Book Review: THE BOYFRIEND

Title: The Boyfriend

Author: Daniel Hurst

Publisher: Inkubator Books
Pages: 207
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

 

The pace picks up from the Prologue when the authorial voice stokes up our interest. The Prologue interested me. I wanted to see which way this would go.

 

Adele Davies is engaged to be married to Tom Barton, her sixth and final boyfriend. Busy with her wedding planning, she learns that her first boyfriend, Shaun Gibson, has hanged himself.

Two days later, she learns that her second boyfriend, Calum Jenkins, has died in a car crash. And then it is the turn of Ryan Harris, her third boyfriend, who also dies suddenly.

Any suspicion that her past boyfriends are being targeted and eliminated is confirmed when she gets a text message saying, Three down, three to go.

But the police dismiss her allegations. And her best friend and her fiancé don’t believe her either. And when she tries to warn potential victims off, it doesn’t work either. Will she be able to keep Tom safe? And who is responsible for all these deaths?

 

The book is written in the first person present tense PoV of Adele. It’s only in Chapter 10 that we become aware of another PoV character, an unknown person known simply as The Boyfriend.

 

I struggled to like Adele. I’m always impatient with characters whose fondness for liquor impairs their judgement. Here, Adele’s crazy social drinking is clearly setting her up for trouble. She keeps downing booze, despite repeated hangovers. She doesn’t seem to understand that she couldn’t live a functional life if she kept drinking that way. Plus, she’s had a mysterious head injury at the age of 16, the details of which she has never been able to remember. All these factors make her an unreliable narrator.

 

Adele is not one of those characters, whose problems keep adding up. Things get worse, but not for her. Here she has one problem. She’s the character who nobody believes.

 

I found Tom too controlling and jealous, not at all the epitome of perfection that Adele believed he was. It was also odd that Adele’s family shows up at the very last minute. She doesn’t have any relationship with them for most of the book.

 

Some of the stuff that Adele tells us is strange. For instance, she says that Shaun’s parents welcomed her into their family, even though they must have known that at our age, there was a good chance the romance wasn’t going to last forever. Why would Shaun’s parents think that way? Shaun is 36, and his parents are in their mid-50s, we are told, so of course theirs was a teenage romance too, and they’re still going strong 36 years later.

 

The tone of the narrative was a mix between thinking aloud and sharing confidences with us readers, and I liked that. The chapters ended on a thought-provoking note.

The manner in which each boyfriend was introduced was interesting. The back stories were sufficiently diverse and well written.

I’ve read two other books by this author, and I can say that he has improved greatly. This book didn’t have any of the issues that I had with his previous books.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: A FAMILIAR STRANGER

Title: A Familiar Stranger

Author: AR Torre
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Pages: 275
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

Lillian Smith, wife, mother and professional obituary writer, is neglected by her husband Mike, despite obeying all his written and unwritten rules. When she comes to know of her husband’s affair over a long period, she feels betrayed and longs to lash out at him. So when she meets David Laurent, she embarks on a steamy affair with him. What she tells him about herself is a lie, based on the personal details of a dead woman that Lillian has used to invent a new persona for herself.

While in this persona, she is cool and elegant, a sophisticated woman. So well is she written that we, like David, believe in the lie of the persona.

But Lillian isn’t the only person who is leading a double life.

 

The book is written in the first person past tense PoV of Lillian, and occasionally of Mike, besides a few chapters from two other PoVs. The main narrative is punctuated by Lillian’s riddle tweets, where she invites her followers to play guessing games about who has died. She is obsessed with death.

The narrative is divided into several parts, including Two Months Before the Death, Six Weeks Before the Death, One Month Before the Death, Two Weeks Before the Death, One Week Before the Death, and Now. These sections count down to a death, and yet we have no clue who is the character that will die. But it feels important, given that Lillian writes obituaries for a living. The section, One Week Before the Death, ends without us being any wiser about who has died.

 

This isn’t a typical whodunit. Past the 55 percent mark, we still don’t know who is dead. Like the followers of Lillian’s Twitter account, we are left guessing which of the characters has died, piecing together the clues that the author has casually thrown our way. The big twist, the identity of the victim, comes at nearly the 59 percent mark.

 

While Mike makes no secret of the fact that he is hiding something and that he is controlling his wife, we find ourselves slowly getting to know Lillian and trusting her, until she shows herself to be an unreliable narrator.

 

There are just a few characters, and yet they all seemed important in the light of what is going to happen.

Lillian has the most delicious, self-deprecating humour. I haven’t seen it done so well in quite a while. I also liked her choice of job. She makes people look good in their obits, giving them a dignity that they might have lacked in life. While she is too emotional, Mike denies his emotions, and is clinical, practical and detached, even in the midst of deep personal crisis.

I wish there had been more of Jacob, Lillian’s son. His emotions towards his parents were barely discussed, and I would have liked to see more of him.

I didn’t appreciate the manner in which the identity of the murderer is revealed. It’s always better when another character figures things out, than when the murderer admits their crime.

 

Here are some quotes from the book:
Don’t wait up. The three most telling words in a marriage.

Intelligence was the gravity that pinned all the pieces onto the board.

A callus began to grow around my feelings for Mike.

 

Chapter 48 is a gut-wrenching expression of grief.

 

There were some typos that will hopefully be addressed. All in all, I liked this book.

 

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: GOOD HUSBANDS

Title: Good Husbands
Author: Cate Ray
Publisher: Park Row
Pages: 386
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Three women, Jessica Jackson, Stephanie Brooke and Priyanka Lawley, strangers to each other, get an identical letter from a woman called Holly Waite, who tells them that her mother, Nicola Waite, was raped 30 years ago in 1990 by their husbands, Maximilian Jackson, Daniel Brooke and Andrew Lawley. For all of them, in marriages of love and trust, the allegation in the letter is deeply disturbing.

The letter evokes different reactions. Jess wants the truth. Priyanka is at first determined to protect Andrew, then loses confidence in him and is undecided about what to do. Stephanie wants to protect her husband and save her family, no matter what. While the other two would prefer to hide from the truth, Jess eggs them on, seeking to band together as a team.

Jess makes it her goal to get justice for Nicole, and Holly too, knowing that the truth could upset their lives and break up their marriages and families.

But will they ever get at the truth, and will justice be served?
 

The novel is written in the first person present tense PoV of Jess, Priyanka and Stephanie. The book is written in three parts, The Letter, The Diary and The Key, each of which drive the action onward.

The premise is a weighty one. A strong woman in a committed marriage learns that her husband has raped somebody in the past. How would she react?

I liked the writing. Here’s a sample:

It’s so temperamental, sexual interplay. One word, one look can alter things dramatically… Attraction is just smoke and mirrors. So fragile, desire can vanish at any moment.

Bitter looks ugly when unwrapped.

At 400 pages, the book is long, with not much action filling up those pages, but although I found myself impatient, I wasn’t bored. The author raises the point about the steady breakdown of democracy in many countries, including India.

The novel meanders a lot, going into questions of male privilege, testosterone, even marital sex, whether a wife can say No, and the age-old assumption that when a woman is raped or sexually assaulted, she was ‘asking’ for it. How the blame is shifted on to the girl, while the perpetrator is condoned.

There is an extensive section about the gaslighting that women are subjected to. And above all, the institution where the heinous act was committed, Montague Club, where women weren’t even allowed in until the 80s.

I found Priyanka’s job very interesting. Although ungraded, we need more discussions on such subjects for young people and teenagers.

I was happy to see an Indian character, ticking off the diversity quotient. I was happier still to know she wasn’t a stereotype. The only mistake was the author’s acknowledgement of her Punjabi Indian heritage. Bandyopadhyay, Priyanka’s surname, is Bengali, not Punjabi.

Stephanie was the character I warmed the least to. She was the most unwilling to believe in the veracity of Nicole’s story, believing the lies about the woman’s promiscuity and how she asked for it. But I also felt sorry for her once she revealed that she learned to keep my sentences short because he often interrupts me when I’m speaking, doesn’t ask what it was that I was going to say.

Priyanka changes her stance when she is confronted by all the lessons around consent that she teaches her students.

Jess is the driving force, for the greater part of the book, the only one to believe Nicole. Of the three women, she has the most powerful and unwavering moral compass. Between them, the three women spanned the gamut of reactions to rape.

Even the men are each representative of a type. There is the ‘weak’ Mr Nice Guy, the brash, militant type and the one who gets by on his looks.

Each of the characters went through turmoil in their respective lives, and they all underwent change.

This was a book about strong women, every single one of them, major and minor characters alike. I also liked how every single thread was resolved, and every character given closure, down to Shelley Fricker. In the end, this band of women stood up for their own against the power imbalance.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: ENDLESS FEAR

Title: Endless Fear
Author: Adrianne Lee
Pages: 249
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐

 
At age 14, April Farraday’s life changed when her mother, actress Lily Cordell-Farraday, fell down the stairs and died. That was 12 years ago. Since then, April has not been able to get the thought out of her mind that she may have been the one to push her mother down.

Having spent the intervening years in a sanitarium, April is now back at Calendar House, her old home, where she has been invited for the formal engagement party of her stepbrother, Thane Garrick.

An ominous note has warned her to stay away, but April is determined to go, hoping to unlock the memories around her mother’s death. Meanwhile, it appears that whoever sent the note has some dangerous plans for her. Accidents keep happening to her, and April is unsure who to trust.

Is old love Spencer to blame, or her stepmother, Cynthia? Will she recover her memories in time or end up losing her life?

 

It was hard to get a timeline on this book, but since none of the characters had cellphones, I assumed it was the eighties.

 

The passages written from the viewpoint of the villain of the piece were rather weak. The entire mystery felt very tepid at the end of it all?

 

There were a lot of proofing errors in this book. Some of the descriptions are banal. With her blood the temperature of ice water. In the same paragraph, we get her mouth felt as dry as the desert outside, her palms as damp as the dew on the cacti.

We are told that April’s father forgot ‘amenities,’ instead of the right word, ‘niceties.’

 

The descriptions are another annoyance. There are repeated references to the colour of character’s eyes and hair, which is distracting and takes away from the action. Spencer’s hair is at first chocolate, then coffee brown, and then chocolate again. His eyes are dove gray, then pewter.

The number of times that Spencer and April kiss each other before Spencer pulls apart is once too often. The forward and backward dance between them continues throughout the book. The entire misunderstanding between them could have been sorted out if they had only spoken, but neither seems to have the good sense to do that. And so, we are left with a book which could have been shorter.

There is a lot of repetition. A lot of characters staring at each other over a certain number of ‘long seconds.’

The Farradays name their children after the month in which they are born. So April’s dad is August, her aunt is called March, and her half-sister is called July. This comes across more as a gimmick than an eccentricity. What if a boy were to be born in May or June? Or a girl in February?

Crusty old Aunt March didn’t get enough space in the book. And then there was all the skirting around Spencer. April though of Cynthia as her stepmother, and Thane as her stepbrother. But Thane’s twin brother, Spencer, was not once referred to as a stepbrother. That was awkward.

Book Review: MADELINE'S MIRACLES

Title: Madeline’s Miracles
Author: Warren Adler
Publisher: Stonehouse Press
Pages: 360
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

 

Virginia Sargent, a commercial artist living the California lifestyle with her stockbroker husband, Jack, and twin pre-teen daughters, who are undisputed masters on the soccer field, meets an enigmatic woman at her beauty parlour. That woman is Madeline Boswell, and she knows everything about Virginia and her family.

Virginia feels drawn to her, and before long, as Madeline’s predictions begin to come true, she begins to trust her completely. She becomes so obsessed with Madeline that she makes her the sole subject of her canvas. She truly believes Madeline’s promise that she can keep their family safe and happy, help them achieve their dreams and protect them from all dangers.

At first Jack is sceptical and spends time and energy trying to expose Madeline as a two-bit psychic and a charlatan. But when his daughter is saved from near tragedy at a football game, he becomes a fanatical convert.

Before long, Madeline is invited to live in their beautiful home, and the couple accord her the status of a demi-god. She dictates terms on every aspect of their lives, from their work, parenting and the stock market. They begin to follow her advice, no matter how outlandish it may seem. But then strange things begin to happen. Lines that should never be crossed are transgressed. Who is Madeline? Is she really clairvoyant, able to see the future and protect their family from unknown dangers, or is she nothing but a sleazy conwoman?
 

The story is written in the 3^rd person past tense PoV of Virginia and Jack in alternate chapters. We don’t see much of the girls. For the most part, we are told that they are busy at soccer practice. It would have been interesting to have their 3^rd person PoV too to see how their parents’ acceptance of this woman affected them, and what they made of it.

The writing is good, and the dialogue believable. The football match in which the twins work their magic is a turning point for the family and is well written.

While the author builds up the story well, the ending is not very convincing. There wasn’t enough conflict to make the characters credible. Also, we get to see Jack’s journey from scepticism to conviction, but for Virginia, it seems as if it takes almost nothing for her to become a complete believer. The fierceness with which she places Madeline on a pedestal, and worships her, treating her at once as a god and a mother made me uncomfortable.

There are references to sex, but they are not gratuitous, even though they are sickening to read about because of what they represent.

Madeline seems like a one-woman cult, and like Jack and Virginia, we hover between rejection and acceptance of the strange things happening in the life of the Sargents. Though a work of fiction, we have seen enough evidence of sensible people giving over their lives into the control of another person to know that such things are very much possible.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)