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.
This is volume 1 in the Echo Trilogy. Unfortunately, it has a prologue, but it's very short, and I skipped it as usual. NO PROLOGUES!!! Alexandra "Lex" Larson is a post-graduate student studying archaeology (in particular the ancient languages and dialects of Egypt) who, on the same day, has three important revelations come to her. One is as exciting as another is disconcerting. The third? Well, she's not quite smart enough to really figure that out until later. First: she's to have the opportunity to go on a dig in Egypt, and not as a grunt, but as a language adviser. This is a dream come true, and which understandably thrills her. It's an honor: a public recognition of her arrival in her chosen professional field. It's also an intriguing and exciting prospect that's unceremoniously tossed in the crapper by the author in favor of a cheap young-adult quality romance! Unbelievable.
Second: her mother shows up unexpectedly and reveals to Lex that she and her sister are by-product's some anonymous guy's masturbatory fantasy: her parents went to a sperm bank and that's how they begat Lex and her sister. There's no explanation offered for why her mother chose to reveal this at precisely that moment, so this positively screeched at me that me I was reading a novel, which I already knew of course, but I was becoming quite immersed in it until that point! Third: later!
It seems to me that Fairleigh could have done a much better job of this than she did, but since she had done such a good job of writing everything else in the first few chapters, I felt forced to let her have her head for a while. I rather suspect that a revelation, irl, of this nature, especially right before Xmas, would be at best, disconcerting to most people, but not to all of them. When are we going to have a novel where the character isn't obsessed by it, or who even doesn't care? That would be a refreshing change, because this "who were my parents/my daddy/my mommie/is a bit hackneyed and trope-ish these days. Of course, it's necessary for this novel's plot, but I find myself wondering if this could have been written in a less 'grab you by the scruff of the neck and shake you violently' manner.
But that's not what I've been handed here, so let's continue. A few people, especially if they were as smart as Lex is supposed to be, would have figured out something long before they were Lex's age (24), but she didn't, and what bothered me, apart from how disturbingly juvenile Lex is, was that her reaction to the news, given what we've been told about her to this point, seemed extreme, and out of character. She immediately obsesses with this news in a most melodramatic manner and to an extent that's way beyond what's rational! It's out of character for her to smolder with this desperate need to know who her "real dad" is and toss everything else aside in pursuit of it. This screamed at me: "You're reading a novel!" I found it irritating, especially when Lex visits her grandmother solely to grill her for information about her genetic legacy, and her grandmother does indeed have this information. How convenient! This reaction is exacerbated later and Lex promoted to full hypocrite status when she agrees with her mother that they should not pass this same information onto her younger sister, Jenny! I began not to like Lex at that point!
What bothers me most of all about this parentage issue, I guess, is that all of it takes away - to an important extent IMO - from Lex's real and most interesting issue. This is the third item to which I alluded above: Lex has premonitions. These revelatory dreams seem to be something very recent and sudden, and again, there's no explanation for this eruption of clairvoyance other than the obvious one: we're starting a novel! But there's something interesting about the dreams: they are, all of them, about the past except, that is, for the very first one which Fairleigh shares with us. That one appeared to be about the future - a future Lex appeared to head off (or did she? We'll never know!). This is important with regard to her inane behavior later.
Lex stays with her folks over Xmas, and she mends a badly-broken fence with her sister Jenny. At least she takes positive steps towards that end - but given her other behaviors, I have to ask, "What's the point?" It's all going to be torn up again when Jenny discovers that Lex kept information from her about their parentage, so even this is irrational! There is one intriguing revelation for the reader here, which is that there's someone else in Lex's dreams who appears to be able to control what she sees. Twice as she is about to see the face of the guy who is advising her parents to contact Doctor Lee in order to have the children they want, someone grabs her shoulder and prevents her turning that last corner in her parents' house to see him. Is this her doctoral adviser - a man about whom we've already had it suggested is very much a father figure to her?! Highly suspicious....
On another note, I was saddened to see that we have yet another female author who (apparently unthinkingly) places men and women into traditional roles: Lex and her mom "naturally" migrate to the kitchen to prepare the Xmas repast whilst her dad sits around drinking beer. He may be sitting pretty, but this arrangement didn't sit well with me. The really sad thing is that it's actually a representative perspective! Should I blame an author for reporting how life is? Should I blame her for not fighting stereotypes? I feel like I should, because the reason these gender roles became stereotypes is that not enough people were combating them!
Yes, I know her story isn't about equality of the genders, but that's not the point. It doesn't hurt writers to combat stereotypes even in the "minor" details of the tales they tell, because those details aren't minor - not in matters of this import. This is fiction that Fairleigh is writing after all, not a documentary; she could make these people behave however she wants, so I'm forced to the understanding that she either consciously chose to buy into the stereotype, or that she was completely blind to what she was promoting, which is actually worse.
I was further put off by Lex's endlessly juvenile behavior. If she were thirteen, I'd pretty much expect this - if she were she also stupid. She gets a ride home (arranged by her newly reconciled sister) with a guy she considered hot in high-school but who she hasn't seen in six years. This is after she has slept in her younger sister's bed one night, because she had a bad dream. Her kid sister finds nothing bizarre in this behavior, which means it's been common for some time. One of them is twenty four, going on thirteen, the other twenty-two, going on sixteen. They're neither of them appealing to me in any way at the moment! So we end up seeing Lex flustered and blushing, and behaving like a pre-teen, when her ride home asks her to accompany him to a New Year's party. How am I supposed to respect her as a hero of this novel when I can't find anything even to like, much less respect, about her so far? Fairleigh really had her work cut out for her at that point if she was going to win me over to her main character! (Spoiler: she failed)
Then came chapter six, in which Lex becomes a real Mary Sushi. So Lex actually forces a prophetic dream upon herself about her New Year's Eve date with Mike. The dream shows her that he will assault her and try to rape her, yet despite the fact that she knows the dreams are "telling her true", she still goes on the date, she still dresses in the same dress she saw in the dream, and she still drinks too much, and of course he assaults her and tries to rape her! I was already having serious respect issues over her behavior, but honestly? So she goes out of her way to prevent the prophetic dream about her professor from coming true when she has no reason to believe it would, then she behaves like a moron with regard to her own dream when she now knows she's dreaming truth? This makes absolutely no sense at all.
This part of the novel is actually interesting because it does raise some of the serious tangential issues over assaults and rape. It would be worth using this as a point to start exploring these issues in a class discussion of the topic. Let me get the baseline out of the way before I go into this: No, if a woman dresses "like a slut" and drinks too much, it does not mean she's asking to be raped, and it does not mean she deserves what she got. Neither does the fact that she initially had a certain end result in mind mean that she should get that result forced upon her after she changes her mind. In Lex's case however, and even without her prophetic warning, it does mean she's not very smart to dress in a way, especially on a first date, that sends certain signals (intentional or not) to someone like Mike, who she really doesn’t know, but who does (or did) have a reputation - something she did know.
The fact that Lex was three sheets to the wind doesn’t mean she's to blame for being raped, or near-raped, but it does mean she's not very smart to drink so much that her inhibitions are not under a healthy control, and her self-defense capacity is severely compromised, especially on a first date - unless she actually does want to plant the impression in her date's mind that she's easy and loose, with poor self control. In Lex's case in particular, given that she was forewarned that this would happen and did absolutely nothing whatsoever to head it off, this most certainly does mean that she's not worthy of much of my respect at this point. I have no idea what Fairleigh thought she was doing with her character here, but it didn’t impress me. On the contrary, it seemed clunky and amateur, and it very effectively evicted me from Lex's corner.
I saw no point to the attack on Lex from a story-telling PoV, just as I saw no point in what happened next. Lex is rescued from her near-rape by a mysterious character who is cloaked in black when Lex later tries to find him in her dream state. He severely beats up her date (this has relevancy for later), and then carries Lex to the ER. None of this makes any sense in the light of later revelations, one of which is Lex's advanced self-healing powers. This rescuer knows who and what she is, so why would he take her to the hospital? I was seriously tempted to believe that he is Seth - the guy who directed Mike to attack her - and yes, the supposedly evil god of the ancient Egyptians. But the truth turns out to be far more menacing than that.
In chapter nine, Fairleigh further insults Lex's intellect and viability as a main character. This is where she finally meets Professor Bahur to discuss the upcoming dig. When the two meet however, we get YA trope all over, which was truly gut-churning in how Lex reacts to the young professor, who is so trope-ish as to be almost a parody, but this isn't the worst problem! Bahur mentions the temple's main entrance, which quite obviously implies there is at least one other entrance, but when Lex brings up that painfully obvious idea, the professor stupidly holds up this as an example of her advanced intellect. Stating the obvious is advanced intellect? It’s no such thing unless she's truly a moron and this is offered as proof that she's not a complete moron!
Fairleigh continued to render this story ever harder for me to like with every opportunity that arose for her to do so. When she began randomly, but reliably, tossing in klutzy plotting or bizarre (even within her own framework) events it was as disappointing as it was unsurprising. How could she go write down-hill after such a promising start? Yet another mystery! On page 87, for example, she has Bahur saying, "A curse whose affects you must suffer from every day", but 'affects' is the wrong word. It should be 'effects'. I tried reading this as though it refers to some sort of affectation, but I can’t see how that makes any sense. Maybe I'm missing something. Or maybe Fairleigh simply screwed-up!
That's a quite minor offense compared with the next few revelations from her pen. Or keyboard. One aspect of the assault on Lex that I haven't mentioned was that she loses about 20 pounds in weight while in hospital overnight after the assault! There is no explanation for this until later, when she meets her thirty-year-old grandfather (yes!). But at the time, she never once thinks there is something utterly bizarre and dangerous about losing so much weight literally overnight, nor does her mother who is constantly at her side, and not one of the medical personnel suggests that she should have tests - like for some form of cancer for example? That's completely absurd: that no one should be interested in it, especially not the doctors in the hospital.
Fairleigh covers this up by producing a Doctor Isa, who takes over Lex's care, but this is also complete nonsense. I've worked in hospitals, and there's no way in hell that a strange doctor could simply storm in from nowhere and take over a doctor's patient, including discharging her, and especially given the circumstances. It's not only not that simple, it's not only medical malpractice, it's also simply impossible, and it was also completely avoidable if Lex had never been taken to the hospital in the first place. The story accomplished nothing by putting her there.
The entire novel sinks further into the toilet when her thirty-year old grandfather comes to visit her, escorted by his aging wife - Lex's grandmother. He launches into the biggest pile of bullshit I've ever heard. Once again we have the now-tired trope of a "time gene" - or more accurately in this case, a chromosome - and none of this makes even the remotest sense. This chromosome allows the people who carry it to look backwards and forwards in time, and to heal very quickly (at the cost of losing body weight - so at least that follows a moderately intelligent principle if nothing else does. And nothing else does!).
Our closest living genetic relative is the chimpanzee. We differ from them by only a tiny handful of percentage points in the entire three-billion character genome, yet humans cannot reproduce with chimpanzees precisely because of a differing chromosome count (inter alia). This inability to reproduce with those outside the genetic group is the very definition of species for those organisms which reproduce sexually, but Fairleigh further clouds this issue by insisting that Nejeret women (Nejerettes, because let's face it there's no equality of the genders in Fairleigh's system!) are barren; reproduction is carried out through Nejeret men impregnating human women! That is women of a different species according to Fairleigh! I'm sorry but no, no, and no-way-in-hell is this system viable or even sensible.
Yet Fairleigh would have us believe that the Nejeret people (the group to which Lex evidently belongs, along with her grandfather) have this extra mutant chromosome and still can reproduce with "humans"! If they can reproduce, they are human period. If they cannot, they are not, so it has to be one or the other, not both, as Fairleigh rather ignorantly would try to have it here. Fairleigh claims it cannot be detected by modern genetics! Nonsense. If it's in the genome then it's readily detectable by modern science - especially if it's an entire chromosome. If Fairleigh knew a little more about genetics, then she would have known to suggest that her mutation was carried in the mitochondrial DNA - that is in the separate genome carried in every cell that comes down to children only through the female line. This could have worked for her fiction (at a stretch), but it's not the way Fairleigh chose to go - she chose to have it come down only through the male line, which means it has to be on the Y chromosome, not on some extra mutant chromosome. There are some issues with mtDNA, too, since, as Bryan Sykes's book The Seven Daughters of Eve which I enjoyed but have not yet got around to reviewing) illustrates, the handful of mitochondria are very well known and none of them are inhuman!
This last observation is rendered particularly amusing when Fairleigh has Lex look back in time (as her grandfather reveals this information to her) and sees her mother cavorting in her own mother's yard, and there are seven apple trees! I nearly laughed out loud at that. And yes, the "A well-fed Nejerette is a happy Nejerette." line struck me as being immensely amusing, but then Fairleigh turns my stomach again by having Bahur take advantage of Lex by having her pretend to be his girlfriend, merely to dissuade the girl at the coffee shop from drooling over him any more. This was a highly inappropriate thing for her supervisor to do, and after all the fuss Lex had been making about never dating again and being cautious with men after she was attacked, for her to simply surrender to Bahur's wishes is a truly sickening, it really is. Rather than find it the least bit romantic, I found it yet another betrayal by a female author of a female character, and yet another example of how profoundly stupid Lex is.
Such examples kept coming thick and fast at that point: Lex meets again with her grandfather and grills him for details of the Nejeret people (and nets herself a very amateur info-dump), whilst she simultaneously fails to fully inform him of important and highly relevant facts. Examples of this would be her knowledge that someone had deliberately changed who her father was by substituting sperm at the fertility clinic where she was conceived, and also in failing to inform her grandfather that it was Seth - one of the seven Nejeret council members (one who has supposedly vanished) - who was directing Mike in his attack on her. This was about 40% into this novel, and right then I was wondering if I could get even so much as fifty percent of it stomached before I bolted.
The answer is a very loud and clear "No!" and the reason is that, after all the fuss we went through about Mike assaulting Lex and how it understandably left emotional scars, we then get Bahur doing precisely the same thing Mike did! He's manipulative. He's irrationally angry over trivialities. He's possessive. He has displayed control issues by savagely beating up a guy who assaulted Lex. He claims he owns her (and is sickeningly correct in that statement), and worse: he physically abuses Lex, pushing her around and worse, and yet this delusional woman thinks this is hot and romantic? She needs therapy, and soon.
I'm sorry but this novel is an insult to intelligent and independent women everywhere, and this needs to be stated loudly and unequivocally. If this were a novel about an abusive relationship, then I could see the rationale in having these characters behave as they do, but this is no such novel. It's supposed to be about Lex coming into her own over some startling find in Egypt (at least that's how it opens), but up to the point where I read it, Egypt wasn't even remotely on the map. Instead, the entire story degenerated into a cheap and sleazy no-mance, which had nothing to recommend it and was actually boring, being all-Lex, all-drooling all-the-time. The rest of the so-called plot went out the window!
The story at that point was paradoxically pointless! It was also completely uninteresting, uninventive, unoriginal, and worse than any of this: thoroughly disgraceful in the way it dishonestly portrayed a co-dependent relationship (where an older - like 2,000 years older! - man preyed on an impressionable and naïve young woman) as being a relationship that was healthy, loving, and romantic. Just exactly why would someone like Bahur, having two thousand years of experience under his belt, be even remotely interested in a child like Lex? That's the equivalent of a fifty-year old man falling in love with, and wanting to marry, a six-month-old kid. This nauseating and obnoxious novel is definitely warty beyond measure.
