Season's Meetings by Amy Dunne

Title: Season's Meetings
Author: Amy Dunne
Publisher: Bold Strokes
Rating: WORTHY!

This novel is not to be confused with Season's Meetings by Catherine Winchester, which I haven't read.

Errata:
P209 "...batter an eyelid..." should be "...bat an eyelid..." unless they're really going to be coating eyelids with flour and eggs...!

P213 "...whatever funny antidote Sky was reeling off..." should be "...whatever funny anecdote Sky was reeling off..." unless relations between Cat and Holly have really become so bad that they're poisoning each other!

Author Amy Dunne (not the same one as the one in Amy Dunn Quits School) is from my own home county of Derbyshire in England, so yes, I'm completely biased, but since I didn't learn this until after I'd finished this novel and concluded it an excellent and highly worthy read, I don't care about bias! I'd thought this was Amy Dunne's debut novel when I read it, but it isn't. It turns out that she has another one Secret Lies which, despite the bizarre title, I'm now looking for. Hopefully there will be more after this one, too.

This is my Xmas novel review for today (I can't promise an Xmas novel every day this month, but I will be doing more). This one is a romance, but it's a little bit different from your usual affair: it’s a lesbian romance. That helped me to forgive the author for making the beginner's mistake of having a character look in a mirror so we can get a description of them. The author also impressed me by not writing in the first person, which is a voice I typically detest. On top of all that, the novel is set in Britain, so worth a look there, too. Yes, America, there are places east of the Atlantic, and west of the Pacific, and south of Texas, and north of Minnesota. And the main character is an atheist! How often do we get that? So we're off to a good start thinks I.

Cat Birch is still stinging over the demise of her live-in relationship with a girl called Paula which ended very unhappily and she's not dealing with it very well at all. She has no interest in life save for work, which isn’t exactly going brilliantly, and she isn’t eating well. She apparently has a drinking problem as well if we’re to judge her by the fact that she pours herself the dregs of a bottle of wine and "gulps" it down, followed by opening yet another bottle and pouring herself a "large glass". On the bright side, she does volunteer work for children's literacy, so it’s not all downhill.

Cat is looking at another Xmas alone until her secretary and her close friend trick her into going to spend Xmas with a goddaughter to whom she can’t say no, but even that seems like it’s falling apart when her flight has to be canceled so Cat can get some last minute work caught up. But at least she doesn’t have to go visiting over Xmas, does she? Well, Beth took care of even that. Now Cat has to travel with someone who's driving up to Scotland. The last traveling companion she expects is Holly - young, feisty, confident, playful, and as optimistic and positive as Cat is the opposite.

The drive in the car (which has a bonnet, a boot, and tyres!) was written well and was quite entertaining. Not that it would do me any good, but I fell in love with Holly during the trip! They're not making the journey in one run because of the weather, so they stop at a hotel half-way through the journey - and the weather goes sour on them. This bit really didn't make sense! It would have been smarter to keep driving, but Holly was tired and Cat doesn't drive, so we can let that slide.

The descriptive prose went a bit sour here. Cat notes that Holly has gold flecks in her eyes. Seriously? The number of times I've read that exact description in YA literature (not that this is YA) is nauseating. It would honestly be a really nice surprise to read a story where the love interest actually doesn’t have gold flecks. Plus Cat is a bit like a cat in heat by this point, which is also not very endearing. I would have preferred it if her responsiveness was more in keeping with what we'd read about her earlier.

I have to say that there were parts of this story that came off as rather false, too. I know it's important to put some chop in the waves so the relationship isn't a plain-sailing Mary Sue boring story, but if it's not done well, then it simply takes the reader out of the story and reminds then that they are, in fact, reading a story. One such instance was Cat's intransigence over telling her friend Beth about her blossoming relationship with Holly.

Cat does have reason to avoid this revelation: long ago she and Beth had vowed to each other that they would never get involved with each other's close friends or family, so now she doesn't want to tell Beth that she fell in love with a cousin. As a result, she and Holly have a fight and it looks like everything is in trouble. Then Beth decides she should bring blind dates to dinner one each for Cat and Holly! Eek!

The thing which immediately crossed my mind was that Holly had set-up Cat, or the both of them were set up by Beth with these blind dates, both of whom seemed too much like caricatures to be taken seriously. Whether this is true or not isn't something I'm going to tell you, because I've given way more spoilers than I like to for a new novel. The reason for doing that is of course that there were some issues I felt needed addressing.

The only other real problem was with the ease of travel. The two of them had been stranded in two feet of snow, with more falling. In those circumstances, I would have expected power lines to be down, and travel to be all but impossible except on major roads, yet there were no power outages, and within a day or two, travel was apparently completely unrestricted, even out in the middle of nowhere. This seemed unrealistic to me! The two travelers had no trouble getting out to Beth and Katie's completely-out-in-the-wilds residence, and there seemed to be no problem in not only finding blind dates, but also in the dates getting there too. It made little logical sense, but I was willing to forgive it because the story, overall, was really entertaining.

It also made little sense that Holly, who had presented as impressively mature, suddenly had a childish hissy fit and viciously announced that "It's over" at one point in the story. This seemed to come completely out of the blue, to say nothing about it being out of character, and turned me off her somewhat, although she won me around again later! OTOH, Holly had been given a heck of lot of provocation (and not in a good way!) by Cat's cowardice, dithering, indecision, a sorry lack of support, and general absence of backbone, but again, she had her reasons, too.

But it's time to be done with all this rambling and conclude the review. My conclusion is that this novel is excellent! It made my eyes water because of the ending. No, I wasn't crying...my eyes were just watering, okay? OKAY? It happens. Deal with it! In short I loved this novel and really became as engrossed as I was enamored by it. This is a couple I would be honored to know in real life. It's rather sad that they're only fictional. This is a wonderful Christmas read which I whole-heartedly recommend.

Secret Lies by Amy Dunne

Title: Secret Lies
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!