Angel on the Ropes by Jill Shultz

Title: Angel on the Ropes
Author: Jill Shultz
Publisher: 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 started out well, but in the end lost my favor and never regained it. I found myself skipping page after page in the last 30 - 50% because it just wasn't interesting. Let me get one minor pet peeve out of the way before i begin. On page 93, I read: "She slid her hand up his bicep..." It's 'biceps', and the weird thing is that unlike all-too-many YA authors I've been reading lately, this author gets it elsewhere in the novel. Why it didn't trigger an alarm here, I don't know.

On a positive note, I loved the title: it was was highly appropriate! Through I normally don't say a word about covers since the author usually has nothing to do with them, on this occasion I have to say that this cover is amazing, and it was the reason why I took a closer look at this novel.

The main character, Amandine Sand is an acrobat. She's also a 'leopard'. I have no idea what that really means, because she's actually human, and in the first third of this novel, which bore rather too many confusing pages for my taste, I was not at all kept well-informed by the author. I skipped pretty much a whole chapter that went 'off topic' into a new set of characters because the entire chapter made very little sense to me, and I was certainly not interested in wasting my time reading and re-reading just to try and decipher what it was the author thought she was telling me.

I read novels for relaxation, not to have to rack my brain to figure out what, exactly is going on and what it means! It’s the author's job to lay that out for me competently, and while I don’t mind doing some work, there's a world of difference between envisioning a sculpture, and mindlessly hammering at a lump of rock in the hope that shape and form will appear. From a writing perspective, this is a real problem with sci-fi. Too many authors try to invent futuristic or alien worlds which are so far outside of our experience that they make no sense. The author then has to try and interpret their own story to we poor readers, so we can enjoy it. I see no point in that, and I've never been a fan of obfuscation for the sake of obfuscation. The other side of that coin is that the author's invented world differs from our own in such negligible ways that we look in askance, wondering why it's even billed as sci-fi, or 'futuristic'. I readily admit that it's a fine line to walk, but unfortunately I had problems with both sides of that coin with this novel.

I don't mind novels that go out on a limb, but when you're led so far out that the limb breaks under the weight of what’s being heaped upon it, then what’s the point?! How are you, in any meaningful sense telling me a story when I don’t understand a word you're saying, or if I'm struggling so much in trying to follow you, that I'm not even sure if what I'm getting was what you thought you were purveying, much less actually relaxing into a good story and enjoying it? After that one chapter which I skipped (which introduced another main character named Nikos), things improved, but when Nikos came back into the story, it was, I'm sorry to say, all downhill from there.

This novel is set in the future (in the early 2390's) when some humans have apparently developed some sort of genetic mutation which marks their skin in a manner evidently reminiscent of a leopard pelt. At the same time as this occurred, there arose a deadly plague. Because people, generally speaking, are so scientifically backward and consequently superstitious, the plague was associated with the leopard skin, and so the leopards became pariahs. Note that this is in the future, with advanced science in place, and yet somehow this bone-headed idea not only becomes powerful, it becomes an obsession, indeed a religion. I have to ask: if this is sci-fi, whence the science? This zealous bigotry, with nothing offered to balance it seemed a bit too much to swallow to me.

This takes place in a Dyson sphere named Penance, obviously not in our solar system. It was created by aliens, but abandoned for some reason. We're told nothing of the sphere - indeed, it's really irrelevant to the story (to say nothing of it being physically impossible to build - depending upon how you define a Dyson sphere, of course). Humans moved in (we don't get to know any of that history), but they apparently lost all their humanity in the process. Now 'leopards' are hunted and killed summarily by a religious group (why isn't that a surprise?!).

Amandine's dream is to work full time in the circus. She achieves this at an early age, and we're suddenly catapulted 17 years into the future where she's now a full-time performer trying to master the quintuple somersault, although for some illogical reason, she considers giving herself more height to accomplish this feat constitutes cheating. That served only to convince me that Amandine isn't so smart, but it was worse than that because the novel's own logic broke down here. Where's the sense in refusing to "cheat" by doing the quintuple somersault from a greater height, yet using maglev belts as part of the act?! This made zero sense to me.

There's further supportive evidence for Amandine's lack of gray matter (either that or a backbone!) in her actions. For one, Amandine is 'romantically' involved with a woman called Malaga, who makes no apology for her own at best thoughtless, and at worst callous - even cruel, treatment of Amandine. Malaga has many lovers, and apparently does not hold the same view as Amandine does about what constitutes a special encounter between them. She holds none of their interactions in the same reverence in which Amandine holds them, even commercializing some of them, selling the experience in her store.

Amandine puts up with all of this for reasons unknown, rooted in her blind infatuation with (a possibly older) woman no doubt, but this relationship terminates so quickly that I'm not even sure why it was included, unless we’re to learn from it that Amandine is a screw-up. Here endeth the LGBTQ+ portion of the lesson, because Amandine from this point onwards, is all hetero all the time. It's for this reason that I don't think that this novel ought to have been classified as 'Gay & Lesbian'.

Amandine is also involved in rescuing other leopards (since she herself was rescued at an early age), and in this she works with a woman called Sarah, who seems to have as little respect for Amandine's needs as Malaga does. Sarah interrupts Amandine's meeting with Malaga begging for help in running a rescue of some leopards, and Amandine caves-in, even though it will screw up her well-planned, but tightly-scheduled day. The rescue takes far longer than planned, further hog-tying Amandine. This made for a frustration- and anger-invoking start to the novel from my perspective! I was hoping, having been given this much, that we would get to see a really kick-ass Amandine turn up, but she never did. On the contrary, she went the opposite way.

By that, I mean that it was fine until Nikos came onto the scene full-time; then it went all to hell so quickly I almost got whiplash. Insta-love materialized out of nowhere, as it’s wont to do in these things. Amandine started behaving as though her emotional age was thirteen. The most transparently manipulated scenes began appearing one after another. - to get Nikos partially undressed, to get Amandine cold so he could hug her to warm her up. It became so bad that I could not stand to read it any more and, as I've said, skimmed the rest of it. I did not choose to read this for a rather cheesy romance; I had thought I was getting an adventurous sci-fi story. It wasn't.

One thing I really appreciated in this novel was the religious pogrom. That's exactly the kind of evil which organized religion perpetrates because it’s divisive by its very nature, artificially setting up one side ("us") as pure and chosen, and insisting upon a confrontational relationship with all others ("them"). That's why I say "Thank God"(!) that religious affiliation is dying and will likely become a minority position over the next forty years.

The biggest problem, to me, was that the story had nothing to do with the any of its setting, which begged the question: why? I have to ask why is this novel was set in the year 2392 (going into 2393) on a Dyson sphere? There is no reason for it. The same story could have been told in any year, past or present, so why set it almost half a millennium hence when neither the advancing of the calendar, nor the Dyson sphere contributed a single thing to the plot? (I have one question: how does the interior of a Dyson sphere experience a winter?!)

It was like the author didn’t really know what kind of a story she wanted to tell, and ended-up becoming entangled in several, without harmonizing the individual parts. Was this novel intended as a romance? It failed on that score because it was entirely unrealistic. Was it supposed to be sci-fi? it failed there, because sci-fi played no part in it, even though there was ambient sci-fi (if I can put it that way). Was it about racism or bigotry? This was the closest guess I could make, but even there it was flat and uninspiring. There is no reason, of course, why you could not feature all of these in the same story, but the more you try to pack in, the more top-heavy you risk it becoming, and this cramming-in of assorted themes is especially unwise if none of the parts hang together at all well.

The timing of the novel was also an issue for me. I mean, why set this novel four hundred years into the future when the time during which it took place played no part in the story, except in a negative way? It could have been set in any era, and would have been better set in the past IMO, so why set it some four hundred years hence? By 'in a negative way', I mean that although people have shown themselves to be racist and bigoted throughout history (and prehistory!), the dominating factors in our society today are technology and science. I found the premise that these were of no utility in this story to be quite simply impossible to swallow. This again begs the question: why sci-fi?! This story would have been better set in the past and not portrayed as sci-fi. For me it would have made more sense in that way, than it did in the setting we're offered.

While the author mentions that there were efforts to create a good vaccine, she would also have us believe that all of this advanced technology and science had not only failed to refute the bigoted claims of the religious nut-jobs, but that no one was even thinking of refuting the blind claim that there was a connection between the "leopards" and the plague. It was as though this baseless assumption was bought into by everyone, and I found that lack of dissent to be too big of a stretch. I couldn't believe that no one was pursuing this as a line of refutation.

The story is billed as 'Gay & Lesbian, Sci Fi & Fantasy', and I have to ask: where's the gay? Yes, Amandine was in a lesbian relationship when the story began, but that's given such short shrift as to be irrelevant. We see essentially none of it; instead what we’re asked to focus on is a rather clichéd YA hetero romance born of insta-love! As if that isn't bad enough, we're asked to read hackneyed lines like: "I want you Nikos. I want all of you." (p193)

This "romance" wasn't realistic. Yes, we can get insta-lust quite easily, but lust isn't love, not even close, and it’s as depressing as it is tiresome to see writers consistently and persistently conflating the two. Do so many writers actually not understand love or do they simply not care? Have they never actually been in love? Why do they feel the need to cheapen something so special, and so wonderful by so thoughtlessly tossing it into such a bland mix? Amandine and Nikos have known each other for what, a couple of weeks or so, and they have spent very little time together. She's just come out of a relationship with a girl with whom she claimed she was deeply in love. Vacillate much, Amandine?! The two of them (A & N) have done nothing momentous, and yet they're now magically in love? As if that wasn't bad enough, he's calling her "my love". It was quite simply unrealistic and far too sugary for me to swallow.

In connection with this, I have to say a word about the speech that's written in parenthesis in this novel. Like much in the novel, we never get an explanation for it, or if we do, whatever was offered went right over my head. I had to assume it was some sort of hand-signal, since there was no mention of ESP in play here. I was guessing that it was some kind of universal 'street' language, but it often made little sense, and it made less sense when we discover Amandine and Nikos doing this while actually having sex (I refuse to call it making love)!

Are we honestly expected to believe that in the course of this very carnal lust, Amandine abruptly breaks-off whatever it is she's doing with her hands, maybe in the middle of offering an intimate and passionate caress, to sign "I'm yours" to Nikos? I don’t really think so! And are we to then also accept that he immediately ceases whatever his hands are pursuing, merely to sign likewise?! I'm sorry, but this fairly reeked of a writing agenda getting in the way of realistic story-telling, and it threw me right out of suspension of disbelief. We have vocal chords so we can be vocal, not so we can keep our mouths shut in deference to sign language when it's unnatural (for those of us blessed with speech) to do so.

In the end I cannot recommend this because of all these issues I had with it. I honestly felt that I was 'lured' into reading it by implicit promises that I felt were not kept, and even when I resigned myself to accepting that, I was still felt cheated out of the story which this had the potential to become.

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!