This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher
This novel is Romancing the Stone meets Stargate yet it fails to be either. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler - since this is telegraphed from the blurb onwards - to say that Diana Morgan is a descendant of the fabled Amazon warriors of Greek mythology. She starts wearing a bangle given to her by her grandmother at the same time as she impulsively accepts an offer made to her by a stranger, to pay her $5,000 if she will spend merely a week translating some obscure script which has been discovered on an excavated wall. At first she's skeptical, but she decides to go, only to discover that her destination isn't the European one she had originally been told, but North Africa. This was the part of the story which had a disturbing amount in common with the movie Stargate!
I started out liking this novel in chapter one (which means the author did her job), only to discover that I was rather saddened by chapter two. It picked up again after that for a short while, but went steadily downhill as I discovered that this purported Amazon warrior woman was going all fluttery heart and googly eyes over a guy, which was a complete betrayal of what Amazon woman are supposed to be - at least from their mythology. Seriously, who wants to read a novel about strong independent women who become limp flags of surrender fluttering in the masculine wind of the first male who comes along - especially when that male has lied to and betrayed the main female character (that's the Romancing the Stone bit.
So what's to like in this novel? Well up front in chapter one, we're offered a woman who is smart, independent, and intellectually curious, but she's immediately let down in chapter two where we learn that this supposedly Amazon woman (who is named Diana, cliché of clichés, for goodness sakes), goes all limp and girlie when she's in the apparently magical presence of James, the son of a nobleman. And he's only one leg of the inevitable trope triangle of lurve (the lying betrayer who picks her up in North Africa and delivers her to the archaeological find is the other). The other thing I liked is how Fortier showed how useless religion is: depicting very admirably that the only protection you can expect comes from yourself, your smarts, your ability, and not from any god or goddess.
What's to dislike? Too much, unfortunately. For one thing, the Britishness of the story rather went off the rails in chapter two, as we're forced to suffer British nobleman James employing the American idiom, "...don't we" rather than the British one, "haven't we?". There's also some unfortunately condescending, if not outright insulting comments about the academics of Oxford being less than pc in their treatment of Diana, who is American by birth, but who grew up in Britain (her father is an English headmaster, her mother American, and her grandmother apparently Amazonian!). That struck me as a really cheap shot by the author to try and garner sympathy for her character. It didn't work on me.
The story picked up as Diana headed south, but that's when I ran into some more issues. I really wanted to like this novel, but Fortier seemed interested only in disappointing me. I had to wonder why, for example, when the Amazons (if they ever existed, which is doubtful) were most closely associated with Scythia (which is very roughly equivalent to modern Turkey), we were starting our adventure in Algeria. The process of getting to Algeria exposed another problem, too. Diana travels there via Tunisia, but when exactly does she take off for that country? Is it important? It is if you like some sort of realism in your stories, as I happen to!
In one part of the novel we're given to understand that it's in the morning, In another part we learn it's in the afternoon. When we arrive at Djerba (an island off the coast of Tunisia) it's late at night - so late in fact that after napping only for a couple of hours, Diana wakens to find that dawn is about to break! This is seriously adrift from reality! It takes only three hours to fly to Tunisia from Gatwick airport, so pray tell where the hell did all that time go?! This was simply poor writing. It's not hard to look these things up and to make your story match reality to a reasonable degree.
Anyone can make a mistake like that, but what really got to me in this way-too-long novel was the unnecessary and tedious detail employed routinely in getting us from A to B by means of detouring around the rest of the alphabet on the way. Hence the way-too-long novel. By far the worst problem was the betrayal of her women, though. Not only does Fortier turn Diana into a rag doll in the hands of men, she also turns Myrina into one, and Myrina is the one who founded the Amazons. Why is it these days that female writers seem so hell-bent upon utterly betraying her female characters every time some studly guy shows up? Fortier does it not once, but twice with Diana with two different men, and as if that wasn't bad enough, she does it again with Myrina.
So who is Myrina? Diana's story is inter-cut with a tale set several thousand years ago. In this story, two girls are escaping from their village where they have (because of their mother), become personae non gratae. One of these two sisters ends-up founding the Amazon race (or so I understood this is where we were headed - I didn't finish this story, after all). Myrina, the older one, is herself betrayed by the author. She's the Katniss Everdeen of this novel, being an expert archer, yet she completely fails her sisters in the temple where she has found refuge. Big, mean, nasty brutish men come in and kill the head priestess, and kidnap nine of the girls for sacrifice, and Myrina doesn't lift a finger to fight them!
I didn't expect this girl to take up a sword and go to it hand-to-hand, but there was nothing at all keeping her from scaling the high temple wall (something she's done before) with her bow, where she could have taken out one after another of these pillagers. So what if she failed to get them all? That would then have allowed her to pursue the course she does in the novel, but at least it wouldn't have portrayed her cowering in the temple along with everyone else. Why would I want to read a novel, especially a long, rambling one, about two women like these? I didn't pick this up to read a sad Harlequin romance, or a nauseating YA novel that has nothing to offer save a truly sad and clichéd love triangle, but that's what I got.
I have to grant kudos to Fortier for bringing some new mythology to the the world of novels sadly beset by tired and unoriginal vampire, demon, and angel tropes, but to do that and then betray your entire theme by making both of your main female characters vapid heart's-a-flutter girls is an awful thing to do. What is the point? Why even bother having Amazons if you're going to render them into spineless toys for boys? I mean that's bad enough alone, but if you're also going to be so wordy in doing this that the story becomes routinely bogged down in tiresomely rambling detail I honestly cannot take that. This is why I quit at about one third in.
I was left with no choice but to rate this novel warty (or at least, 35% of it warty!)
