Showing posts with label relationships. Show all posts
Showing posts with label relationships. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Love Rehab by Jo Piazza






Title: Love Rehab: a novel in twelve steps
Author: Jo Piazza
Publisher: Open Road
Rating: worthy!

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!


Editing notes:
P 25 "So you listen to Dixie Chicks on repeat sober..." Needs a comma in there somewhere! It took me three reads to get it.
p104 There's some weird formatting by the Rule 7 text!

Love rehab is a very short novel (~140 pages) which took a bit of getting into. Frankly my initial feeling when I started reading this was that this was "chick-humor" which I wouldn’t appreciate (not that I'm a big fan of guy humor either. I prefer my humor gender-neutral!), or that it was a kind of feminine humor that you need two X chromosomes to really get/appreciate, or that I just would be plainly and simply bored with it (not bored of it, Richelle Mead!) and just wouldn't like it. There is a certain brand of feminine humor which I find genderist and obnoxious, but this novel doesn’t have that, and once I got the rhythm of it, it turned out to be funny and engaging.

I'm not sure about the immediate introduction of an instadore candidate, but to be fair, I am not sure either where that will go, so I won't complain about him yet; after all, this is Love Rehab, so there simply has to be a love interest somewhere along the way, I suppose!

So here's the story: Sophie, the female protagonist is going through a huge obsession-depression over the fact that Eric, her long-time boyfriend, dumped her for a younger, curvier "administrative assistant" (yeah, I'll bet!) at his office. Sophie's friend Annie, who is an alcoholic owner of a bar, shows up in her drive in a stolen police car, and is ordered to go through AA in order to avoid a worse sentence. Sophie goes with her and in a chat with the AA leader afterwards, realizes that she has an addiction to love and needs rehab. Since there's no such thing available to her, she undertakes to start one in her New Jersey (or is that Noo Joyzi?) home. She puts out word through her editor (she illustrates children's books), and a host of people show up to the Sunday meeting. They tell their stories, Annie and Sophie end up with a new house-mate named Prithi (no one can live there unless their name ends with an 'ee' sound!), and Love Rehab is launched!

One problem I did have with this was that while undergoing the oppressive struggle to get out from under the aftermath of a bad relationship, Sophie (the name means wisdom!) is talking about getting her eyebrows waxed. Excuse me, but isn't that part of the problem, that women have been conditioned to feel that their natural self is inadequate and in order to be acceptable to men they must turn themselves into the closest approximation to a Barbie doll that they can reasonably (even unreasonably) manage? When I read this I thought: I shall be seriously interested in where that goes as I continue with this!

So these meetings start snowballing with more people showing up, all of them as wacky as we've already met, with bizarre, sad, and humorous stories and as the word gets around it gets distorted. One woman called Katrina shows up asking if this is the right address for the 'Love Retreat'! She ends up moving in, sharing a room with Sophie! She's spoiled rotten rich and still having bad relationships, and she starts offering everyone aroma therapy (gag) and gods know what. I'm over 50% in and loving this tale so far. Not a lot seems ot be happenign in moving Sophie's sotry forwards, btu you get to wrapped up in the peripherals that it doesn't matter. But I guess that depends on how you define 'moving her story forwards'. She's so involved in the group that overall, she's doing fine and is really starting to overcome her addiction without really noticing. Maybe that's the point.

In many ways, this novel could have been written by Nora Ephron (were she still alive. I wouldn’t expect her to write it now!). One of the things I resent about this genre of story is that it's always about fabulously well-off yuppies who never seem to ever have to do an honest week's work, and who get morosely hung up about laughable trivialities. They have pretty much everything they want and they still can't find happiness! This novel was not quite that, but it had enough of that stigma inherent to turn me off it a bit - but not a lot. These characters were fun and interesting, and engaging, but I kept wondering why they never seemed to have to go to work, especially Sophie who can apparently take a straight three months off her job without her editor ever once getting on her case, and without her ever wanting for ready cash to splash around! And she thinks she has problems? It would be really nice to just once have a story like this, but about regular, working stiffs from a life which is a notch or two lower than the Ephron class battleship of thirty-something yuppie-dom.

So the predictable relationship with Joe the Alcoholics Anonymous counselor predictably happens. Although it happens in a better way than all-too-many of the young-adult novels I've been habituating of late, it still smacked of too much YA instadore. I found that to be really sad, because it betrays everything this novel purports to be about, and it is such an unrealistic event as to be a complete sham.

Yes, sometimes you do find the perfect partner on the rebound, but that's not the norm, it’s the extreme rarity. Most of the time when you've been hurt as badly as Sophie was, it wrecks your life and all hopes of a decent relationship in the foreseeable future, because your misery turns others off. There is (almost) never that perfect partner waiting for you just around the corner. In my experience no one even really cares that much because they've all been there too, and rather than being moved by and empathic towards your debilitating withdrawal, they're nauseated by it and don't want to know about it. Certainly, potential partners don't. In my experience, the only real honest and effective way to get through it is to go cold turkey and avoid other people until you get a grip. Of course if you have close friends and they're ready, willing, and able to put up with the ungodly mess that you are, then that's a good way to go, too!

The worst part of this novel was Sophie's love interest, which was telegraphed by someone with a sore thumb sticking out, and it was completely out of place for me. The ending, therefore, was so trite and demeaning as to be truly nauseating; it was an all-Nora-Ephron ending, which betrayed the growth which we're supposed to believe Sophie had undergone by rendering her into a helpless child who needed rescuing by a man, but that's all I have to say about that.

Even having said that, I can still recommend this novel because overall, it's a fun story about an important topic with which we all have some familiarity, some of us more than others. It does slip in the latter half as compared with the first half, and there is a bit of the way-too-predictable going on, but there is also a nice thread of sly humor and a host of interesting people and amazing behaviors to enjoy. So yeah, give it a read! It’s short and fun so what have you got to lose?


Tuesday, April 2, 2013

H2O by Austin Boyd and Brannon Hollingsworth






Title: H2O
Author: Austin Boyd and Brannon Hollingsworth
Publisher: AMG Publishers
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of my reviews so far, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley, and is available now.

I am not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, I don't feel comfortable going into anywhere near as much detail over it as I have with the older books I've been reviewing! I cannot rob the authors of their story, so this is shorter, but most probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!


It's funny I should start reviewing this tonight when it's pouring down with rain outside as a humongous and adorable thunderstorm comes rolling through!

After reading only only a couple of sentences of H2O I thought I would dislike it. The florid language just turned my stomach, but I pressed on and was rewarded with a story which grew more fascinating as I progressed, but as I progressed it became obvious this was Christian fiction and there was no mystery over what the protagonist was experiencing. I was interested to note that it takes two guys to write a novel from the female perspective! lol! I'm an atheist, but I have no objection to religious fiction as long as the author(s) don't try to make too much sense out of it or take it too seriously, so I began in a state of curiosity as to where they would take this.

The main protagonist is Kate Pepper, a senior (rank, not age!) employee of an aerospace software corporation who is flying high in her world. She's also well-known for her sashimi and for the charity affairs she puts on with her boyrfriend Xavier. I love Kate Pepper. I know someone whom I really respect and whose maiden name is Pepper, and I used to date someone whose nickname was Pepper, and I love the Pepper Potts character in Ironman, so this effect hardly comes as a surprise to me, but the character is written well, even though she's sometimes infuriating to me. Unfortunately, that wasn't going to pan out too well!

I don’t know what it is about women with a soft belly, but Kate has one, amd I would take one of those over one with a washboard stomach - all other things being equal - any time, anywhere! OTOH, I'd take the washboard if she had a mind behind it, and the soft belly didn’t (and I had a choice!). But that's just me. Where this soft spot for a soft spot came from, I have no idea, but it’s a part of me and I don’t care to discard or abuse it.

Kate Pepper is an over-achiever, which didn’t win any points with me. Much worse than that, though, is that she's in an abusive relationship - of the mental, not the physical kind, but the physical kind is more than taken care of by Kate herself! She slices her hand making sashimi. She flies off her motorbike and is hospitalized because she's going way-the-hell too fast in the rain. She passes out in the shower, and goes temporarily blind making rice balls!

The one thing all of these events have in common, which Kate is evidently too slow to figure out, is water. There is something about water on her skin which transports her - and as the story progresses evidently does so quite literally - to another world - or more accurately to another time: Biblical times. This world is hard to understand and very scary and hallucinatory as far as Kate is concerned. I'm bothered by the fact that if water has so dramtatic an effect on her, then why doesn't the water - which is some 70% of her body! - have a huge effect? Why doesn't the water in the coffee in which she over-indulges, have an effect? There is a lame attmept to explain this away by saying the water needs to be in a pure form to have this effect on her, but that's just nonsense! No water is truly pure - even fresh water from your faucet or from a store bought bottle has some contaminants in it; that is not necessarily to say these contaminants are harmful, just to say that there's really no such thing as pure H2O.

When I got to a point which was some 30 pages shy of finishing this novel, I was seriously done with it! If this is Christian religious fiction, it falls far short of the glory of god! H2O has gone downhill fast and I find that hard to believe given how interested I was in it at the start, but I've read children's stories that are more intelligent, sophisticated, and believable than this one is. It’s painfully obvious what this is all about and has been since the first couple of visions which Kate has had. The only mystery in this novel is why Kate is so retarded in figuring out what’s going on. She was raised a Catholic and yet is completely brain-dead as to the religious nature of the visions!

I'm sorry, but I don’t want to read stories about people who are that irremediably and unrepentantly (yes, I use that word advisedly!) stupid. This Kate, the dumb as a brick Kate, is not the Kate I was led to believe this story was about in the beginning. That Kate - the one I loved, has left the building. I don’t know this substitute Kate and I don’t want to. This Kate is a weak woman who needs a guy to rescue her. But then the church has never been very kind to women, has it? Not since Eve at any rate! But that's not the worst sin in which Boyd and Hollingsworth indulge themselves!

Her "savior" has the initials JC. Why isn't that a surprise? But get this: his name is John Connor. Yes, he's the guy who fights the terminator machines! Not really, but did Boyd and Hollingsworth not see a Terminator movie? That's actually not the great sin; the great sin is that these visions appear to be nothing more than Jesus trying ineffectually to get Kate back into the fold. Jesus evidently is learning nothing from his consistent failures, but like an idiot, he continues repeating these same actions over and over again regardless of the cost to Kate, in the absurd hope of a different outcome! Seriously? Isn't that the definition of insanity?! He's putting her through this endless torment in order to say "Hi!"? I thought that was supposed to be Satan's job?!

Let me make this comparison: If someone you hadn't seen in a long while wanted to renew your acquaintanceship, but instead of simply coming right up to you and saying "Hi!", deliberately avoided meeting you face to face, and instead tried to force you back into a relationship by slipping you a drug which caused you to have bizarre and scary hallucinations, and caused you to injure yourself because of those hallucinations, making you think you were ill, delusional, and mentally deranged, would that be someone you actually wanted to be acquainted with? Excuse me, but you are a bona fides nut-job if your answer to that question is "Yes."

We're talking here about a character which I consider to be fictional, but which 90% of the US population accepts as real. He's claimed to be not only the most powerful being there is, but also supposed to be love itself, and yet the only way he can think of to get you to pay attention to him is quite literally to hit you upside the head? No! No one who loves you does that to you, not even when that person is human. For a god of love to do that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. This is an abusive relationship!

The irony here is that we’re shown Kate in an abusive relationship at the start of this story and she's back in one at the end! Just when we see her start to drag herself out of the previous one, we see her being told by more than one person that she needs to get into another one, where an even more powerful alpha-male figure wants to literally take over her life and do it not with love, but with violence, abuse, and threats? The biggest one of those threats is of course, that she either bows to him and quite literally worships him for eternity (how boring is that?), or she must literally rot in hell? How is this a step up for her?

I'm sorry but I can't read any more of this story! It's simplistic, juvenile opiate for the masses, and it makes zero sense even within its own religious framework. This story began great, and I was willing to go with it despite my misgivings that it would go exactly where in fact it actually did go, but though it started so well, it rapidly went to hell in a hand-basket. I cannot recommend this story to anyone who has any integrity and self-respect, and I especially cannot recommend it to women.