The Prelude by KaSonndra Leigh

Title: The Prelude: A Musical Interlude Novel
Author: KaSonndra Leigh
Publisher: KaSonndra Leigh Books
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.

Errata
P12 is missing a close quote after "Do we have a deal?"
P34 "She prances right up to where Luca Martuccio's sits."? "...where Luca Martuccio's party sits" maybe?
P71 "respond back" tautology.

I didn't like this novel at all, which makes me feel bad because I want to support independent publishers. I was put off it very quickly, and while I did try hard to read all the way through it, I found myself skipping sections because they were simply uninteresting.

Erin Angelo is the female protagonist who narrates the opening section, and she had lost my support by p13 when an "Adonis" walks in: Aleksandr Dostovsky. His mouth is "a heart-shaped ode to sex". Honestly? I just cannot picture a guy with a heart-shaped mouth in a frame designed to hold a picture of a great lover! It just doesn't work. I can picture a "French fop" from an historical romance with a heart-shaped mouth. I can picture an adorable infant with a heart-shaped mouth. But a leading man? No. I'm not sure what I expected with this novel, but I did expect more maturity and class than this, especially given the Italian opera angle. Are we being told an actual story here or are we merely the uncomfortable audience for an author's 222 page wet dream? Perhaps it would have been better titled Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Porn?

"Adonis" tells us that he likes to be called Alek Dostov, although that sounds more like something an American would say than a Russian, and we're offered no real reason to believe that a man like him would shorten his name for the convenience of others. But his "god-like" accent turns Angelo on, apparently stirring things she hasn’t felt in ages. Unfortunately, stirring things like that tends to bring a lot of murk and pollutants to the surface. This does bring on a full-blown asthma attack in Angelo, but she still manages to speak in complete sentences! Yes, she's that amazing!

He gets her inhaler, she gets to suck, and she's finally able to obsesses on his eyes, telling him they're unusual; then she checks herself and apologizes saying that it was inappropriate! This is after this stranger has been stroking his thumb along her cheek and she saw nothing untoward about that! Talk about double standards. And why make Dostov Russian, but then refer to him in terms of Greek gods? Why not just make him Greek? Unemployment is sky-high in Greece right now. A Greek guy looking for work abroad is not an uncommon thing at all.

Angelo is in love with his accent. He says "Did I not?" and she hears it as "Deed I knot?" Maybe it's just me, but I don't see how 'not' is different from 'knot' in pronunciation. You can argue that those three particular words actually mean something else and this is what Angelo sees, but that's not how Leigh conveys it to us. Or if that's what she intended, she ties herself in knots trying to do it! Neither is Dostov a 'maestro' as he's referred to all-too-often. No one at 23 gets that appellation. Maestro means something. It's an insult to music to toss an honor like that away, and it's a betrayal of what Leigh is supposedly trying to do with this novel.

'Maestro' doesn't mean stud, or tough guy, or sex god, or even heart-shaped mouth; it has a real meaning related to music (usually) and Dostov has no cred whatsoever in that regard. What's he done? In 23 years he has not put in anywhere near sufficient time to earn such a title. Nor are we ever treated to any kind of explanation from Leigh as to why he should carry such an honorific, or what he could possibly have done to merit it at so youthful an age.

Bear in mind (or given 'deed I knot' above, perhaps 'baring mined' might be more accurate?!) that this is obviously the guy who's being introduced as the instadore du jour, yet never once does Angelo consider being completely honest with him at their first encounter. She could have explained to him that the supplier had sent the wrong color fabric, and he could have found it refreshing that here was someone who was willing to be completely honest with him given the life he's led. This would have been the perfect opportunity to remove this novel from the "Twilight" zone and put it somewhere these tall tales seem to have an insurmoutable problem in going: into honesty and authenticity, but Leigh doesn't take us there. If Angelo had been completely honest with Dostov right there and then, that would have offered the possibility of a bond, shameless bond(!), being forged between them: something which might have led to a love rooted in something other than developmentally-retarded adolescent fantasy. As it is, Leigh looks like she's writing young-adult chest-pounding romance, betraying the entire genre in the xiphoid process.

When Leigh introduces us to the reason for titling her novel the way she did, I can see where she's going, and it’s admirable, but she fails to convince me that she's chosen the right title or knows how to play this piece. I see no respect accorded to the careers which are assigned to either actor in this drama. I found that very sad; it had me distracted from the story because I was wondering why someone would make their main characters a fashion designer and a musician if they're not then going to go somewhere with it - especially in a novel which supposedly has music at its core.

On that score, I'm not sure that 'prelude' is a proper fit, either. It seemed to me that what Leigh was really looking for was more along the lines of an overture; however, given that both parties had been in relationships before, perhaps prelude - the beginning of a new movement - is better than overture, which to me signifies the start of something brand new. The two are probably interchangeable at least to some degree, but this relationship was supposed to be the start of something brand new, yet neither party to it seemed to be making any original overtures.

I was intrigued by how Leigh introduced the music motif, but disappointed that it then goes nowhere, since it was the only thing which was holding my attention! The main characters are far too one-dimensional to inspire loyalty and too predictable to generate any interest. The setting was no better. I was not at all moved by this story supposedly taking place in Milan, because I felt none of the atmosphere of that city. Everyone in the story acts exactly like they're American, with American speech patterns and even their thought processes are as American as you can get.

Not only is there nothing to make us believe we're in Milan, there isn't anything to make us believe Angelo was ever in Austin, Texas, either. Take this example: "A road that ran along the swamp lands." In Austin, Texas? Texas which is in a three-year drought? Texas which had its driest year ever in 2011? What swamp? Does Leigh not understand that there's a difference between Texas and Louisiana? Or does she think Austin is on the coast with a salt marsh next door? That was suspension of disbelief out the door again.

Why was I uninspired by the two protagonists? We have Angelo, who is supposedly a fashion prodigy at 23. That I could just about buy, but even if I swallowed that unquestioningly, what does Leigh offer me in return, to validate my trust in her? Nothing! I'm sorry, but I can't buy that a fashion meteor like Angelo goes through life thinking of nothing - quite literally nothing whatsoever - save how hot Dostov is. She goes through the entire novel and never honestly contemplates fashion. She never dwells on her work, or ruminates other than briefly in passing on her ideas for designs. She never becomes engrossed in what needs to be done to get her opera project where it needs to be. There is no fashion in her head and that makes this character a complete fraud for me. Romy and Michele were more convincing as fashion designers than Angelo is.

Yeah, we get one evening where she sits and roughs out some sketches of things she wants to make, but that's it, and it's over far too quickly. We get to share none of her thought processes during this time: there's nothing about how she's viewing what she does, nothing about how she gets an idea and translates it onto the page; nothing about how she can see fabric giving a three-dimensional life to her drawings, nothing about the fit, flow and feel of the material. Remember this is told from her first person PoV (alternating with Dostov's), yet we almost never find a fashionable thought drifting anywhere in her mind! The young-Earth creationists have more intelligent design than she does, and I can't buy that she would be even remotely like that were she a real person - not even were she hopelessly in love as well. It's a betrayal of her entire life's choices to depict her this way.

Even Dostov agrees that Erin Angelo is simply uninteresting and has nothing to offer. I know this because when we get into his mind all he has going on is lust for her body. All he wants is her "boobs" under his hands, and honestly, given the way this story is told, who can blame him when she evidently has nothing else on display? We're reminded ad nauseam that he's a maestro, yet never once does a real musical thought enter his brain. He never thinks about his opera. He never thinks about the musical direction in which he's taking it. He never thinks about any piece of music he would compose or play. He never relates music to what's happening in the real world, or sees music in the everyday events of the real world. Not once. Not ever. And he's a "maestro", so we're expected to believe. Well I don't believe it; I've been offered no reason to do so, unless you count him raising and waving his baton all over the place. And yes, do rest assured that he's tapped a few podia with it. His name ought to be Do-stiff, not Dostov.

An example of how inappropriate he is to his position is clarified starkly when he asks Erin to perform in the opera in an important solo role. This made me laugh out loud because it was so brain-dead. Some maestro. An important opera is opening and some untried, untested girl off the street with zero training is thought appropriate? We can tell what an aria-head Dostov is by the fact that his narration runs like this: "I only make it as far as the door to my Aston Martin...". Since we already know the make of car he owns, was there something wrong with merely saying "the door to my car", or are we intended to understand that the nipple-devouring Dostov is a pretentious parvenu?

The entire novel shows that this pair of one-note people don't know the score, let alone how to write or sing along with one. Their entire repertoire consists of nothing more than lusting after the other. Now I can buy that someone is hot, and would be strongly in your thoughts, but for that to be the sole subject of pretty much their entire mental process is patent nonsense. If there are truly people like that, they need competent medical attention rather urgently, and if they fail to get that, then they need law enforcement attention even more urgently before someone gets hurt.

I looked forward to reading this and would have liked to have loved it (or even loved to liked it), but I could not. This novel was not about real people with real careers, hopes, and dreams. It was merely a story of how two sets of repressed genitals got their rocks off. This novel ought to have been titled Tragédie en Musique but that one is already taken, so might I suggest Catastrophe de Mode played at tempo di licenziosità?

Catching Jordan by Miranda Kenneally

Title: Catching Jordan
Author: Miranda Kenneally
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Rating: worthy

Don't confuse this novel with Crossing Jordan or with Jordan's Catch!

I've been aware of this novel for a while and shied away from reading it because it's similar in some regards to my own Seasoning. So what made me take the plunge? Well I was kicked into dealing with it by the news story of Maddy Paige's appalling treatment by the delusional and clueless so-called Strong Rock Christian School. It needs to be renamed "Rocks in the Head Christian School" or "Strong Discrimination Christian School". Things desperately need to change, and reviewing this novel and others like it down the road is one albeit tiny way to get the feeling out there that gender is irrelevant to everything except procreation, and amongst some species, not even then! Since my own Seasoning novel is already published and was originally written some years ago, no one can accuse me of ripping off someone else's work!

Having completed Catching Jordan, I can say that the two novels are indeed very different. Seasoning isn't about romance or getting into college, it's about the game and about genderism, and it's about growing up, not about wallowing blindly in some adolescent fiction; it's about leading and taking charge, and it's about overcoming paralyzing fear. This isn't a comment on Catching Jordan, but it is a comment on bad YA fiction. Seasoning was never aimed at the young adult market although I'm working (on and off, mostly off!) on a partially illustrated version which will be aimed precisely at that market.

Before we get started on the review let me comment in detail on the Maddy Paige insanity. I noticed while reading the limited news items about it, that the Atlanta Phoenix is supporting Maddy, but it seems a bit sad to me that a team which is segregated from "men's" sports is supporting a woman who wants precisely the opposite: a fully-integrated team!

Maddy's case is clearly religiously motivated. This world is always sadder when religion ceases to be personal and becomes a power-play once more, but this goes beyond just religion: it's also an ingrained societal imperative, as was shown by Constanta.com's article about it, where Veronica Griffin of all people labeled Atlanta Phoenix as a "Women's Professional Football team", not simply as a "Professional Football team".

The bottom line is that if a person is good enough, that's all there is; gender (or anything else for that matter) is irrelevant. It's time to stop seeing this as inviolably delineated "men's" and "women's" and start seeing it as "people's". What, exactly, does Strong Rock's Phil Roberts mean when he talks about "girl sports" and "boy sports"? Do sports have gender now‽ Seriously? If history teaches us anything, it's that segregation has never been the answer. We're in a position where even the military is fully integrating women, so why are we deliberately segregating half of our population in sports?

If Phil Roberts was scared that "...boys were going to start lusting after her...", then what he needed to address is the abject failure of his (evidently not) Strong Rock Christian school to inculcate children in appropriate values and behaviors instead of punishing a 12-year-old girl for his school's sorry failure. Or does he want us to believe that a good Christian education necessarily turns out lustful boys? Maybe it's a case of strongly sucks, not strongly rocks?

If it's true that women cooperate better than men as some studies suggest, then including women on the team (not "the boys team", just "the team") is not only a just thing to do, it's a demonstrably smart thing to do!

So let's review! I have to say that I was turned off this novel rather quickly (by p15!) when Tyler Green ("Ty" of course) saunters onto the stage, and Jordan Woods turns almost literally to Jell-O™. Now this is the tough captain of her team, used to being in charge, used to playing rough, used to focusing, surrounded by hunks every day, getting down and dirty with them, and not a whisper of an overt attraction, but her legs literally go rubbery when Ty shows up. I'm sorry but that made me nauseous. Keneally betrayed Jordan right there and then. I found myself seriously hoping this novel was better than this, but I had little faith that it was over the next thirty pages that I read.

Jordan Woods (cool last name!) is the captain of her high school football team. She's also the quarterback. This parallels my own Janine Majeski character who is the captain of her factory soccer team and also the lead striker, and that's pretty much where the parallel ends. Jordan's dad is a major league football player (who predictably isn't supportive of her, but he is supportive of her bother, who plays college football). Her mother, predictably, is supportive, but has some weird ideas about how her daughter needs to represent herself to guys. Her idea of selling herself is to completely sell out.

When Ty, the predictable new kid in town, appears at practice hoping for a place on the team, Jordan is so predictably distracted in practicing a new snap that one of her own team, playing opposition, sacks her. For those not familiar with American football, the term 'sacking the quarterback' doesn't mean firing her, it means tackling. Why it has to be described in such dramatic terms is a mystery. Rome was sacked, a quarterback is simply knocked over - like a liquor store. Americans are probably the only nation on the planet who think along Muslim lines, but not about god: about their own nation! Whereas the Muslims assert in the Shahada that "there is no god but Allah; Muhammad is the messenger of God," Americans assert however unconsciously, there is no nation but the USA; capitalism is its profit.

So while to the rest of the world, 'football' means two teams of eleven kicking a ball around a pitch, trying to get it into opposing nets, America begs to differ. No, not even begs: demands! Contrary to real football where the hand isn't allowed to touch the ball unless you're a goalkeeper or you're throwing the ball back in after it goes out over the side line (and there are strict rules covering all that), in (American) football the foot never touches the ball! Well, yeah, there's a rare instance or two, such as kick off, for example, but this is really not football. It's Carryball or Throwball. Tarryball? Crowball?!

Anyway Jordan is fine: she's a tough player, but all of this is about to go as far south as the South Auckland Saints courtesy of super-hunk Ty. Suddenly Jordan, hitherto the consummate player, cannot think of anything else but Ty and his hunky body. Indeed, her whole life quits orbiting planet football and starts circling the drain of sinkhole Ty. I'm sorry, but I don't buy this given what we've been told about Jordan. Yes, I would buy that she's strongly attracted to a guy, but not like it's described here, and not to the virtual abandonment of everything else. That's not the Jordan I was introduced to in the first fifteen pages. I don't know why Kenneally betrays and abandons that Jordan, disrespecting her and morphing her from a worthy, even remarkable female protagonist into nothing more than a gland warmer.

Over the next thirty pages or so we reach the point where Jordan isn't sleeping because she can't stop thinking of Ty, and where she's spending hours doing her hair, shaving her legs, and picking out a wardrobe. One thought she has is "I hope Ty likes shea butter," although whether she imagines him eating her or simply fondling her skin isn't detailed. And yeah, I hope that did disgust you because it disgusted me to read what Keneally was writing here. But Keneally thinks it's okay to write this stuff as long as she has Jordan agree that "Yeah, I know. I make myself sick, too."! She tops all this with a lacy underwear set which barely covers her (and which her own mother bought for her), and incorporates a push-up bra underneath an unusually (for her) low-cut T-shirt.

What bothers me about this is that there seems to be a mindset here that Ty is somehow going to intuit exactly what Jordan is wearing and react favorably, even predictably to it! I really don't care if she falls for a guy or sleeps with him if she's thought it though some. That's her business. It's also her business what she wears, but for her to react like this when she's met Ty just once, hardly spoken to him, and doesn't know squat about him is a disgrace. Is she planning on flying into bed with him when she knows nothing about him, his habits, his attitude towards women, or most importantly, his sexual history? Remember this is a girl who, we're told, has been playing school football for many years. She's not thirteen, she's seventeen. She supposed to be on the cusp of adulthood. She's the best there is at what she does in her state. She didn't get there by failing to plan, failing to anticipate, failing to look ahead and to consider all the options, or by acting like she's brain-dead. Yet all of that training, which is ingrained if we're to believe what Kenneally has told us in the first fifteen pages, runs completely off the clock!

Keneally's genderism exposed in this novel is another disgrace, as is her appalling deprecation of "math nerds". She puts this bigotry into Jordan's mind, but that only makes it worse: if Jordan is in a position where discrimination and bigotry come into play, then where does she get off employing that same attitude towards others? This just makes Jordan look like a hypocrite or a privileged brat. Those are not qualities which will endear her to me. To her credit, Keneally does try to claw some of this back later in the novel, but whether she does enough is up to you to decide.

If some clueless guy had written this novel it wouldn't be any less excusable, but it would be more understandable. For this to come from a female writer is disturbing at best. Keneally's attitude towards Jordan's fellow football players is pretty much that they're all closet rapists. And what's with them all calling her 'Woods'? It seems all the girls and virtually none of the guys get to be called by their first name. That just struck me as weird. The two main protagonists are the exceptions to this. There is another, the third element of the almost inevitable triangle, but both his first and last names sound like first names so it doesn't really make an impact!

Jordan's attitude towards the cheerleaders is that they're all essentially ignorant, rude, cruel, and air-headed bimbos who neither know nor care about football, only about the hunks who play it. I don't doubt for a minute that there are cheerleaders like that, and high school football players like she describes and implies, but to categorize all of them in one way is bigoted nonsense. It's no better than saying something as idiotic as "all black people are drug addicts", or "gays are pedophiles". I was dearly hoping at this point that this novel improved, but I wasn't optimistic, especially when I discovered that Keneally is yet another writer who thinks in terms of 'bicep' and not 'biceps'!

Jordan gets screwed over by her coach in the first game of the season when he dumps her after the first half and puts Ty in, in her place. This is the game which has scouts from the University of Alabama watching; then Alabama seems to want her as a college player, but makes her pose in make-up and a demeaning outfit for their calendar. I have to wonder if anyone from the UoA has seen this novel and how they feel about Keneally describing their picture-taking as she does. I just Googled pictures for UoA and women's sports and saw nothing even remotely like Keneally describes! Is this a personal vendetta against Alabama?

On the emotional front, Jordan really starts screwing things up. For a seventeen-year-old she acts like a ten year old. For a team captain she's clueless in how to apply what she supposedly knows there to other parts of her life. She does precisely what we expected, and starts dating Ty, and then she discovers how utterly clueless she's been with Sam, who she's known for a decade and who is in love with her. She rides roughshod over his feelings and while she's telling him that she wants everything to remain the same between them (but really, he's not good enough for her). While she's doing this, she ignores message after message from Ty. When he finally comes over in tears through worry about her whereabouts and welfare (and yes, he does overdo it on the "I need to know where you are" power-play, but he lost his parents to a car accident and didn't know where they were, either). Jordan rightly tells him off about that, but this is after she basically told Sam how things were going to be! In short, she treats both guys like dirt.

At that point, I didn't like Jordan any more, and since this was the only character in this entire novel who had offered any hope of holding my interest, I was disappointed to say the least. The opening few pages were all about sports, but sports was quickly ditched with the arrival of Ty, and that was a mistake; the novel took a turn for the worst with that, but by the time my doubts were maximizing, I had only a hundred or so pages left to go, so I pressed on, and Keneally actually did struggle to pull this out of the fire. It's for that reason alone that I'm rating it as a cautious 'worthy'. The writing - technically speaking - isn't bad, but the events and conversation are rather tedious at times, stuck in a groove. However since I have to operate under the assumption that what might seem less than ideal to me could seem reasonable to someone who is actually the same age as Jordan. I would hope that such people have a bit more going for them and be looking out for something stronger than this, but maybe this will do for now.

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.

Skinny Bitch in Love by Kim Barnouin

Title: Skinny Bitch in Love
Author: Kim Barnouin
Publisher: Knopf
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!

Skinny Bitch in love is told in the in the flirt person singular! A book critic, Paul Johnson, once wrote an article for the New Statesman reviewing the Ian Fleming novel Dr. No, a James Bond fable. The review slammed Fleming's work, and it was titled, Sex, snobbery and sadism" ("The New Statesman 5 April 1958). I could use the same title for this review, and the only adjustment I’d have to make is that of changing 'sadism' to 'masochism'.

I am the very last fan of pretentiousness, particularly when it comes to food and fashion, so this novel is not a no-brainer for me. I feel nauseated whenever I hear a French words substituted for a perfectly good English ones in those cultures: sous chef instead of under-cook, prêt-à-porter instead of off-the-rack, and so on. I even nauseated myself when I employed that very technique in a novel of my own Waterfall, though it was necessary there, in order to create a certain mood and atmosphere, primarily because that was, after all, an Anglo-French novel.

But when it comes to food, the English language has shown itself to be highly vulnerable to invasion. No one likes to eat dead pigs, but they love to pig out on pork! Butchered sheep is horrible, but mutton and lamb? No one would mind being fleeced for that, would they? Cow corpse is a turn off, but everyone has a steak in bar-B-Q! You see what I mean? Most us feel so guilty for slaughtering animals by the millions that we hide from it behind barricades of euphemism. This very real French disease is endemic.

Skinny Bitch in Love has a few too many tropes and clichés for my taste, and in the first dozen pages, too. There's the gay best friend, the woman who is so perfect but somehow her life is in the toilet, the overweight but canine-loyal and adorable best girlfriend, the injustice and betrayal, etc., but I chose to go with this because I wanted to know just what kind of a salad Barnouin had tossed here.

The protagonist, Clementine, is the under-cook at a vegan eatery which to me betrays everything about veganism by flaunting itself as snottily high class. I was a vegan at one time, when I was younger. I'm still a vegetarian (the only one in my family - immediate and extended), so I know a bit about the culture, its pros and cons, its bulls and bears and have a bit of a feel for how isolated Clementine must have felt as the story unfolded.

A high-class food critic visits the restaurant, and the food Clementine Cooper has worked so hard to prepare is sabotaged (there's another French word! The encroaching French-ism galls! Aargh!). Someone adds butter (a big no-no for vegans: anything derived from the animal kingdom is out, including dairy) to one of the dishes the critic is to sample. Emil, the owner of the restaurant hears immediately about this. Maybe he's psychic. He fires Clementine, and her gay friend Ty quits in sympathetic support. Shortly afterwards, she hears that Emil has fired the entire kitchen staff. Emil is a sadistic moron.

Clementine thinks a rival, Rain (there's a joke in there somewhere along the lines of "It never rains...", but let’s not go there), was the one who betrayed her, but Rain stopped that play, claiming Clementine is all wet. The butter was, after all, found at Clementine's own work station, and Clementine was evidently far too stupid to taste the food before serving it). Now Clementine is out of a job and resigned to the fact that she will never work in this town again - not in the food business, anyway. Now you understand one reason why I detest this food culture. So who sabotaged the meal? If I were writing this, it would be Ty just to break the mold (mold, kitchen? Hmm!), but I somehow doubt that Barnouin is going to diss her leading gay man. Maybe it actually was Clementine in an unconscious self-sabotage, to get her out of her rut. I honestly have no idea, because we spent so little time in the warm-up that it’s impossible to determine who in that kitchen is red-handed!

So Clementine decides to resurrect herself after failing to find work at a dozen snotty eateries where she applied. She decides to promote herself as a vegan personal chef and cooking guide, and she prepares fliers. Now this is all taking place in LA, BTW, so it does fly, but I'm far form convinced that posting this particular kind of flier on light poles was the best choice of venue. She did garner one response. Unfortunately it was from her ex-boyfriend of six months ago, over whom she still has painful feelings. He did pay her over two thousand dollars to teach him how to cook and to prepare a bunch of meals, but she had to put up with seeing him pretty much make out with the woman to whom he was planning on becoming married (yes, I know it’s far quicker to say fiancée, but that necessitates using another...aargh! Too late! I already let another mal mot slip in! Double aargh!

Clementine's next plan is to start a cooking class. She posts more fliers and gets three responders, including her roommate, at $400 a pop for a six week course (it's actually a six-day course, one per week). One major problem I noticed is that despite her being a chef and talking about preparing food all the time, not one recipe ever shows up in th novel! Not in the ebook, anyway!

So the first night of the class she has a librarian turn up who seems interested in Sara, and a woman who obsesses about her name being Eva, not Eves, not Evie, etc. Nicely done there - forcing us to focus on Eva's first name takes attention away from her last name! The class is interrupted by noises outside and Clementine discovers that someone is opening a steakhouse directly across the street and hanging a huge sign across from her window! Like an idiot, she goes over to complain about the sign and gets nowhere, of course, but the owner, who has the entirely original name of Zach follows her back over and signs up for her class (but never attends). He also hires her to create two vegan meals for his restaurant and pays her whatever she asks for her time.

Here's where this story goes rapidly down hill. The instant Zach arrives, Clementine devolves from a person I was half-way to liking, into a microcephalic teenager, feeling tingles in her extremities which in the real world would actually be an early-warning that some sort of circulatory malfunction is about to ensue. Oh, and I'm now convinced that I'm reading young adult fiction. But it gets worse! It always does when it goes there, doesn't it? Well, not always, but all-too-often.

So Zach is insistent that Clementine visit him at his home in the evening to cook these two meals so he can taste them before he accepts them as fare for his restaurant; then his phone rings and he's talking to someone he refers to as "Baby" on the phone. Clementine, readily led by the nose as she is, goes to his home - the home of this guy who she doesn't even remotely know, and who is well over six feet and probably weighs three times what she does. She starts preparing the meals, and they talk and then completely uninvited, He kisses her and she doesn't even make a deal out of it.

I'm sorry, but Clementine lost my interest and good will right there and then. This isn't a woman who is asking for trouble, this is a woman who is writing a scented invitation on vellum, with calligraphy, begging for a grease-trap full of trouble to come and shave her ass with a large-bladed meat slicer. They kiss again, and then "Baby" shows up - a hawt young woman who immediately and loudly announces that she'll wait for Zach upstairs in the bedroom, and he follows her like a butch in heat not even having the couth to remotely attempt the requisite placation of Clementine! And we know that Clementine will not learn her lesson. This novel isn't Skinny Bitch in Love, it's strutting, red-ass displaying, shameless and concupiscent Skinny Bitch in torrid heat.

I have some issues with Barnouin trying to anglify Alexander. I've never heard anyone refer to a a 12-year-old as a "bloke". But once I get on this kind of kick I can't stop, so let me mention one other writing issue and then move on. Barnouin describes what Clementine and Alexander do on their first date, and she mentions that they sat and "people watched". It was misleading and would have been better as "people-watched", so it actually conveyed that they were watching people as opposed to passers-by staring at them! Just a minor thing, but this is a writing blog as well as a reading blog so I’d be remiss if I didn’t pick up on these things!

I have a problem with Clementine's rejection of Alexander. Yes, you can write your character with whatever quirks you like and it would be insane to make every character the same, and have all of them perfect, but unless Barnouin really wants to render Clementine as one of the shallowest airhead female characters imaginable, is it actually necessary to have her decide that because her toes don’t physically tingle when they kiss, then she should peremptorily ditch Alexander as a prospect even though he's the best guy for her on present showing? If it’s the case that she's going to bow down to Zach the Bastard, as she's consistently doing so far, then I can only conclude that Clementine is a moron who deserves all she gets. Women like her are why other women end up saddled with a bad rep from guys.

It gets worse. The next cooking class descends into the girls giving Duncan the librarian advice about how to stalk his ex. Seriously?! The only way to deal with an ex is to let them go and move on. Most of us learn that the hard way. Clementine has learned it, but seems incapable of passing on that hard-won knowledge. Red roses arrive and they all think it's a gift from Alexander the Gray Area, but even I knew they were from Zach the Bastard - because, of course, every woman is so weak and dumb that she can not only be manipulated with pretty-pretty, but also bought and paid for with it. At least, that's the message Barnouin apparently wants you to take home.

The flowers work, of course, and Clementine is now Zach the Bastard's zombie for life. He dictates to her when, where, and how they will meet again (and he does this routinely) and Clementine she falls right into line and sees no problem with subjecting herself to this dictatorship. It was at this point that I wanted to delete this ebook, and go vomit, but I initially decided to stick with it to the halfway point and if it was no better by then, it would merit a warty! Curiously enough that means I need to read 69 more pages: how deliciously appropriate for Clementine's mentality! I entertained the idea of asking my wife to read this and give me her opinion, but my feeling is that she would reject this novel out of hand without even pretending she wanted to read it.

Clementine's dad gets sick, so her cooking session with Zach, which is about to devolve into her laying down for him, no questions asked, is over. Zach the Bastard offers to drive her to the hospital! Nicely calculated move. He sure has the vegan wool substitute pulled squarely over Clementine's eyes. So Clementine's dad is lying sick in the hospital bed, he might be slowly dying, yet the first thought Clementine has is to leave him and go find Zach, and then hang out at a bar with him instead of being with her sick father, lending moral support to her mom and her sister. I'm wondering who is more sick - Clementine or her father? I definitely do not like this woman now.

This scene actually made me acutely aware that Clementine is always in the servile position of going to find Zach; he's never looking for her. He merely sits and waits on her running after him, like he's the King of Siam. Don't worry, you'll bringer....

Well, now the only topic of conversation at Clementine's cooking classes is endless endless ENDLESS tales of Zach the Bastard. I'm sorry but this is nauseating. I sincerely hope that women in general have far going for them than disporting themselves like adolescent fangirls of wretched lechers, but that's the message Barnouin seems to be so desperately and dedicatedly endeavoring to implant within our minds: women have no existence outside of how they can serve and worship men, and they should not expect any such existence because really, they don’t have any right to one, do they?

Clementine flips off Alexander - now they're just good friends and Alexander apparently has so little self-esteem that he's fine with that. How many women have put how many guys through that? And how many guys return the favor? The short answer to those questions is: too many. Meanwhile at cooking class, the 75% of the class which has two X chromosomes agrees to stalk Duncan's ex girlfriend on his behalf. How sick is that? They complete their mission and determine that Duncan is SoL, but on their way out of the bar, they espy Zach the Bastard with his arm comfortably around a woman he's escorting somewhere.

Clementine agonizes over Zach the Bastard, expends not one single thought on her sick father. She has to learn from her sister Elizabeth that her father is on the mend! But of course that's not important because she has a plan for a new restaurant just a few doors down from where she lives. She focuses on how pretty it will look when it’s cleaned (by Sara) and decorated (by Ty). She evidently doesn’t plan on doing a thing herself save directing the others on what to do, and she gives not one ounce of thought to parking.

At least Barnouin has the cultural class to bring in Doctor Who! Props for that! It did perk up my interest briefly. Alexander calls her asking if she’ll bake and decorate some four dozen Doctor Who cupcakes for his sister's wedding. His sister is called Sabine. Really. After watching an ep of Nikita (3.2) last night in which Seymour unexpectedly impersonates a Dalek, I'm again amazed by how deeply this show has penetrated the psyche in the US.

Anyway, moving right along here! Sara is a fan of Doctor Who, so now I'm thinking: who really cares about Skinny Bitch? I want to read a novel about Normally-Proportioned Sara! How many times have you read a novel where the main character has a best friend and you find yourself wanting to read about the best friend rather than the main character? I find I'm doing that a bit more than I might have imagined I would since I've been reading YA novels lately. And after reading the disastrous Insurgent and now this, both in the first person, I have to reaffirm my decision to never read another first person YA or romance novel. Although I’ll probably be forced to break that resolution when something really cool pops up. If it ever pops up.

Clementine inexplicably resorts to avoiding Zach the Bastard. Not that she shouldn't avoid him in the long run, but after all that crap about stalking Duncan's ex, and advising her to close with Duncan, she now avoids closing with Zach the Bastard? What level of hypocrite is Clementine? She needs to tell him to drop dead, and then avoid him. Zach the Bastard is an expert at womanipulation though: he now resorts to employing Clementine's sick dad in order to force a response from her! And of course she comes to heel like a good dog.

A serious problem I have with Clementine is that she's so shallow that she lets that first kiss with Alexander dictate her whole attitude towards him. How pathetic is this woman? She acts like she's half her own age, and she's only 26. If Barnouin was actually going to get Clementine and Alexander together, then I’d have more respect for this novel, but having read what I've read so far, I have no faith in Barnouin's ability or intent to make that happen.

Zach the Bastard tells Clementine that the redhead he had his arm around is his fraternal twin sister. Okay. Again with the fraternal. Why is she his brotherly sister?! This isn't a fault of Barnouin's, of course, but it is a serious problem with our heavily gender-biased language. Note that I say gender-biased, not sex-biased, because sex has a host of baggage associated with it, which is also highly gender-biased. Pet peeve - what can I say?!

So Clementine goes to eat on the beach with Zach the Bastard and she dresses sexily, and pretty much wants to drop her panties right there in the sand. This reminds me of that old cartoon where a woman is buried in the sand and some enterprising guy asks her, "What's in it for me if I dig you out?", and her response is "Sand!" (and no, I'm not going to explain that for you!). On the beach, Clementine pretty much lets Zach the Bastard poke and prod her like he;s tenderizing meat, which, I guess, he is. She lets him get away with the most inappropriate things, given how young and tenuous their relationship is at this point. This is after she's had the hypocrisy to get on her friend Sara's case for jumping Duncan's bones! This is Duncan the Librarian who evidently read her like an open book and who might well be planning on returning her to the shelf now that they've had sex! How bad is it that I'm far more interested in how Clementine's business plans turn out, than ever I could be in what happens to that waste of a relationship called Zach the Bastard?

Unfortunately, Barnouin is trying to win me over by showing what a wonderful half-brother Zach the Bastard is. They go indoors, and as he and Clementine (who is all but down on her hands and knees, head buried in the couch, butt in the air for him like a Skinny Bitch in heat), there comes another knock at the door. It’s his punk half-sister Jolie, and her punk boyfriend Rufus, who have been cut off without a cent (I almost wrote scent there, but I figured most people wouldn’t get it) by their father, who's on his third wife (not literally, I assume, but in this novel who knows?), because she won't go to college - she wants to be an actor instead, and Rufus is in a band, of course.

So the night ends right there because Zach the Bastard, who instantaneously paid for three hotel rooms without asking, and Clem, who acquiesces to every whim he has, could not possibly, no way, no how, go to a hotel for the night - or part of it - and her reputation as easy is pretty much painted on her forehead by now, so why not? Without even showing her the respect of asking, Zach the Bastard dumps his 18 year old half-sister completely on Clementine and Sara for the next day, and Clementine meekly tugs her forelock and acquiesces. And so does Sara, but she makes Clementine come along on her audition that next morning because, since this is first person, we can’t really see what’s going on unless Clementine inexplicably goes along. So now I'm wondering who will get the job in the commercial: Clementine, Jolie, or both? I know where my money is.

I won the bet for once! Sara failed, Jolie got a call-back! And Zach the Bastard's cheap-ass attempt to dissuade her from getting married, getting her own apartment, and going into acting was a 100% failure on all fronts. So Zach the Bastard comes over and dumps on Clementine. He makes it clear that he thought that her crappy hovel of an apartment and her slow-lingering-death of a 'business', together with her lifestyle in general would completely turn Jolie off, but it had the opposite effect! Despite this insulting, rude and callous behavior, Clementine doesn’t even have the self-respect to throw him out of her apartment! He leaves in a childish fit of anger. Will she now dump this low-life jerk-off? I wouldn’t put Monopoly money on it. He'll apologize, send flowers or something, and she'll come running back to him, lay down, and spread her legs. This is an abusive relationship, and normally I’d feel bad for Clementine, but she's such a dumb, clueless, and shallow Skinny Bitch that I can’t find a lick of compassion for her. I can't. I honestly can't.

And this leaves me with a dilemma, because I really like Sara and Jolie and want to see what happens to them. So do I finish this or erase it now? Only Time will tell! Or maybe Newsweek! Hey: Fascinating idiom of the day: "...I waste fuel emissions." What the heck does that mean?!

I find it of note that Barnouin can embrace the French tongue when it comes to 'sous chef', but not when it comes to 'chaise longue'. She writes the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard 'chaise lounge'. Interesting. And so Clementine and Zach the Bastard finally leap into bed together without a thought or a word for STDs and condoms, because, of course, then it wouldn’t be smart fiction, would it now?

I decided to read this novel to the bitter end, not because of any merit intrinsic to the work itself, but because it would be unfair to Barnouin to reject this out of hand when I read all the way through the utterly detestable Insurgent (and especially since I specifically identified an ABBA song in that review, "Fernando", and that same song is identified in Barnouin's novel; what a weird coincidence!). This novel is much better written than Insurgent could ever hope to be, so props to Barnouin for her writing style, but it is equally dissatisfying in one respect: the female protagonist. I could neither root for her, nor wish her well when this vegan so willingly lays her neck on the butcher's block of an abusive romance which itself smells like rancid meat.

But I've written more than enough spoilers for this review, so no more of those! It’s Barnouin's story to tell, not mine after all. I did press on nails-on-chalkboard notwithstanding, and finished it despite having very little faith that I would really get any more about Sara or Jolie, but I had hope - which of course was dashed. What I didn’t know was if I could stand was to read even one more page about how big of a flimsy, threadbare doormat Clementine is for Zach the Bastard and how unrelentingly ineducable he truly is to her needs. Yes, it’s said that true love is work, but if it’s this much work you need to find a new career while your self respect is salvageable. I could never comport Clementine's self-respect in wanting to succeed on her own in her business with the complete absence of any self-respect in her relationship with Zach the Bastard. But you know what I really didn’t get? Why did Zach the Bastard even need a dog when he had a Skinny Bitch who would come to heel at his every whistle?

In summary, let me suffice to say that Zach the Bastard maintains his reputation, and Clementine is so stupid that she thinks Zach the Bastard is "complicated"! She has a perfect in with Alexander but treats him like he's a large portion of nothing, whilst simultaneously lying to herself that nothing about Zach the Bastard is easy! Her co-dependent relationship with this jerk is like a friendship between two spoiled thirteen year olds. It’s not remotely mature, but worse than that, it’s not even interesting; neither is it entertaining because it’s entirely predictable from the start, no matter how much of a nauseating roller-coaster ride is included in the fee. The relationship between Jolie and her fiancé Rufus is much more mature and far more engrossing. Even Sara's non-relationship held more raw entertainment value than anything that was written about Clementine's interactions with Zach the Bastard.

I cannot recommend this novel. It's an insult to thinking, self-respecting women.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

a Pride and Prejudice movie is reviewed on the Movie page

Title: Pride and Prejudice
Author: Jane Austen
Pages: 238
Publisher: Penguin UK
Rating: Worthy!
Perspective: third person past

Note: Spoil like you've never seen a refrigerator! (like you don't know what's in this novel anyway! Darcy and Elizabeth get married! There! I gave it all away!)

How could I not read this in the bicentenary of its publication? I'm reading this in an anthology of Austen's novels. See, I told you I had one, and you didn't believe me! Mine isn't quite the same as the one referenced above, but near enough. The cover picture is from mine.

Note that Gutenberg has a free ebook of this novel. It's also noteworthy that Marvel comics produced a graphic novel of this novel (which I've also read! Yes, I'm way ahead of you!)

Having gone into some detail over Pride and Prejudice in the movie section elsewhere on this blog, there's going to be little to say about the story or the plot since it starts out very much like the best movie of the book, the 1995 one featuring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle in the main roles, so this must needs be a compare and contrast review. The story centers on the Bennett Family, Mr & Mrs, and their five daughters, from oldest to youngest: Jane, Elizabeth (Lizzie), Mary, Catherine (Kitty), and Lydia, and their interactions with the main male suitors Bingley (for Jane), Darcy (for Lizzie), and last but least Wickham (for anyone he can get but finally, for Lydia).

This book is something of a delight. It’s very different from modern novels (understandably, since it's over 200 years old!), and different again from American novels since it’s British. The Brits like to use single quotation marks to signify the spoken word their novels, and the grammar and word use varies considerably from that which is to be found in modern novels, even those which are written as historical (or perhaps more accurately, hysterical) romances. It’s not often you find words like 'celerity' in modern works, nor 'self-gratulation', nor 'whither', nor 'repine', nor 'eclat'!

Austen often has a (perhaps unintentional) turn of humor that I find delightful, as in chapter 17 where she has Jane and Elizabeth secretly discussing Wickham's revelations regarding Darcy, from which they're disturbed by Bingley's arrival with an invitation to the ball which he had promised Lydia he should hold:

The two young ladies were summoned from the shrubbery, where this conversation passed, by the arrival of the very persons of whom they had been speaking;

Summoned from the shrubbery indeed! Shades of Monty Python!

Even someone of Austen's propriety and stature isn't immune from grammatical error, or perhaps more accurately, error in clarity of communication as I discovered, also in 17, where we read:

Jane pictured to herself a happy evening in the society of her two friends, and the attentions of her brother;

When first I read that, I found myself wondering how Jane could have a brother when Austen has already made it quite clear that she had only four sisters and no other siblings. Having looked at this more closely, I can only conclude that the brother in this case is Bingley, the brother not of Jane, but of her two friends mentioned in the prior clause, so the sentence is somewhat more confusing on that point than it ought to have been!

Austen also seems inconsistent in how she uses the indefinite article before an aspirate. She writes 'a husband', but 'an hope'. This may be less interesting to others than it is to me, because to me it’s yet another reason to take interest in more antiquated writing styles, especially when found in the form of fiction. This antiquity of style is one of the charms of such novels. I almost end up feeling as though I'm a better person, and certainly I feel that I'm better equipped as a writer for having an acquaintanceship with such work.

I find myself wondering what rules she's applying as she writes, or if indeed she's applying any rules other than her own innate feel for English as she has it through nothing more than growing up a native to it in that era. Perhaps whatever rules she employs were so imbued within her having grown as she did, that it never crossed her mind that any rules were actually being employed at all, so innate is her grasp of the language. But how remarkable it is that we can have now this window into life 200 years ago, even as narrow and focused as it necessarily is! Perhaps you might want to research Austen's life and times. There's a Jane Austen wiki which may be a good place to start - or to which you can contribute if you wish!

One of the interesting phrases I found was 'he left the country.' when Austen means, of course, not that he left England, but that he left the countryside for the city. And on that topic, we find Jane in denial about Bingley after he has left, and Elizabeth rather angry at his behavior, but not so angry as she becomes when Collins proposes to her and will not take no for an answer. The 1995 movie has Collins storming off and proposing to Charlotte, which doesn't represent the novel at all. The 2005 movie does a better job on this score. And Bingley's sisters (of which there appears only one in the 2005 movie) do not steadily imply that Bingley, now back in London, is seriously interested in Darcy's sister in the movies whereas they do in the novel.

One item of interest occurred to me reading the novel, and that is exactly what Lizzie's dad might have meant in issuing his 'ultimatum' upon learning of Lizzie's refusal to marry Collins:

...Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.

Does he mean he will never speak to her if she does, or does he merely mean that if she marries and moves away, he will be unable to see her? I think we're supposed to take it as it's traditionally been understood, but perhaps Austen was playing with a little double-entendre here?

Whilst on this topic, I have to say here that the novel suggests a far greater friendship between Jane and Bingley's two sisters, notwithstanding the superior attitude of the latter, than either the 1995 movie or the 2005 movie would have you believe. The novel also indicates that Elizabeth's first two dances with Collins were much more embarrassing than they were depicted as being in the 1995 movie ('mortification' is the term Austen uses, followed by 'ecstasy' as the dances are over and Elizabeth is released!). The 2005 movie shows no problem there at all.

This novel was not originally intended to have the title 'Pride and Prejudice', it was to have been titled 'First Impressions', but as wikipedia points out, two other works with that title had been published quite recently as Austen was revising her work, so she changed it to what is in my opinion a far better title. It’s hard to see this novel under it’s original name! Austen perhaps took her title from words in a contemporary work by Fanny Burney, which Austen is known to have liked.

The title is all the more appropriate since the novel primarily addresses the clash between Darcy's over-developed sense of pride, and Elizabeth's hasty prejudice against him based on her first impression of his character, and of Wickham's despicable lies about him. Her prejudice shows strongly at the dance which Bingley holds at Netherfield, where Elizabeth is depicted as saying, in response to her friend Charlotte's suggestion that dancing with Darcy (now there's a movie title!) isn’t so bad: "Heaven forbid! That would be the greatest misfortune of all! To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate! Do not wish me such an evil."

Contrast that, then, with what she says whilst she's actually dancing with Darcy in response to a comment he made about her suggestions as to how conversation ought to be conducted during a dance:

'Both,' replied Elizabeth archly; 'for I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.'

So now, it appears, she considers that the two of them have a lot in common, although Darcy seems to disagree. They spar over the pianoforte whilst the others play cards. Cards back then consisted of games such as Quadrille, which according to wikipedia is is a Spanish trick-taking game directly ancestral to Boston and chief progenitor of Solo whist, perfected in early 18th century France as a four-handed version of the Spanish game Ombre.

Another game was Cassino, which wikipedia describes as an Italian fishing card game which is the only one to have penetrated the English-speaking world.

Do you wonder at this point if I wonder if they're going to be 'violently' in love? That term is much abused, we find, and Austen herself is evidently quite aware of it. Consider this from Chapter 25:

But that expression of 'violently in love' is so hackneyed, so doubtful, so indefinite, that it gives me very little idea. It is as often applied to feelings which arise from a half-hour's acquaintance, as to a real, strong attachment. Pray, how violent was Mr. Bingley's love?

On Elizabeth's visit to Hunsford to spend time with her friend Charlotte, now married to Collins (ch 28) we come across yet another of Austen's charming phrases:

Here, leading the way through every walk and cross walk, and scarcely allowing them an interval to utter the praises he asked for, every view was pointed out with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind.

After their sparring over the piano, which is even more charming in the novel than in either movie (and which is better done in the 2005 movie than it is in the 1995 version), Elizabeth finds that visits by Darcy to Charlotte's home, where Elizabeth is staying, are much more frequent, but he says very little. This portion of the relationship is entirely passed over in the movies, which makes it harder to see from what quarter Darcy's deep passion arose.

The very heated exchange between then after Darcy proposes in the worst proposal ever, is not exactly spelled out, in terms of who said exactly what in the novel, so some of what appears in the movies is quite simply made up. But whilst the novel lacks something in this regard at this important point, it handles sufficiently well, particularly Elizabeth's personal ruminations immediately afterwards and the next morning when Darcy hands her a letter (he's stalking her out in the country where he knows she walks).

Darcy's letter hugely long and it's related in the novel with no paragraphing, running to 4½ full pages! Neither movie gives any indication of this., On the contrary: the letter they show is very short in comparison. Lizzie agonizes over Darcy's words about Wickham for two hours as she walks up and down in the outdoors, but she eventually arrives at the conclusion that Darcy must be right! Then she turns her attention to what he said about Jane. Why she does this in the reverse of the order in which the letter conveys this information must remain a mystery, I suppose, but we're forced to wonder if Austen was more fixated upon Lizzie's relationship with Wickham than she was on hers with Jane.

Lizzie is soon back home, but within a month or so she's off again in what's by far the best part of the novel (of course I'm insanely biased when I say this!) on her trip with the Gardiners to Derbyshire, a county in which I was born and raised. This is the location of Mrs Gardiner's home village of Lambton, which is conveniently close to Darcy's Pemberley. There is at least two Lambtons in England but neither is in Derbyshire. One of them is famous for being the home of the Lambton Worm, an ancient legend from which Bram Stoker took his inspiration for his The Lair of the White Worm. Wikipedia informs us that the home of Fitzwilliam Darcy was modeled on Chatsworth House, a beautiful place not far from my home town. It was this very house which was used (for exteriors only) in the 2005 movie.

Austen also has Lizzie refer to other places with which I'm very familiar: Dovedale to which I've also been several times, the Peak District, and finally, my own home town, Matlock (yes, just like the TV show, but we had it first!) which is part of the Peak District.

Moving right along now.... Lizzie and the Gardiners (sounds like a band name, doesn't it? "Here's the latest release from Lizzie and the Gardiners, Wickham if you've got 'em"!) are strolling around Darcy's home! This seems strange to me, but I guess it was perfectly normal back then for strangers to be shown around the homes of the ridiculously well-off. It's during this tour that Lizzie completely reforms her opinion of Darcy, and then, of course, she runs into him as she's going outdoors.

I think of the two movies, the better one for this portion is the 2005 version, even though it strays way beyond the bounds of canon. In it, a scene was added where Lizzie is looking at some truly amazing sculptures, one of which is a bust of Darcy. Yes, Virginia, men had busts back then, and proud of them they were, too! A non-canonical scene was also added where Lizzie is attracted by some beautiful piano-playing and finds herself watching Georgiana, without knowing who she is. Darcy suddenly walks into he scene and hugs her. He sees Lizzie, who runs, evidently thinking this is Darcy's girlfriend!

Eventually, the two of them talk outside, during a walk with the Gardiners, but Mrs Gardiner carefully engineers it so that she and her husband are way ahead of the younger couple. The ensuing conversation, awkward as it may be, gives Lizzie leave to further reform her opinion of this man. Her flabber, such as it is, has never been so gasted as when Darcy informs her that he should like for her to meet his younger sister, Georgiana, who is anxious to meet Lizzie.

Unfortunately. it's immediately after this is that Lizzie receives news from Jane that Lydia has absconded with Wickham! Darcy learns of this from Lizzie - much more humorously portrayed in the 2005 than in the 1995. he embarks upon his adventure to discover where Wickham is hiding in London. There is much more going on here than is ever portrayed in either movie, and once Wickham and Lydia are married off and out of the way, considerably more going on with Bingley and Darcy than is portrayed in either movie, although the essence of what happens is carried through there.

Needless to say - but I've begun so I'll finish! - Bingley comes back and proposes to Jane - although nowhere near as velocitously as the movies indicate, even the lengthier 1995 version, and eventually, Darcy and Lizzie have their walk, wherein they go into rather tedious detail about their roller-coaster history together, I have to say. Eventually they're both married off and exquisitely happy. Austen doesn't marry either of the other sisters, but takes pains to relate that, removed from the influence of Lydia, and living with the Darcy's, Kitty improves immeasurably and left with her mother, even Mary starts to come out of her shell.

Yes, there was far more detail than ever I was interested in hearing at the end of this novel, so while I still recommend reading this or another of Austen's works for their authentic period detail, and for Austen's occasional humorous and charming turn of phrases, I have to say that I'm not overwhelmed by her overall talent as a writer. There is too much detail of the tedious variety and it's gone into in places where less would have sufficed. There is almost no observation of the surroundings, and conversation can sometimes become obscure since Austen is not fond of indicating who is speaking at a given time, so that perhaps a whole page will pass of purest conversation, by the end of which one is no longer certain as to who said what.

I realize that this is how they wrote back then, but that renders my observation no less valid. I seriously doubt that, had Austen not written this, but a writer of modern historical romance wrote it exactly as the first edition bore it, it would not have anywhere near the acclaim it now has, and before it was published you may rest assured that some editor somewhere would have it with abandon if it came across their desk! It's worth keeping that in mind when we bestow praise upon it, but go ahead and read it and make up your own mind, because your opinion of it is all that matters in the last analysis. Overall I'm quite prepared to declare it worthy!