Author: Anthony Szpak (has no website that I could easily find)
Publisher: Vincere Press
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.
This novel was rather odd to categorize. I started it thinking it was a young adult novel, but it began with a child, who turned into a young teen who ended up in prison and before you know it, ten years have passed and he's an adult. So no, not a YA novel! it purports to tell the true story of Santa Clause, aka Saint Nick, by garbing a New Your prison escapee in a fake white beard, a red, bullet-proof fireman's jacket, and riding on a rocket powered sled. Yeah, like that. I wasn't impressed.
Nick loses his parents to a drowning accident in 1869 New York City, and is "purloined" by a witness to the accident, Fergus, who has decided that child labor is the new black, so he wears them out in his factories and becomes rich. Nick, his supposedly adopted son works as slave labor in his factories. It's rather sad, but Nick's life is unremarkable until it's defined by Molly, a child his own (teen) age, who comes to the factory looking for work. She treats him like dirt, calling him "Rat-Boy" even as they supposedly fall in love and plan upon running away. They fail. Fergus, who was planning on marrying Molly as soon as she turned eighteen (why would a man like Fergus even wait that long?), discovers Molly and Nick in a tryst, and he accuses Nick not only of kidnapping, but also of attempted murder, and since Fergus has the police, the witnesses, the judge, and the jailers in his pocket, Nick is sent down for a life-long stretch on Rikers Island - at a time when the prison was new!
Molly tries to visit him but is told that he doesn't want to see her, and later that he's dead. A decade goes by and Nick manages to escape, conveniently hooking up with a total genius of an inventor, who Nick treats like trash until he realizes what utility he has. Nick is hardly a saint. No one in this novel is. Nick isn't very smart, and his leading impulse is continually towards violence. I don't like him. Neither do I like Molly who, when Nick looks her up after his escape, treats him like trash and rejects him. It's patently apparent that she's doing this because she has a child she fears losing to her husband Fergus if there were any dissent between them, but none of that excuses her appalling treatment of Nick. Having said that, surely this sorry couple definitely deserves one another?
Rather than move on, Nick decides to stick around and eventually, even he gets it into his stupid head that the best way to take down Fergus is to hit him hard in his money bags. Of course, this will hurt Molly, too, who has grown accustomed to living in luxury, but that's the price she will have to pay for not having the guts to run away from Fergus and instead, marry the lousy swine and have a child with him. I'm sorry but she's not heroic either.
Nick's friend Benny can do anything - he's the super hero of inventors, making mechanical walking dolls out of nothing in just a few minutes, making a bullet-proof coat out of a red fireman's jacket, making an airplane years before Gustav Weisskopf, Clément Ader, Karl Jatho, or the Wright brothers ever did. But you know what? Benny makes more sense than does Molly. Nick gets shot and when Molly reads of it, thinking he's dead, she takes to her bed in grief. This is the same Molly who treated him like dirt a few days before! No. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that the feisty self-possessed Molly of fourteen years of age, who had intelligent plans for her future, who supposedly loved Nick, has turned into the sell-out, loser Molly we meet after Nick gets out of prison, an inverse Molly who is to all intents and purposes happily married to a jerk who treats children like disposable diapers.
When Nick tries to contact Molly again, asking her for money, all she cares about is what happened to the children from the factories, and once she sees that they're being taken care of, her life suddenly turns around and it’s insta-love again? Where was this attitude for the last ten years as she lived with the very guy who was abusing these children en masse? I'm sorry, but suspension of disbelief just got suspended.
When Nick finally gets a real chance to talk to her, her excuse for not pursing finding out about him with more zest than she did, and for not trying to see him or help him is that Fergus threatened her with losing her child! Excuse me, but there was no child when Nick went to prison. There was no marriage. She whines about not being able to run and hide with a child in tow, but she sure as hell could have run and hid before she was married, before she jumped into Fergus's bed, before there was a child, when she was young and feisty and intent upon doing that very thing. Molly chose not to. She chose the easy way out. This girl who was introduced to us as a fierce, determined, and strong young woman simply bows down and knuckles under for no reason whatsoever except that it’s the road most taken. The bare fact is that she betrayed Nick, and everything that both she and they together stood for.
The story reaches absurdist proportions when Molly is summoned from her (and Fergus's) bed at midnight, and is expected to travel the dangerous and dark streets of New York City alone, for no better reason than to see a demo of Benny's latest invention - a rocket powered sled that flies. Yes, flies. Seriously? This was the point at which I called, "Check please, I'm outta here!" I really did not want to read any more of this novel; it's just too stupid for words and the characters are not even remotely endearing, much less believable. This novel is WARTY!
