Author: RA Andrade
Publisher: Selladore Press (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!
Ross is a young man who is taking flying lessons from Ernie - flying helicopters. Ernie is an odd, older guy who hints to Ross that he should as ask out his daughter, Penny! Ross shies away from that, not being very good with girls - so he says. He's not going to be around anyway because he has a summer trip to Vermont planned.
The book is 250 pages overall, but it starts on page five, ends on 246, and the lines are widely-spaced, so the effective length is less than the 240 or so pages it would seem to be at first glance. It's titled The Field Trip but evidently isn't friendly to trees! Not in the print version, anyway! Maybe that's why Ross keeps on insisting that it's a research trip. Ernie has mentioned to him that a war buddy of his who lives up there has been reporting odd goings on: lights in the sky (LITS - a staple of UFO folklore) at night and military activity in the air during the day.
I didn't get Ross. At first I thought he was in his late teens or at best, early twenties, but he turned out to be thirty five, which was a big surprise. He's a teacher evidently in some sort of a community college (the novel is unclear), and he's still living with his mom. He has, effectively, a non-existent dating history, but this seems to be changing when Marsha, one of this students asks to meet with him on the evening of the last day of classes, to discuss his views on virtual evolution.
Writing issues! Even in the best written novel there are writing issues to discuss, and this is in part what this blog is all about. One problem I've noticed with some authors is that they think "biceps" is a plural and it's okay to refer to a "bicep". This author isn't one of those, but in one part of the text, we read, "right arm biceps". This is superfluous, since the biceps is found only in the arm. "Right biceps would have served just as well and actually sounds better. Every little bit helps!
The major who appears in chapter three is a bit of a cliché. He's chewing on an unlit cigar? Is that even allowed in the US army these days? He felt like something out of a comic book. The writing that introduced him needed some work, too. For example, this sentence: "Clenching the cigar between his bared teeth, the major grimaced." If you have a cigar between your bared teeth you're pretty much grimacing to begin with.
After the disastrous dinner where Marsha gets both wine and chocolate mousse on her, she nevertheless invites Ross back to her apartment to continue the discussion. As he arrives, bringing pizza, she greets him wearing literally nothing but a sheet robe. I'm sorry but this is nonsensical. Yes, he's been her teacher, but she doesn't know him, and she greets him dressed (or more inappropriately, undressed) like that?
The reason she does this is to seduce him, and it works because he has zero self control and even less self-respect. After a rather odd and somewhat inaccurate conversation about evolution, she retires to the bedroom, calls him down there and he enters her room to find her naked on the bed. This moron doesn't even question her motive, much less her physical health, and immediately has unprotected sex with her.
I'm sorry, but at this point I could not stand to read this novel any more. I'm not a fan of juvenile sex romps; I like intelligent stories about intelligent characters, and this clearly wasn't one. I can't recommend it based on the small portion I read.
