Author: Ryan Winfield
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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 was attracted to this one because the blurb made it sound like an off-the-beaten-track kind of a story, which I'm always up for after so many cookie-cutter YA novels, and the other advantage this one had was that it wasn't YA (per se - in practice it was no better). Yeah, I know that blurbs nearly always lie (except mine, of course!), but the only way to find out how good the blurb is, is to actually read the novel, so I bought into this one. It appeared to be a romance, but it's written by a guy, which further intrigued me. It’s not that guys can’t write romances, but they tend not to (at least not under their real name!). I'm always fond of going against type, but not being rubbed the wrong way as this novel was determined to do.
When I finally got into it, I found myself significantly less thrilled. I hadn't expected a modern remake of Lady Chatterley's Lover! The writing is technically good, and the novel started out well enough: it’s descriptive and easy to read, and the characters are well-drawn to begin with. So what was my problem? It was far too trope-ish for my taste, and rather quickly, the characters began breaking the rules we’d been given earlier in the novel. I guess if the writer is going for an all-out romance, then it’s fine, but I’d expected (or at least hoped for) more than that with this novel, and it wasn't delivered. Fortunately, it wasn't so bad that I felt like tossing the book after two chapters, so I stayed on-board for a while, which proved to be not worth the time.
So specifically what was my problem? Well, there were several. The first of these was that the main character (Jane) is a recovering addict who has just gone through her daughter (who happens to be named Melody) dying of an addiction not that dissimilar to the one Jane herself has fought. We're expected to believe that Jane is racked with grief over this (we're frequently reminded of it), but disturbingly quickly, she magically forgets all of this debilitating grief and instead, begins lusting after Caleb (a suitably earthy name) - a guy she almost quite literally picked up off the street.
She met him accidentally and he was not very nice to her so, of course, she sought him out! She thought he knew something about her daughter. When she finds him that second time, he's been mugged (he lives on the street) and his guitar is gone - the one on which he played a song that caught Jane's attention. She takes him home (cue tired trope of the woman ministering to her man) and employs him to tidy up her yard, then she buys a brand new guitar for him. Apparently pulling $6,600 out of savings to pay him and provide him with a gift isn’t a problem for Jane. No word on how she came by such copious, free, and easy cash.
This whole relationship completely trivialized Jane's grief over her daughter's death and rendered it into a mere annoyance, quickly dispensed with. It was entirely unrealistic to me. Caleb went out of type, too, at this point. Instead of being the very reserved, laconic drifter we initially met, he transmogrifies into a perky, playful, flirtatious toy-boy and this turned me right off of his character. I just could not see such a dramatic about-turn occurring for either of these characters without some lead-in and some strong motivation and we’ve been offered neither before this occurs. So what's left when the novel's two main adult characters turn out to juvenile propinquents? Ditch it.
Caleb is also far too much of a trope hot guy. I'm tired of authors trotting out these shirtless guys with chiseled abs and tight glutes. Is this the best their imagination can do? It's pathetic. The other side of this coin isn’t any better: she stares at his sweat-soaked T-shirt covering his 'broad shoulders' and 'narrow waist'. She wears his newly washed T-shirt to bed the night they argue. Seriously? This is nauseating. Can we not find something a bit more realistic and less cartoonish? Why invent characters which you're simply going to caricature and turn into unfunny jokes? I was led into this novel thinking that it was about damaged people feeling their way back towards a life, and perhaps even helping each other get there. Instead, we’re presented with people who are 'damaged' one minute and perfectly fine the next, with zero transition time!
Caleb's gardening job achieves two things: one is to keep the two of them in close proximity, and the other is to get his shirt off routinely or to get him soaking wet so he has to strip down to his shorts when he's been resident in the house for only a couple of days. Jane isn’t even phased by his shameless disrobing! Neither of these ruses is very inventive, and they deviate not at all from the trope norm. I wanted more story and less yawning - or more accurately, I wanted something different. If we’re going off the beaten path, can we not go a bit further off than a chiseled body, wet clothes and girls dressing in men's shirts?
Caleb is portrayed as an idiot and a jerk, too, unfortunately. Jane supplies him with gardening gloves, yet he fails to wear them while he's pulling out thorny shrubs. This doesn’t convey to me that he's manly or tough; on the contrary, it conveys that he's a moron - someone who needs his hands for his avocation towards playing guitar, yet too dumb to grasp that he needs to take care of them.
So how is he a jerk? Well when he pats the couch for Jane to sit next to him, she meekly complies, and this leads to hugging after she starts crying over her life, but when she asks him to tell her about Melody, he argues with her that it’s off limits. This doesn’t tell me that he's damaged; it tells me that he's selfish and probably hiding something (he was). His behavior isn't acceptable given what Jane has done for him. This behavior is rendered even more out of left field by a later revelation.
As if that isn't bad enough he's knocking on her bedroom door in the middle of the night and opening it without even being bid to enter. This was the place where I decided I could read no more of this crap. Belief, no longer comfortably suspended, was laying with torn skin on the unforgiving asphalt, and driving right over it was reality, heading out of town on the last bus.
If you want to write stuff like this and get away with it, you have to set it up in a way that works - that makes it appropriate for characters to behave in these ways. You can't just have a character act in a certain way because your plot suddenly demands it right there and then. You have to make it credible by putting a few things in place, first; then when it happens, it doesn't seem like something out of day-time TV, and your reader can accept it all like it's normal and fine - even hoped for and expected.
The blurb for this novel asks: "What boundaries would you cross for true love?", but there are no boundaries crossed here. It tells us: "Jane’s Melody follows a forty-year-old woman on a romantic journey of rediscovery after years of struggling alone." In what way his she struggling? She overcame her addiction with abundant help. She evidently made a wad of money selling insurance. She lives in her own house in complete comfort. She can take time off work and not miss the paychecks. Her grief over her daughter is actually self-pity because she chose not to do for her daughter what others had done for her. She gets over this self-pity in record time once Hot Hunk™ shows up. I ask again: in what way is she struggling? The blurb says, "Jane must decide if it’s too late for her to start over, or if true love really knows no limits." Seriously? There is no "True Love™ here. There's an older woman's lust for a younger guy. Love never enters into it.
This author just doesn't get it. I don't know what kind of readership (or reader's hip!) he was aiming for, but it sure as hell ain't me, and it's sure as hell not anyone I can respect! This novel is warty and certifiably so.
