I quit reading this as soon as I read "But because I’m kind of girly, a lot of people don’t see it." - What they don't see is that she's a lesbian. While I do share a preference for women, I'm not a lesbian and I cannot speak for them, but for me I found this offensive that the implication here is that lesbians can't be girly, which I know for a fact is entirely untrue. It's like the author expects us to accept that all lesbians are macho and butch, which is bullshit. I couldn't stand to read any firther beyidn that point. The story seemed obsessed with geekiness abd very ltitle else other thans ex, so once again there's no romance here, and no sensuality. I had the disastisfying feeling that this was going to be about falling in lust, not in love and that doesn't interest me.
Tuesday, October 12, 2021
Friday, January 10, 2020
Van Life by Nicolette Dane
Rating: WARTY!
Errata:
"So we're effectively on the lamb?" Should be lam without the B! They're not actually riding a baby sheep!
"Off near the hollow and it's vast decline," No, not 'it is vast decline', but 'its vast decline' the vast decline belonging to it.
I saw this author listed in a daily book flyer I get and the title she had on offer was interesting, but it was only listed as being available at Amazon. Why authors limit themselves and sell their soul to Amazon like this I cannot for the life of me begin to grasp, but I won't do business with Amazon, not even if the book is free, so I looked on B&N for it and that one wasn't there, but this one was, so I decided to try it instead.
I was disappointed, so I guess I won't go and read the other book even if it becomes available through an acceptable outlet. The writing felt simplistic and amateurish and the descriptions of sexual encounters were laughable, the author squeamishly refusing to use real words for body parts and instead inventing absurd terms, such as "pink pellet" for clitoris. No, not 'terms', 'turds'! I'm sorry but I can't take any writer seriously who does that.
The story is about this woman named Julia who gave up her corporate life to travel around the country (USA of course, because everyone knows that there cannot possibly be any story worth telling that occurs outside these jealously-guarded borders). She drives an old van which she's slowly fitting-out with amenities such as a table, a solar panel so she can have fridge, a shower, and so on. She picks up temp jobs from time to time to finance her travels, but occasional part-time jobs such as a couple of afternoons a week in a bar hardly seem like they would earn her enough money to finance this kind of lifestyle! It would barely pay for gas, let alone food and any kind of other needs; however, I was willing to let that go for the sake of a good story.
At one stop in a town she's visited before, temping in a bar, Julia encounters a woman named Robyn who is upset because she just got laid off from her job. They sit and commiserate and get slightly drunk and Robyn goes back to Julia's place (she's housesitting on this occasion, as well as the bar job), and they end-up in bed together having unprotected sex. In short, they're idiots. You know it wouldn't hurt a writer, the story, or the readership, to put in a brief line about sexual histories there, or at least offer some sort of a nod and a wink to the fact that having sex with a stranger is potentially dangerous and even life-threatening!
More fool me, but I even let that go. This was made a lot easier by the fact that the descriptions of their intimate encounters I took to skipping because they were so boring. As you have to realize, the two of them end up traveling together. Robyn's justification is that she has to go to North Carolina to come out to her parents, because she never admitted to herself that she was a lesbian until she met Julia. I'd say she was bi since she had a fiancé prior to meeting Julia, but you know it's illegal to have a bi character in a novel like this. It has to be all or nothing, right?
Anyway, they set off on the journey and after encountering a seedy guy in Wal-Mart while shopping before turning in for the night, someone tries to break into their van, and Julia shoots him with this .22 gun she carries. So the assumption is that it was this guy they met. I began wondering if it was in fact Robyn's surprisingly placid, accepting, and compliant ex-fiancé who was the troublemaker here, but I could not be bothered to read this story long enough to actually find out.
So these idiots, instead of reporting this incident to the police, take off for the mountains, which again, shows how stupid they are. They end up camping in some national forest area. The next morning, Robyn walks down from their camp site to sit and watch the sun come up, but the description of this makes no sense. In order to get there to see that sunrise, she would have had to have walked downhill on a narrow trail in pitch darkness. Maybe she took a flashlight, but it doesn't say so. The author gives no indication that it was dark at all! Neither does it say it was still dark when Julia goes down there slightly later, to meet her. Despite the sun not yet having come up, there's no hint that Julia had to find her way in darkness or semi-darkness either!
After both of them are together down there, the author writes: "all while the sun moved up in the sky and began ushering the early dawn into the blue morning." I'm not sure exactly what she means by 'early dawn' coupled with 'blue morning', but to me, 'early dawn' means that Robyn went down there in complete darkness and at best Julia went in twilight, yet neither had a flashlight? This was really thoughtlessly-written. Clearly the author wanted to evoke a feeling, but she failed because she didn't actually put herself there and think through exactly what it would have been like. Either that or she conveyed it really badly! It was at this point that I said enough is enough.
I had let so much slip by that it became the straw that finally broke this camel's back. Based on these observations and negative feelings, I cannot commend this one as a worthy read. I've read some really good LGBTQIA books, but this was nowhere near good and I'm not even clear as to what kind of an audience a novel like this could be aimed at. Hopefully not one as stupid as the main characters in it!
