House Broken by Sonja Yoerg

Rating: WARTY!

"After her disagreeable mother is injured, veterinarian Geneva works to rebuild their fractured relationship. But will shocking revelations tear them apart for good?" Who gives a shit? Really?

The Middle of Somewhere by Sonja Yoerg

Rating: WORTHY!

Liz is twenty-nine and feels that her life is somehow becoming derailed. She has long wanted to hike the two-hundred and twenty mile JMT (John Muir Trail) in California, and has never done it. After the first seven miles, the trail runs above 7,000 feet for its entire length. Now she has the chance to do this, and is looking forward to a wilderness experience to help get her mind right, but live-in boyfriend Dante, about whom Liz has mixed feelings, has talked her into bringing him along. I was interested in reading this novel having recently been in Yosemite (all too briefly!) myself.

There were some formatting issues with this book as I read it - on a smart phone in a Kindle app. For example, this sentence, at 2% in, had a line break right before the last word, which would have been fine except that the line break didn’t occur at the end of the line but in the middle of a line where it dropped to the next line and the sentence finished with the last word. It looked like this:
How could she be psyched when this wasn’t the trip she’d
planned?

There were other such issues. Some screens had the text finish about two thirds the way across the screen, like the text had been indented from the right. I suspect this was caused by hard carriage returns which didn't translate into Kindle format. In other instances, there were words run together such as 'performanceenhancing'. Any spell-checker would catch that. In at least one instances a hyphen was missed such as: 'selfrecrimination' and “Or thenot-confess-your-most-shameful-moments..." A spell-checker would catch that, too.

There were other cases where speech from two different people was run together such as: He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’d do this to me.”“I’m sorry.” (the last speech was from Dante's girlfriend Liz, and should have appeared on a separate line). Another instance was: “It’s freezing. I’m hiking in my leggings until it warms up.”“I’m hiking in everything.” Again a line break was missing. Spell-checkers won't catch these problems, and maybe they were caused by the translation to kindle format rather than anything the author did. I don't know.

This was an advance review copy, so I am hopeful that the formatting issues will be resolved before it gets into its final form, but this wasn't the only such issue. This one is on the author: she wrote "wracking her brain" when it ought to be "racking her brain" There were problems with the chapter starting points, too. For example, both chapters one and two begin with a capital letter T, although this has nothing to do with the text. The first one begins "T Liz..." and the second chapter begins "T At...". I found myself wondering if this was the result of a drop-cap not being translated into the Kindle format properly. The second chapter also had a problem with the word "Chapter" rendering it as "Ch apte r Two".

Meanwhile, back at the story, Liz has issues with Dante of which he's unaware. These are not helped by his delaying her trip. She had to wait two weeks past her planned date so that Dante could also get a permit to hike, and then on the day they arrived at their starting point, she had to wait on his chatting with some people in the visitor's center before they actually began it. Having hiked up really steep and demanding slopes for half a day or so at the start of the trail, they encountered two guys, evidently brothers, who were evidently to be the bad guys here, and I found myself hoping this would not turn into a bad teen B movie!

By day two, Liz is so tired of Dante antics that she's all-but ready to ditch him and strike out on her own. This could have gone either of two ways here: she does ditch him and finds herself ready for a new life, or the trip will bond them. At that point, I was leaning towards the second even though the story looked like it was heading towards the first, but there was a third option, where he decides to turn back leaving Liz alone as she had originally wanted.

At one point in the novel, we're told that the next leg of the journey is a rise of three thousand feet over a instance of twelve miles which sounds amusing on the face of it, since it's only a one in 21 gradient, but of course, the gradient isn't that gradual. Some parts are evidently flat, or nearly so, whereas other parts are extremely steep. It just seemed to me less impressive than perhaps the author thought it was when she wrote it!

Liz, it turns out is rather like a Chinese nesting doll set, in that as we read through this, we find that what was on the outside concealed something different underneath. In some ways, it was annoying to me that I kept on thinking I knew what was going on, only to find that being undermined by another layer underneath. I don't know why it annoyed me. Clearly this was the way to do it, rather than front-load the novel with all her baggage in the same way she was loaded with baggage as she began her hike. Or worse, put a prologue in. God forbid that crappy method of writing, and kudos to the author for avoiding it.

In the end, as irritating as it was in some ways to lift the ragged jute rug of Liz's personality and find dirt swept underneath it, it was quite realistic - not so much in how she was revealing herself to us, but in how she was keeping the ragged edges of her life hidden, where she wouldn't see them for what they were. Liz is carrying far more weight on this trip than she needs to, but most of it isn't in her backpack.

My blog is about writing, and I found an example of the word 'entitled' being misused. I know this is becoming more common but that doesn't make it right - not until it's totally common! It's sad to see words being misused and losing their meaning. It's reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984 where words can mean two different things - like flammable and inflammable! In this case we're told that a Georgia O'Keeffe painting was entitled "Above the Clouds I" when it was really simply titled "Above the Clouds I". It's a pretty picture and you can argue that it was entitled to be admired, but that's as far as that goes!

Without wanting to give too much away, there is one section of the book where Liz confesses something to Dante and his reaction is to hike alone the next day, leaving her behind. This behavior, to me seemed no better than Gabriel's behavior - the very thing which Liz is so obsessing over, yet she never once thinks there's anything wrong with Dante's abandoning her (on three occasions no less!) when she most needed support. For me his behavior was unforgivable.

The portion which deals with the suspension bridge over Woods Creek misled me. The story indicates that the bridge is a lot higher than it appears from images on the web, which makes the events there rather suspect! Note that Woods Creek isn't named after me even though I've reached the point where I have actually started creaking...! From the text I imagined the bridge higher and with rocky terrain on either side, whereas it is actually in a rather forested area. Note that I've never seen it, so I'm judging from images on the web, and I guess it's possible there's more than one suspension bridge over it, but it's no big deal.

What bothered me most of all was that Liz, who started out strong an independent, was disappointingly slowly morphed into a rather more childlike version of herself in the last fifteen percent of the novel, and reduced to irritating internal monologue about how sorry she was (I'm not telling what for!), and how certain she was she had lost Dante. This was way overdone. I got the message. I didn't need to be hit over the head with it every few pages! Liz is also an experienced hiker, so when I read, "...and he and Joe assisted Dante in helping Liz down tricky sections" it made her seem inept or like a maiden in distress, and I reacted badly to it. Liz deserved a lot better than that.

It was at that point that I wondered if my rating for this novel was going to end-up in the toilet, but it regrouped at the end and made for a decent ending and overall, a very worthy read, whic was a welcome and pleasant surprise for me! I recommend this one.