Blind Date by Frances Fyfield

Title: Blind Date
Author: Frances Fyfield
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: worthy

Frances Fyfield is from my own home county of Derbyshire in England, and this is my own signed hardback copy! How cool is that! How many author's signatures do you have on your Nook screen?! lol!

So, too cool, but if only I could be sure I'll like it! So, a blind date with Blind Date! I have to confess that I found this novel almost impossible to get into for the first thirty or forty pages, then it all started settling down. I’d advise a re-write of those first pages were I Fyfield's editor. At one point she's in first person, then loses that for third person. Very little of what she wrote in those pages made very much sense to me; then it’s like someone else took over and the novel was fine.

The story features Elisabeth, a young woman who got drunk one night and tripped over while walking home, and while she was lying there half asleep, some psycho who had been stalking people prior to this, threw acid onto her. Fortunately, she was laying in such a way that her face was largely protected, but her body was severely burned, her skin even dissolved in several places, and her surgery to correct this hasn't exactly been stealthy. I can empathize with Elisabeth a little, having accidentally knocked scalding hot water onto my back when I was very young, but mine is hardly a scar which stands out in public. It does lend a whole nude meaning to "keep your shirt on" though!

We join Elisabeth staying with her mother in Devon at her boarding house. She hates it there, her only comfort being her 12 year old brother (whom I suspect of being the acid thrower, warped wretch that I am, but there is another potential suspect revealed later, so maybe I am as warped as I claim!). Even though she isn't completely recovered from her trauma, Elisabeth prevails upon her friend Patsy (shades of Absolutely Fabulous!) to return her to London. Patsy is something of a fair-weather friend of Elisabeth's, resenting her neediness now that she's injured.

Back in London, Elisabeth moves back into her bell tower. She lives in the bell tower of an old church, one which is largely disused, so the bells haven't rung in years. She wakes up in the night to discover someone else is staying there - a large, gentle young man who was occupying the place during her absence, doing some work around the church. After her initial fear that he was an intruder, they reconcile their positions and he plans on leaving the very next day. She fails to recall that he is the same guy, Joe, who she saw hanging around during one of her hospital visits in Devon....

In addition to Elisabeth, we’re introduced to a small group of young professional women, of which Patsy is one, Hazel another, and Angela the third. They're in relationship doldrums and decide to join an introductory dating service to find a decent guy for themselves. Angela, who has already signed on for this service, but who keeps this secret from the other two, is supposed to meet with a guy (nicknamed 'Owl' because of his eyeglasses) who also joined the dating service but kept it secret from his three male friends (Joe, Rob, and Michael) who were talking about joining it - at Michael's suggestion!

Angela turns up dead. Patsy gets an invitation from the same dating service. None of these girls talk to each other about what they're up to - except that Patsy does confide in Elisabeth, who, having kicked Joe out, has now started to become friendly with him and is lured out for a bus trip around the sights of London with him.

Meanwhile, the rather weird woman who runs the dating service seems to have an oddball relationship with her rather oddball son. The plot sickens! But this story continues to intrigue me. During the first thirty or forty pages I was really becoming frustrated with it, and when I read bits and pieces of it over the weekend, I was frustrated, but reading it at other times, including at lunchtime today, I was drawn right back into it. The problem I think is that this novel is dense and serious and it doesn't take kindly to being read in dribs and drabs, or when there are interruptions going on around you. But if you sit down with it and treat it with respect, and give it some time, then it will be kind to you! How odd is that? It’s like the novel is the physical real-world manifestation of the fictional female protagonist within. I don’t know if Fyfield deliberately created it like this, but it’s a wonderfully enlightening concept which has really made an impression on me as a writer!

So Patsy survives her encounter with Michael, the son of Cynthia, warped and wefted adult child that he is, and she passes on her knowledge of him to Joe and Elisabeth, who are now becoming much more comfortable with each other, although she's as irascible as ever. In a bygone era, I could imagine a young Katherine Hepburn playing her and playing her well. Michael is carrying a psychic wound from someone who was unkind to him, and I believe that the person who did this to him is none other than Elisabeth herself, who caught him stealing when they were both kids, and reported him - although that alone seems insufficient to warp him as much as he is. So now he's killing women who are unkind to him, which is why Patsy is still alive. It makes me worry about what will happen to Elisabeth if this is what happened. How is she going to handle the guilt-trip that drops on her when she learns that she set this killer in motion? Or am I completely wrong in my assessment? It wouldn't be the first time!Both Joe and Elisabeth go to sign on with Cynthia's match-making agency, but Joe deliberately plays himself as an uncouth character and is thrown out, whereas Elisabeth, who remembers Cynthia from the incident during her childhood, is rushed through the sign-on process and hurried out the door a little more kindly. Now it appears that Michael has his hands on a key to her church tower, so things are slowly coming to a head.

I'm not sure I'm too keen on Joe. He strikes me as being a little bit creepy, but Elisabeth I am in love with, and looking forward to reading how this all pans out. As it looks right now, I'm pretty much expecting there to be a showdown in the tower rather reminiscent of the ending to Hitchcock's Vertigo, but with a bell falling on Michael (assuming he's indeed the villain and not an appallingly stinking red herring!) or something along those lines. We'll see!

Well I finished this and I did get something right! The ending struck me as a bit vague, and Joe's behavior seemed so at odds with how he'd been characterized earlier that it bothered me to a degree, but considering characterization and general writing quality, I recommend this novel because of Elisabeth.

Lingerie Wars by Janet Elizabeth Henderson

Title: Lingerie Wars
Author: Janet Elizabeth Henderson
Publisher: Unknown
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. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

This novel appears to be the first in an Invertary series. Whether any of the others will be an improvement on this I don't intend to find out.

The English and the Scots have long been antagonistic. In the past, these disagreements were fought out on the battlefield, but that stopped when Elizabeth 1st died without leaving an heir. She herself picked James 6th of Scotland to succeed her. He had been the longest reigning monarch ever to rule Scotland, but when he became James 1st of England, he set about combining the two nations into one (along with Ireland), and setting up a single parliament to govern them. The flourishing of English society which had taken place under Elizabeth continued during his reign. Bacon, Donne, Jonson (Don Johnson lol!), Marlowe, and Shakespeare lived in his era, and it is his name which became attached to the Authorised King James Version of the Bible.

These days, those battles are fought on the football field, and each year the four nations which comprise Great Britain: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales represent in a week-long battle for soccer supremacy in the quaintly titled 'Home Internationals'. Though a single nation, the UK is allowed four teams because it was the birthplace of football. I remember one interview on TV with the then manager of Scotland where he referred to the upcoming match between these two nations as taking on the "Anglish" - not playing against England, the team, but against the nation! I found that amusing. So these games have deep roots that go beyond mere football. I love Scotland: it was featured powerfully in my novel Saurus, so when I saw this novel pop up on Netgalley, I couldn't resist it, even though romances like this aren't exactly my cup of tea, especially after the very disappointing Skinny Bitch in Love.

The male protagonist is a retired British soldier, with the asinine name of Lake Benson (can we not ever have a romance without these bizarre pretentious names?!). His sister, believe it or not, is called Rainne! Rain feeds lakes, so are we to take home from this that Lake's sister is servile? She's certainly portrayed that way. He has loaned her money to open this underwear shop directly across the street from an exotic lingerie shop owned and run by Kirsty. These names remind me of stories I used to read to my kids when they were toddlers, about a blue dog and his rainbow-hued friends. The shops are supposed to be in a little Scots town of Invertary, which is fictional but seems to be based heavily on a real town called Inverary which sits on a Loch-side.

So we immediately know the over-arching plot: Lake and Kirsty are made for each other and will live happily ever afterwards, unless this story truly is different, which I seriously doubt at this time. The only mystery, then, is how well it's written and how entertaining are the contortions through which these two will go before they finally get together. I'm sorry to have to relate that I was sadly let down on that score. David Tennant and Kelly MacDonald have already done this kind of thing in film, which wasn't great but was passable enough to idle away an hour or two, and was a lot better than this novel.

There are unforeseen issues with the shop, 'Betty's Knicker Emporium', one of which is that the contract under which the shop was sold stipulates that 86-year-old Betty still has a say in it - including that the sign stays unchanged. Betty owns the building; Rainne merely leases the shop, so this immediately presents the problem of how much money Lake has sunk into this if it's jsut for rent and stock. It's not like he bought the building. Kirsty comes over to visit with Rainne (someone whom she's been trying to help in getting her business afloat) and gets into a dispute with Lake, which ends up with the two of them declaring all-out war on each other (the lingerie wars of the novel's title). Kirsty, who essentially melted when she saw Lake. The cliché-laden description of this encounter all but made me toss my breakfast all over my keyboard. I was hoping that we could keep that YA nonsense to a minimum and actually enjoy a fun story here, but that hope was quickly dashed to death on this rocky romance.

While Kirsty is rather discombobulated by this turn of events, Lake finds himself excited by the prospect of planning a battle. He gets a dose of reality, however, when 86-year-old Betty shows up and lets herself in, offering him a hot meat pie for breakfast, and demanding he toss the coffee he's made and make her some tea. I confess I did love Betty and the conversations they had. Lake's assessment of Betty is: "In another life she would have made a leader of a great terrorist cell. Or a dictator of a small country." This is the kind of story I was hoping for. Unfortunately, it's not what was delivered. I really liked the opening few paragraphs of chapter 2; the interaction between Lake and Kirsty there was really enjoyable, as was his relationship with Betty. Even Rainne comes out of her shell a bit, but this is yet another romance (and indeed there seems to be no discernible difference here between adult fiction and young-adult fiction) which goes the way of the woman turning into a limp rag and the over-confident male smugly dictating her every breath.

The battle lines are slowly being drawn, with a newspaper article back-firing on Kirsty, and Lake finding out that she was once a model of the same hue as those of Victoria's Secret, until her then boyfriend crashed a car in which they were driving, and while he walked away (taking a chunk of her money with him), tragedy walked all over Kirsty's body, sending her into PTSD, as well as marking her with some serious physical scarring. I found it a bit weird that I was reading this (Lingerie Wars), interleaved with reading Blind Date which also features a female protagonist with body scars. Were I superstitious, I'd be in danger of becoming creeped-out by these coincidences between my current ebook and my current hardback! But it's just a meaningless coincidence.

So, I was toodling along with this story, enjoying it sporadically in fact, despite some significant potholes in the interaction between the two main protagonists. I was even willing to put up with some sabotage of Lake's store which was conducted not by Kirsty, but on her behalf. No one was hurt and it was done rather in fun (if somewhat mean fun), but my enjoyment of the novel came to a screeching halt when Lake began manhandling Kirsty and then breaking into Kirsty's home and snooping around one night when she was sleeping upstairs. He snooped her financial information on her laptop, had someone hack into her website and advertise his own store on it, and then he ogled her while she was fast asleep in her bed.

I'm sorry but no.

What is this - a clueless, trope infested, young adult novel? It wasn't supposed to be, but it's indistiguishable from one. This was entirely unacceptable to me, and I found it offensive that the Kirsty character is such a dishrag, not only permitting, but even falling in with Lake's manipulation of her even as she mumbles feeble protestations. What the hell kind of a woman is she? Well to begin with, she's one who has lost all my respect. Clearly, she's not any kind of a woman; rather, she's just a toy for this guy: a living, life-size sex doll for the adolescent soldier-boy. If you don't find that offensive, not in the least, then I'm sorry, but there's something wrong with you.

If this were a spy novel, then yes, I'd half expect some breaking and entering, and snooping. If it were a stalker novel, or a thriller, or a horror story, or a story about a psycho killer, then yes, it would be "appropriate" to the tale to have this happen. Even if this were a comédie noire, this might be "acceptable" - for example, a pair of spies who were entering into a relationship both snooping on each other and breaking into each other's apartments. It would fit the fable in those instances, but for a light romantic comedy? No. You lose the light right there and instead starkly illuminate a host of problems with this kind of fiction, whereby women are portrayed as having no value other than as man-toys. How is the way Kirsty is represented here different from how, for example, women are portrayed in porn movies: as having nothing on their mind other than idly waiting for some guy who is just like Lake to denude them and 'do' them? Let me answer that: it isn’t. There is no difference, and I find both equally offensive.

How can it be viewed in any other light: to have a guy manhandling and manipulating a woman who is in financial straits and who is scarred both physically and mentally, and for the female protagonist to accept this as fine amnd have no protection from this sick bullying lech? No. There is no way I am going to accept this as a comedy or a cute roamnce, and Henderson should be thoroughly ashamed of herself for even thinking this up for such a genre, let alone committing it to an actual novel. If she were going somewhere useful, or interesting with that line of plotting, that might be a different story, and I admit I'm judging this having read only 30% of it, but in those sixty-some pages, I've seen no hint whatsoever that she plans on heading anywhere other than Lake clubbing Kirsty over the head, and dragging her back to his cave.

Has Henderson neither read nor seen anything of the military scandals whereby women in the military are abused and raped by men like Lake Benson, and who are denied justice because they’re women? Not that there can be any real justice for such appalling abuse, but you know what I mean. I wonder how she feels about perpetuating the lie that it’s just fine for military men to take what they want, because it’s really what women want too, isn’t it? (So she'd have us believe, if judged by this novel).

I sat and thought about whether I really wanted to read any more of this trash - about whether the remaining 70% could make up for the first thirty, and I'm sorry but I can’t find it in me to read any more. Henderson has in these first few pages, robbed me of any faith I might have held in her ability to take this anywhere, at this point, where it could possibly shed the sewer stench with which she's now so irremediably imbued it. 'Warty' hardly describes a canker like this. Remind me never again to make the sad mistake of imagining that a story with a saucily playful title like Lingerie Wars could go anywhere other than where Henderson has let it sink.