Author: Lance Erlick
Publisher: Finlee Augare Books
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 of any kind for this review.
The writing technique seemed a bit odd to me in this novel; it feels like it's a first novel, which it apparently isn't, but the oddities go beyond that to being downright confusing at points, such as at the top of page 20 where Erlick includes a brief first person thought, but fails to italicize it to delineate it as such. This novel contains no warning which would suggest that it's a draft galley proof or anything like that and really, in this day and age, there would seem to be neither need nor excuse for such anachronisms. The copy put out there for net "galley" reading really ought to be in first class shape. There is no excuse for it to be less than that.
This is yet another novel which has a "table of contents" which lists only the chapter numbers - no page number, no chapter title, nothing but a list of chapters. I still do not see the point in that! But at least the author is smart enough not to have a prologue! This novel tells the story of a war in North America which appears broadly speaking, to be between men and women. The "rebels" seem to be all men (at least in the first half of this novel, which is all I read): mountain men living in the Appalachians who carry shotguns and skulk around in the undergrowth taking ineffectual potshots at the enemy). The enemy is an army of "mechs" which are women encased in a titanium alloy shell, which of course has an inevitable weak spot. Seriously? When George, who inexplicably goes by Geo (like Neo, maybe?!), and his father kill one of the mechs, Geo is somehow left a sitting duck, but the other mech simply stares at him instead of shooting, so he escapes.
It turns out that the other mech is Geo's "sister" Annabelle, who is apparently tired of killing, and she's not very good at it anyway, because it isn't long before she's captured and held while her captors try to force her into a marriage. This made zero sense at all to me. Are these women free or not? Isn't that why they're fighting? So what’s with the arranged marriages? It made zero sense that Annabelle would not kill Geo when she had the chance given that he had just slaughtered her closest friend. The fact that she's his "sister" holds no water because they don't even know each other in any meaningful sense, and they're not related.
The story seems very much to be a Xerox® of the American civil war, with the rural "south" fighting the industrialized "north", and with families split and pitted against one another, but along gender lines rather than political or slave-ownership affiliation. It reminds me of an idea I had for a gender war story, but mine was nothing like this one. The story then took off swinging like a pendulum, back and forth between Geo and Annabelle until the two of them finally hook up together, both of them on the run. Since Annabelle's adopted, it seems pretty obvious which way things will go from here on out: no surprises, nothing unexpected there.
My problem with this story, at just before the half-way point, was that I had no vested interest in it or in any of the characters. I could not relate to either Geo or Annabelle, and I had no feelings about them one way or the other. They seemed really bland and rather juvenile, and offered me nothing to root for. Why would I care about either of them or what happens to them? I can’t answer that question, and that is exactly the problem! I need something more than this if I'm to really get interested in a novel. I need to see a reason to root for a character, or I need to actually like the character or at least find them engaging, or interesting. There was none of that here. I need to be interested in their world and what's going on. I need to want to find out what happens next, and I just didn't care what happened next here! Feeling none of the above is a really bad position to be in when you're pretty-much half-way through the novel!
One of the worst parts of the story, and this was what finally put the last nail in its coffin, came right around this point, too: at the end of chapter 21 Annabelle pins Geo on the floor to show him how tough she is, and how men are not superior to women. This was bad enough, having her behaving "like a man" to show how superior (or even how 'equal' women are, but then contrast this with what happens in Chapter 23, less than ten pages later, where Geo refuses to share his sleeping bag with her because she won’t answer his appallingly intrusive personal questions, and she starts whining that he's not behaving like a gentleman! I'm sorry, but at that point I decided this novel was simply too juvenile and silly to continue reading. This is novel is WARTY!
