Calling Invisible Women by Jeanne Ray

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an audiobook I picked up on spec from the library and it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable books I've ever encountered. The tone was delicious, the reader, Coleen Marlo, perfect, and the story amazing. It's one of those stories which makes a hopeful writer like me wish I had thought of it first, but I doubt I could have written this particular story as well as Jeanne Ray did. The tone of voice in the story is beautiful: slightly bemused, humorous, and a little bit sarcastic. It's first person, too, which I normally do not like, but it was perfect here. Audiobooks tend to be much more experimental with me because I'm a captive audience when commuting, so I see a lot of fails with these, but those are worth the listening, because one in a while one like this pops up and makes it all worthwhile.

Clover Hobart is a fifty-four year old woman who discovers one morning that she's invisible. Her visibility wavers for a day or two before it becomes, apparently, permanent. The weird thing though is not her visibility, but the fact that no one in her family: not her husband the pediatrician, not her emotional daughter, and not her unemployed son who is living at home see any difference. She's apparently always been invisible to them!

Her best friend Gilda, who lives down the street, notices. At first Clover starts panicking, but as she grows used to it, she realizes there are things she can do. If she takes her clothes off, no one can see her and it's a super power. She discovers there are other such women in her position and that they have a secret society which meets in the Sheraton in a conference room which they don't even have to book to reserve it. No one knows they're using it! Since these women all travel naked, they have to bring a tissue with them so they can raise it when they want to speak. Clover becomes friends with some of them. At first she has a problem with the nudity, but since one property of invisibility is that she doesn't feel heat or cold, she eventually embraces it as they have done.

One day, she accompanies one of her new acquaintances to the school where she lost her job when she became invisible. The two of them ride the school bus and spend the day in the school. No one can see them and they're able to prevent bullying and tackle other issues. This inspires the other woman to think she can get her job back. On another day, Clover foils a bank robbery, but of course gets no credit since no one could see her do anything. They just thought the robber randomly threw his guns away!

I noted that some critics down-rated the story for being unrealistic(!) or vacuous, but to me, the whole point of the story was to be playful and light-hearted, and have fun while exploring a very real issue: the metaphorical invisibility which older women routinely experience, and which they do so far more than older men. I think the author did a fantastic job and I want to read more of her work. I recommend this unreservedly.

The Geneva Decision by Seeley James

Title: The Geneva Decision
Author: Seeley James
Publisher: Seeley James
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 his story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

First, a litany of nit-picking! I found this novel a bit inexplicable. The premise is that an outstanding Olympic soccer player, Pia Sabel, has given up her career at a young age (mid 20's apparently), to take over as the head of her father's security firm, Sabel (of course!), whose operatives use tranquilizer darts instead of regular guns, even though this always places them at a disadvantage because the darts have a really poor range!

Pia is incompetent. She's had no training, and was not even a field operative, yet she assigns herself to protect the life of a Swiss banker, and stands nowhere near him on this assignment! The two military-trained people who were with her on this op were evidently equally as incompetent, and Pia offered them no warning whatsoever even though she had spotted the assassin a significant time before he struck. She spotted him because even though he was a professional, he was sweating like an amateur! Thus, her charge is assassinated.

The assassin is taken into custody, but he escapes from the police. His assistant is let go by Pia, as she tries to take him in a soccer slide tackle (on asphalt! That's going to leave a mark! But it inexplicably doesn't!), instead of using her tranquilizer gun when she was well within range.

Shortly after, her team of three tracks down the assassin to a store in a back street, but instead of alerting the police, they enter the store and the assassin gets away again - and like in all the best TV shows, instead of giving chase, they stand around whining about how he's getting away! Pia is incompetent. Her team is incompetent.

Shortly afterwards, Pia is walking across a bridge when the assassin shows up out of nowhere, her team is nowhere near her, and she has to jump into the icy river to escape him, yet her phone still works fine afterwards. Hmm. I wish I had a phone like that!

The wife of the assassinated guy, Lena Marot, wants to hire Pia to find her husband's killer. She thinks Pia can do it because she was so good at soccer! She apparently fails to grasp that there's a massive difference between a trained soccer player anticipating the moves of her opponents on the pitch, and a fish-out-of-water trying to guess at what trained killers will do. They’re not in the same league!

And that's the problem with this novel: it's too much contradiction, too many fish out of too much water, too much over-superhero and not enough personality; Pia is so impossibly wonderful at everything she does (except her job, of course!) that instead of impressing me, she makes me want to vomit. She reminds me of the intentionally hilarious Peter Swift in the Tom Selleck movie, Her Alibi (which I highly recommend. It's a blast, and I'm not even a Tom Selleck fan, but in this, both he and his co-star Paulina Porizkova were perfect).

But just as in that movie, Tom Selleck's narration imbues his absurd private dick with extraordinary powers, we see the same thing here. Pia's parents were killed in front of her when she was only four years old, and I have to wonder whether Peter Swift was her real father, and if her mother wasn't that chronic over-achiever Honor Harrington, from the eponymous series by David Webber. That series started out excellently, but then went rapidly downhill as it became far more of a naval warfare info-dump (why - it was set in space!) far worse than anything Tom Clancy ever inflicted on us, than ever it was a stirring story of a woman fighting genderism in the military.

But I digress! The story goes to Cameroon, and back, and it continues to go back forth and back and forth all over the place without ever putting down any roots to give us something to root for. It goes to a lot of places, but 'engaging' isn’t one of those venues. Pia makes too many dumb decisions, which flatly contradicts the endless attempts to establish her as a paragon of physical perfection, superb skill, profuse poise, and men-defying feats of superhero stamina.

This endless perfection was too much to take in the first place, and when set against the dizzying number of escapes by the bad guys was completely undermined. The last line of the novel is "What's the matter, Dad? Afraid I'll find out who ordered my parents' assassination?" which seems really weird, but Pia was adopted after her parents were killed - killed apparently for no reason whatsoever other than to give her the tired cliché of chasing that muddied rainbow over a series of novels. She was adopted by her "Dad" but there's no explanation as to why he made her change her name instead of allowing her to preserve her family name, or why she didn’t change it back when she grew older.

I can’t get invested in this person at all. She's too "perfect" and simultaneously too incompetent. I have no faith in her, no trust in her, and really no interest in her or anything she's going to do. I think I am going to request no more of this kind of novel from Netgalley. I seem to have an awful lot of bad luck with them!