Showing posts with label Portia MacIntosh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Portia MacIntosh. Show all posts

Saturday, April 17, 2021

Faking it by Portia MacIntosh

Rating: WARTY!

I'm always open to a good fish-out-of-water story or a life-swap story and this is both. It seemed, despite being outside of my usual fare, like it might be a laugh. It wasn't. It was an audiobook narrated decently by Karen Cass, but she couldn't save the poor material.

It's also set in Britain, so it made a pleasant change from the obsessive-compulsive 'range' of stories I typically see - all set in the US like there's nowhere else on Earth worth writing about, or set elsewhere, but with American characters, like no other nationalities are worth writing about. I often wonder if such a shallow publishing schedule by US publishers contributes to the US's problem whence half its voting population has an intense dislike of anyone perceived as a 'foreigner', but again the location wasn't enough to save it.

In this novel, Ella and Emma are identical twins who haven't really spoken in many years because of a falling-out over money when their mother - an advice columnist - died quite young from cancer. Emma got an inheritance because she married young and had children - a stipulation of the will. Emma doesn't get a thing until she turns 35 because their evil mother wanted them to stand on their own two feet before they got anything - or to have at least spawned offspring.

It's nonsensical and probably open to challenge in a probate court, interfering with reproductive rights as it does, but I let that slide even as I wondered if this might have been a better story had Ella decided to have a child just to get the money, and then given it up for adoption. It would certainly have given her more depth and made for a more interesting person than she was. It also would have made for a better story had Ella been the success, not needed her mother's money, and poor Emma, who had children too early in life was the struggling one who needed Ella's help.

As it was, she was thoroughly unappealing and boring, She was in a dead-end job, which she lost in an improbable way, and she showed no ambition to go anywhere or do anything. The only time she ever stretched herself, it seems, was when out of desperation, she accepted her twin's amazingly coincidental offer to impersonate her. Her twin has the unlikely fate of having to do jail time for unpaid parking fines.

This, too, was ridiculous because it turns out her twin is such a over-achiever and so organized that it's inconceivable that she - or her husband - would not have paid the fines, so the author is constantly betraying her own premises and character traits. It would have been better if Emma's crime had been something like unintentional shoplifting. It would have have explained her embarrassment and her need to be impersonated while she was in jail, better than parking fines did, so again, unimaginative.

But I let that go, and I read on. Ella becomes Emma, despite having different hair and being slightly more rounded than the trim and fit Emma. the problem with the story began immediately as Ella interacted with Emma's friends and acquaintances and finds that they're such a snotty and superior bunch, yet never once - not in the fifty percent(?) or so that I listened to - did she ever come back with an amusing observation or zinger in return. She was a limp tissue and it was boring, and turned me right off her.

On top of that there was a lot of body-shaming in the story, in endlessly talking about looks and weight. It's really aggravating when Ella finally goes to get her stupid home-attempt at hair-trimming fixed by Emma's hairdresser, who really needed to be kicked in the balls, he was such an obnoxious, judgmental, little snot - and such a cliché. I imagine this is what the author thought was funny, but it wasn't. It was stereotyping and nasty.

It seemed pretty obvious from the off that Emma's husband is having an affair, and maybe Emma is too, but I wasn't fully convinced that this was not a red herring. Ella, however, is immediately into a YA love triangle with studly men and this was another turn-off. I know this is chick-lit, but who laid down the rule that a woman cannot be depicted as standing on her own two feet? Does she have to be salivating like a bitch-in-heat over every other man she encounters? Seriously? One of them, supposedly a friend, refers to Ella more than once as "you dirty girl" which is obnoxious. It's such poor writing, and it makes it really hard to enjoy a story when it's so bald and obvious. Subtlety is not Portia MacIntosh's strong suit, evidently.

So all-in-all, this story was bad, it wasn't funny, it was written poorly, and it had serious issues. I cannot commend it as a worthy read.