Rating: WARTY!
This completes my trilogy of ladies of Lesbos literature (how about that for alliteration?!), all advance review copies. I read about eighty percent of Iron Goddess which is an awesome title and sounded like a really entertaining idea for a story, but it consistently failed me. Let this be an advisory to anyone who's ever tackled me when I've quit reading a novel at twenty or twenty-five percent and urged me to read on because it turns around. I'm sorry, but if you're taking more than twenty-five percent of your novel to get a reader interested, or to kick it into gear, then you're doing it wrong and I don't feel bad about ditching it when there is so much more out there to read, including stories which will engage me from page one and will keep me entertained. Life is too short to waste it on the faint hope that at thirty or forty percent things will dramatically improve. They don't. Not in my experience. This one didn't, although, as always, I was grateful to the author and publisher for a chance to read it. It was not for me for multiple reasons.
I was having serious doubts about this around twenty percent, but I pressed on and on hoping it would turn around and improve, but by eighty percent it had not changed one whit. It had shown itself to be exactly the same improbable and un-engaging novel as it had been at twenty percent. It has proved to me once again that it has never been worth my time to press on however hopefully, so no more of this. I quit it because the protagonist was just as dumb, headstrong, thoughtless, selfish, and foolish as she had been at twenty percent. She had learned nothing, had grown not a millimeter, and was still taking ridiculously improbable risks and putting everyone she supposedly cared about in mortal danger.
Shealene had ditched her sister and her father, who was head of a motorbike gang, at an early age, and moved on. Now she had somehow wangled a partnership in a motorbike customization shop catering to women. The shop was a haven for ex-cons who were trying to go straight. They had just about finished-up a rich contract with a girl band for three customized bikes, when the shop was robbed and the bikes and a host of other stuff had been taken. Instead of letting the police handle it - and making some discrete inquiries on the side id she wanted to - Shea gets in the face of a drug gang member and pisses him off to no end, putting everyone in her shop at risk. Then she pisses off the bike gang, but reconnects with her sister - the abused wife of the new gang leader.
Never once does she think of who she might hurt with her knee-jerk behavior. Delivering her sister to the family friend who is babysitting her sister's eight year old daughter (a child she has never met), Shea discovers the house has been broken into, the friend murdered, and her niece abducted. Despite the fact that Shea could not possibly have abducted this girl - and had multiple lines of evidence supporting that fact (she was driving her sister over there at the time, neighbors had already heard gunshots long before Shea arrived, the gun she foolishly failed to get rid of when the cops arrived was not the one used to kill the family friend), she's arrested for abducting the girl! She's still on the scene of the crime when the cops arrive - she's clearly not gone anywhere with anyone, yet she's arrested? It made absolutely no sense.
This was where I seriously doubted this novel would work for me, and further reading only confirmed this fact. Event after event was highly improbable, Shea squandered chance after chance to take care of business and get herself out of danger, and her failure to take those opportunities, put people at risk further down the line. Despite getting injured and being all but incapacitated by it at one point, she becomes ever more active after the injury - like it never occurred! This one was a bit too improbable for my taste, and the girl was far too mindless and headstrong, flying off the handle and acting completely ridiculously causing more problems than she solved. This business with the niece made zero sense, either. This child has never met Shea, yet at one point she's clinging to her like Shea is the kid's own mom! This was simply not credible.
The novel presents itself as a LGBTQIA story since Shea has a girlfriend (that she treats like dirt), and there's also a transgender character in it, but the relationship Shea has with Jennifer has no impact whatsoever on the story. Jennifer isn't even really an independent character. She's a minor appendage of Shea's, so her presence and her and Shea's preference really contributed nothing to the story. It's great that gender queer characters are becoming more and more common in novels (and TV, and movies), but this story would have been exactly the same had Shea been straight.
The reason I cannot recommend this, though, has nothing to do with that. The whole story was far too improbable, and Shea's hatred of the police force was ridiculous to an extreme. Her stupidity and stubborn insularity got people killed and a child injured. If she'd let the police help then things would have had a better outcome, and she never seems to get this. I really didn't like her at all. I liked her sister a lot more despite (or perhaps because of) Shea's poor attitude towards her. A story about Wendy might have been worth reading. This was not. A story about Shea, her girlfriend, and the bike shop without the theft and the gang war might have actually made for some really entertaining reading.
I wish the author all the best because she has talent if she can corral it and focus on what's important and what makes a main character appealing to a reader, and what makes a story believable, but I have no desire to read any more about an immature hothead like Shealene. She's just not interesting.
