - to another world - or more accurately to another time: Biblical times. This world is hard to understand and very scary and hallucinatory as far as Kate is concerned. I'm bothered by the fact that if water has so dramtatic an effect on her, then why doesn't the water - which is some 70% of her body! - have a huge effect? Why doesn't the water in the coffee in which she over-indulges, have an effect? There is a lame attmept to explain this away by saying the water needs to be in a pure form to have this effect on her, but that's just nonsense! No water is truly pure - even fresh water from your faucet or from a store bought bottle has some contaminants in it; that is not necessarily to say these contaminants are harmful, just to say that there's really no such thing as pure H2O.
When I got to a point which was some 30 pages shy of finishing this novel, I was seriously done with it! If this is Christian religious fiction, it falls far short of the glory of god! H2O has gone downhill fast and I find that hard to believe given how interested I was in it at the start, but I've read children's stories that are more intelligent, sophisticated, and believable than this one is. It’s painfully obvious what this is all about and has been since the first couple of visions which Kate has had. The only mystery in this novel is why Kate is so retarded in figuring out what’s going on. She was raised a Catholic and yet is completely brain-dead as to the religious nature of the visions!
I'm sorry, but I don’t want to read stories about people who are that irremediably and unrepentantly (yes, I use that word advisedly!) stupid. This Kate, the dumb as a brick Kate, is not the Kate I was led to believe this story was about in the beginning. That Kate - the one I loved, has left the building. I don’t know this substitute Kate and I don’t want to. This Kate is a weak woman who needs a guy to rescue her. But then the church has never been very kind to women, has it? Not since Eve at any rate! But that's not the worst sin in which Boyd and Hollingsworth indulge themselves!
Her "savior" has the initials JC. Why isn't that a surprise? But get this: his name is John Connor. Yes, he's the guy who fights the terminator machines! Not really, but did Boyd and Hollingsworth not see a Terminator movie? That's actually not the great sin; the great sin is that these visions appear to be nothing more than Jesus trying ineffectually to get Kate back into the fold. Jesus evidently is learning nothing from his consistent failures, but like an idiot, he continues repeating these same actions over and over again regardless of the cost to Kate, in the absurd hope of a different outcome! Seriously? Isn't that the definition of insanity?! He's putting her through this endless torment in order to say "Hi!"? I thought that was supposed to be Satan's job?!
Let me make this comparison: If someone you hadn't seen in a long while wanted to renew your acquaintanceship, but instead of simply coming right up to you and saying "Hi!", deliberately avoided meeting you face to face, and instead tried to force you back into a relationship by slipping you a drug which caused you to have bizarre and scary hallucinations, and caused you to injure yourself because of those hallucinations, making you think you were ill, delusional, and mentally deranged, would that be someone you actually wanted to be acquainted with? Excuse me, but you are a bona fides nut-job if your answer to that question is "Yes."
We're talking here about a character which I consider to be fictional, but which 90% of the US population accepts as real. He's claimed to be not only the most powerful being there is, but also supposed to be love itself, and yet the only way he can think of to get you to pay attention to him is quite literally to hit you upside the head? No! No one who loves you does that to you, not even when that person is human. For a god of love to do that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. This is an abusive relationship!
The irony here is that we’re shown Kate in an abusive relationship at the start of this story and she's back in one at the end! Just when we see her start to drag herself out of the previous one, we see her being told by more than one person that she needs to get into another one, where an even more powerful alpha-male figure wants to literally take over her life and do it not with love, but with violence, abuse, and threats? The biggest one of those threats is of course, that she either bows to him and quite literally worships him for eternity (how boring is that?), or she must literally rot in hell? How is this a step up for her?
I'm sorry but I can't read any more of this story! It's simplistic, juvenile opiate for the masses, and it makes zero sense even within its own religious framework. This story began great, and I was willing to go with it despite my misgivings that it would go exactly where in fact it actually did go, but though it started so well, it rapidly went to hell in a hand-basket. I cannot recommend this story to anyone who has any integrity and self-respect, and I especially cannot recommend it to women.
