**spoiler alert** I rarely leave reviews for books. It usually takes a book actively angering me to do it, and actively angering me usually takes a bo**spoiler alert** I rarely leave reviews for books. It usually takes a book actively angering me to do it, and actively angering me usually takes a book squandering its potential. That's what this book has done: unnecessarily squandered its potential.
On the face of it, a book about a generation ship dying, with a main character who is a runway indentured servant, smuggling a baby who isn't hers, being chased by a policeman deciding what his role is during Armageddon - well, that sounds fantastic, a possible contender for my top ten list of the year.
But everything about this book - just like everything about the generation ship - quickly falls apart.
For starters, this book tries to be hard science fiction when that is clearly beyond the capabilities of the author. I like a SciFi story that's soft SciFi. I don't need the science to be "good" to enjoy it, and I'm not a scientist, so authors can sneak a lot by me so long as the basics that I know are adhered to. But if you are going to write hard SciFi, it has got to make sense to a person who knows enough about science and engineering to be dangerous as a reader.
The author - unnecessarily for the story - tries to shoehorn in a lot of "science," presumably to world-build. For most of the book, we're given descriptors of the ship - its surface is roughly the size of Switzerland, its biomes are made to resemble earth, mountains were carved by artists to include cool rock-face buildings, desert sand is made from crushed recycled glass from earth trash dumps - that could stand alone without a whole lot of real science explaination from the author.
[In fact, that bit about the sand is particularly interesting - the different colors of glass, once mixed, now have become heterogenous because they have different weights that have separated through the rocking of the ship.]
For most of the story, it is unclear what shape exactly the ship is or how it gets its gravity. After a particularly bad quake brought on by the cracking hull of the ship, the ship loses gravity momentarily. So I assumed it was artificial gravity. Cool. I can deal with that. But, later in the book, spin is mentioned as the source of gravity. Before I get into the ship's bizarre shape, I need to state the obvious: if a ship was hit or damaged sufficiently to stop the spin and thereby kill the gravity, gravity won't just come back a minute later on its own, with everything being just like normal. That's not how gravity works in a hard science environment.
It took until the last 15-20% of the book to understand what the ship is supposed to look like, and "knowing" now what it looks like doesn't really help me picture it, because - whoa man - is this ship design *bizarre.* In fact, it is an engineer's nightmare.
This spinning ship - something that everyone (I hate generalizations, but in this case I think it is fair) would default to being a ring that spins fast, with people living on the inside edge so as to take advantage of centripetal force - is in fact a cylinder. But not the way you might picture it with the people living on the curved surface. Not at all...
Before we got the skinny on the "cylinder" shape, we got lots of mentions of the "edge" of the ship, and of the "circumference" of the ship. People are living in a circle of space - the edge of the cylinder. The sky is another flat circle above your head. The walls are flat sides going straight up. So, the only usable space on the whole ship is a giant circle the size of Switzerland, leaving an equal circle empty (more on this later), and the massive walls holding the circles together also empty. I cannot image scientists or designers or financiers thinking up this arrangement, and all of its *massive* wasted space and resources, and think that's the way to go.
I get that writers want to make something new and unique to their canon, but this author should not be (literally) trying to invent the wheel here with their obvious lack of real scientific and engineering understanding.
Not only is all of that space wasted, but having what would basically amount to a giant flipping coin in space would need a massive amount of fuel to keep itself spinning in anything resembling a stable enough way to keep a regular gravity and a regular trajectory, especially assuming at the micro meteor hits it is sure to take.
The problem that the ship is facing is a cracked outer hull that is evidently unfixable by the engineers is the ship. The ship is slowly breaking apart. I think I know why that is happening, and it all has to do with the ship's original design.
The inner hull is made to look like sky for the majority of the inhabitants so that, generations in, people don't forget what the sky is and decide to stick to the ship. So far so good. But, the outer hull has windows. In order to give the engineers hope and something to look at? The outer hull has hundreds of stress points and seals that only a few people will ever know of, let alone see, with no justification for their existence.
Worse? The "sky" of the inner hull isn't a display. No. It is a series of *holes* punched into the inner hull, through which individual lights are shown to approximate stars. They are manually lit and moved by people. Also, the sun is evidently moved that way, too?
So the outer hull has literally millions of seams and *plexiglass* windows, and the inner hull has "irregular" and "jagged" holes punched into it for lights that could just be mounted on the underside. No wonder the ship is in trouble!
When they attempt to repair the ship, they "vacuum seal" the area around the hull. All the space around them is literally vacuum, not that they can expose it to vacuum to take the stress off, because the internal hull is full of holes! Why is this imagined/written this way? This ship would never exist this way.
Did you catch the manually moved sun thing? Well, when it is finally announced that the world is ending, all of a sudden the sun starts misbehaving. Originally I hypothesized that the micrometeors were computer programmers who created a virus so that the simulation of the day and night cycle only took an hour. (Just as logical as any "science" or plot points in this book.) In fact, the workers who moved the sun just gave up, and set it to "manual," but the manual mode wasn't working? It was just for the drama, but still, what a crazy, lazy answer.
More effects from the sun? All the weird cycles of the sun changed the weather patterns, because of "all the extra heat from the sun." Except - there's no reason why the ship would be getting heat from the sun lights. Those bulbs would have to have such resistance to create heat that they'd constantly be burning out. No. Those lights would be cold LCDs. They'd never effect the weather.
Next, let's talk about the people running the sky and doing the technical maintenance on the ship. It all started with trained engineers. Then they didn't want to do it anymore. So they took troublesome runaway slaves/indentured servants, and the mentally and/or criminally insane, and made them take care of the ship. Sounds reasonable?
Those people were kept in the outer hull, which was separated by a wall of deserts. Deserts that apparently took 2-3 days of driving to reach from the city. In an area the size of Switzerland, nowhere would be a 2 day drive away, let alone the "strip" of desert in place to keep people away from the illusion of the wall (for whatever reason).
Also: the prison doors had no locks so anyone can wander in or out at will, apparently. To the area that is not only a high security prison and asylum, but also where all the infrastructure in the entire ship is controlled. Seems right.
And to get from the "ground" to the sky? It is nice that it was acknowledged that the gravity would flip, but, the ladders people inexplicably have to use to get from the "up" elevator to the "down" elevator are zero G, even though they are along the side walls, which - and I could be wrong here - but would in all likelihood has gravity pushing outward, at depending if they were on the outer edge or the side one, potentially at a much faster or slower turn, so gravity might be way stronger.
All this adds up to: don't write a detailed, preportedly hard SciFi book when science isn't your strong suit.
But wait, there's more: my complaints aren't all about the bad science. There's also the bad character development.
Our first POV is an indentured servant (her original ancestors signed up themselves and all their heirs to be in perpetual bondage until the ship lands, and then those heirs will be free). Her mom disappeared. She's passed around as a slave. Her only moments of love are her using people. That's fine. But why is she taking care of this child?
The child is the daughter of the richest people on the ship. She's the nanny. I'd accept that she loves the kid. But she spends most of the book planning to abandon the kid. Then decides she doesn't want to. Instead, she wants to use the "special privileges" of the girl to potentially get her to an escape pod. She apparently neither has explicit love for the child, nor qualms about the baby having special privileges she could never dream of.
I could deal with these obtuse motivations if the story were in 1st person, as a lot of people are shockingly obtuse and unaware of their own motivations, but this is in third person, so part of the joy of reading this should be the narrator weaving out the implications of a person's place in the world, aspirations, qualms, and inner battles, etc... the author gives us none of this.
Worse, this book ends up being a "cops are good and mean well always" message from our other POV. He's such a Pollyanna, he has no idea some cops are corrupt or act poorly, or that power can do things like put unwanted people in gulags (i.e. the apparently maintenance staff).
He doesn't so much wrestle with his job in the end times, but marvles that life could be complicated. His only interesting characteristics are his struggling with his parents being criminals. He also comes from a formerly rich family, but that is apparently not important or interesting or sad to him.
And really, these struggles, that could have interesting sociological implications, are not only glossed over, but given to a Pollyanna cop.
And why a cop? All of his police actions are slow and completely nonsensical (all criminals go this court because they do, so let's go to this city and sit by a pool all day waiting for them to trip over our beach towels) and drag the pace of the book to a near standstill. It is boring. If you choose to glorify cops, at least make it exciting. If it isn't exciting, use literally anybody else, please. I'm so tired of excusing or glorifying cops in books. It's problematic.
But what bothered me most was probably the lazy writing on the part of the author.
-At least once per chapter the author used a version of the formula "it could have been a minute or an hour or a century for all I knew."
-The female POV was so "broken" that she "never kissed anyone for fun or love, only to use them" when there was a whole scene of her doing just that with a minor character. And once, when the cop asked her if he could do anything for her she broke down crying because apparently no one ever asked her that question in her whole life? The dude she was using did that at least once in the book. Ridiculously sloppy writing.
-The female POV was completely uneducated but owns books, but the college educated cop had never held a real book in his life?
-The female POV has no education or connections or inside info, but knows exactly where to head to get to the prison - out in the middle of the desert - and finds the exact spot unwittingly. She knows what cities will have no security cameras to track her when she's on the run. She knows exactly which accounts is her masters will have no tracking software when she uses his money.
-The male POV sees a car driving kilometers away during citywide panic, and somehow knows the woman and baby are in it, of all people, all fleeing from the end is the world.
-The female POV's mom was in the exact place they end up. She was dead, but one of the 12 people they talked to knew her intimately.
Basically, every plot point was stumbled on like our POVs were homing pigeons.
And just structurally, the whole book shifted from one character POV alternating, to a shared POV at the end, which was just terrible, confusing, and got rid of any doubt/intrigue between the two.
The book was readable for the first half, maybe, until the author started adding terrible science to justify the world-building, started messing with the POV format, leaned into the Deus ex machina so hard on every plot point, and got sloppy in every bit of dialogue in their mad rush to get this trash heap to the end in a clear "I just want to be done already" rush.
Thanks for letting me get all that madness out of my system.
If you're looking for a book to show you what not to do in writing, give it a read, but otherwise, allow my review to give you the best of the bad points, and spend your reading hours more wisely.
It's too bad. This book sounded like it had so much potential.
Look, this book is *something* different than your average run-of-the-mill read. That's not nothing.
But for all the things that make it special, I wouLook, this book is *something* different than your average run-of-the-mill read. That's not nothing.
But for all the things that make it special, I would not say it is good, and I certainly would not say I like it. But I respect a lot of what the author was trying to do with this book.
The author doesn't treat the reader as dumb. The author doesn't lean on old conventions. If Gideon was a puzzle box of a story (I'm still dubious about that, as it isn't solvable until they give you the key) this book makes the reader a caveman trying to understand differential calculus.
But it isn't just that math is hard, but the author lays down a magic system full of lore as well as functions, and then breaks all the rules at will and with no apparent reason. That I cannot respect. A lot of this book read very willy nilly for how much it thought itself important.
The biggest failing of this book was the fact that the author has apparently become uneditable. It took Stephen King at least a decade to get to that point. While Gideon was a darling, and probably made the publishing house a lot of money, Muir is no King. And honestly, I think King and every author out there needs a good editor to get the most potential from their work. King has gone too long in the tooth for me as well.
This book is incomprehensible for the first 75% of the many, many pages. Characters aren't the same (there's some accounting for that in the end, but not all of it), and the cute, gross voice and tone of the whole thing just goes off into crazy, misleading, unimportant, meandering detail. An editor could easily cut 30% of the book, and nothing would be missing, and nothing would be clarified. It would just be less, and less is almost always more, especially when it is the ravings of a crazy story gone long in the tooth.
(Lack of) Clarity is the big thing that jars me. The book starts off as if everything you read in Gideon happened differently. You have no clue as to why for 75% of the book. And then? Well? The payoff doesn't exactly pay off. The author wants you *in* the mystery, but there's practically no clues or foreshadowing, and while the book throws you between different timelines, it never gives you a clue as to why this book even exists. It never flashes to resolve. If I'd had a bit that from go, I probably would have enjoyed the book more from the beginning, which would have made where the book went worth it.
As it is, I hate-read the book because I wanted that payoff I was expecting from a book as highly rated as this one is.
This book is trying to be too clever for the abilities of the author, and it reads to me as if she was never told no, or told to explain herself.
Is it worth reading? No. As a writer, I'm glad I read it because it was an experience. I'm not saying I can do better. I can see what the author's done here and the possibilities it presented, and I'm sure it will be of value to me as I grow as a writer.
I'm honestly not sure if I've ever hated a book more in my entire life.
I kept with it for three reasons: it was audiobook, which makes anyth*Audiobook
I'm honestly not sure if I've ever hated a book more in my entire life.
I kept with it for three reasons: it was audiobook, which makes anything theoretically possible; it was short, though it felt absolutely interminable; and I've heard from many authors I respect that they either love Henry James, or even seek to emulate him...
This book was a slog. As a ~ghost~ story, it has two ghosts that were seen by one women, maybe by a girl, and possibly only one of them by the boy? I don't know. But the ghosts, described as evil and terrible, were never more than standing there, looking at people. That's it. They did nothing at all.
As a ghost ~story~, I found it lacking for almost any kind of plot. A friend said that when James was writing, he found it unseemly to show anything, so the actual events of the story were wholly glossed over, and never fully explained. I could not make a better summary.
And that prologue? A cast of characters well never see again talking about ghost stories. Eventually we have a man who says he has papers from the scariest ghost story ever. But he'll have to send for them. We're forced to wait for the post to come days later for the story to start. I felt those daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaays, let me tell you.
I've never read a book where BOTH it takes a sentence 20 words to say what 12 could, AND 40 sentences to say what 8 could.
I think reading it has brought me to this impression of James as a writer: he was born more than a century early for his true calling. He obviously loved language, but hated actual communication. He would have made for the world's greatest computer programmer....more
**spoiler alert** I don't generally write reviews - especially negative reviews - but this book, which has one of the most innovative and unique conce**spoiler alert** I don't generally write reviews - especially negative reviews - but this book, which has one of the most innovative and unique conceits I've ever come across, should have been so much more than it was.
The concept? Earth has had some drastic shift in its gravitational force, so matter is pulled sideways, turning the earth into a giant, unending cliff face.
It is so bizarre and brilliant and evocative - clutching on to the wall of the earth, trying not to plummet into a neverending abyss - I gave this book two stars, even though it might have been one of the most poorly executed books I've ever read.
The first third of this book is about a boy prince in a small village. It is all about how he is abused by his family. The author goes into a lot of detail about his physical, emotional, and verbal abuse.
Then he falls off the wall. He blacks out and wakes in a hospital in a somewhat different land - a land somewhat richer, wider, and more bellicose than his own.
This next third of the book is him struggling with physical rehabilitation, struggling to learn a foreign language, and being conscripted into an army and learning to be a kite soldier. But really, this section of the book is more graphic details about how he's physically, emotionally, and verbally abused - this time by the military.
Then he goes to war - which he has very little to do with - and his side loses, so he's sold into slavery, where he has to learn a new language (in detail), and spends most of his time behind physically, emotionally, and verbally abused - by his owner. This is maybe 2/3 of the final third of the book.
The final 1/3 of the final third of the book is like a different book completely.
Suddenly, a "wizard" shows up in a metal hot air balloon. He's apparently one of many (male) siblings created in a lab from the sperm of a single man and the eggs of a single woman who lived hundreds of years ago before gravity got messed up. They apparently never die. He apparently visited the prince's village when the prince was a baby and put machines in his head so that he could end up being/creating a machine to fix gravity?
Your guess is as good as mine.
Don't worry, he was physically, emotionally, and verbally abused by the "wizard."
He was also given a long-winded physics lecture about how the world-building functions irl. Seriously. He has no idea what's going on for something like 20 pages, and has to fake it so that the author can prove some physics flex and redeem his credentials as a hard science fiction author, even though this story has been a fantasy the whole time.
Did I mention that this "wizard" is at war with all his siblings, who, by the way, are all "lovers" of each other? Yep.
Well, he gets away. Then he decides to walk home... so the final 30 pages or so are him trying to walk home, even though he has no idea where home is, other than West and Up. Every 2 paragraphs or so are him in a different city, all of which are just like the others, getting drunk or doing nothing at all. The last 30 pages are the worst part of any book I've maybe ever read.
Oh, and he buys a slave, and then complains at least 5 times in the 10 pages she's in that he's really mad and confused as to why she cries all the time. He ends up deciding that she's too ugly to fuck (rape).
He's eleven.
In the last five pages he stumbles upon a boy he was a soldier with, and he has to rescue him from slavery, so he tried to buy him from his master, who won't sell him. He yells at the master enough than the man has a heart attack and dies.
They leave, though they have to dodge an assassin that the old man's heir sends after them. That's a *whole* paragraph. Not rushing here, or stuffing in unnecessary detail, let me assure you.
In the end, he's making his insipidly slow progress home when the wizard shows up again and tells him how much he's missed him.
End of book.
Yep.
That was the end.
****
Constantly in this book I forgot that gravity worked the way it did, because aside from the fact that he fell once and all the kite flying, it didn't play much of a role in the story. They kept goats - presumably because they do well on cliffs though that is never confirmed - but otherwise, it could have been anywhere. Sure they mentioned narrow "shelves" constantly, but that almost never constrained the narrative.
There were no rock climbers, no real mention of climbing traders (aside from people controlling ladders and charging tariffs), no real secondary culture, even though it was supposed to be hundreds of years after the gravity shift, which was itself supposed to be hundreds of years from now.
So many lost opportunities.
I'd never in a million years recommend that you read this book.
And yet, I have to give it two stars just for the crazy, unique conceit that made me pick up the book in the first place, and constantly forced me to not dnf it (even and especially in the last 30 pages), just in case it ended up living up to its potential.
It didn't.
This is probably the worst book I've read in years. But it is fun to describe for you.
Ultimately, that's why I had to review it. Just to redeem the time I spent reading it....more
**spoiler alert** Let me start off by saying that this book has an instance of what clearly seems like sexual assault, wrapped up in a gloss of romanc**spoiler alert** Let me start off by saying that this book has an instance of what clearly seems like sexual assault, wrapped up in a gloss of romance. Skip down to the “The Unforgivable” section for that information.
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Normally, I don’t rate and review any books that I read for fear of poisoning the memory well. Normally, I wouldn’t rate and review a romance novel in particular, because it isn’t a genre with which I have much experience, nor is it one I have much love for. But the title and the fact that it showed up on a list of good romance novels for men from a source I trust made me pick it up in the first place. I’ve been trying to get deeper into the Writing Community online, and so many writers there are romance authors – and romance is such a popular genre generally – that I wanted to familiarize myself with the genre as I work on my own writing...
I’m making an exception to rating and reviewing this book because there were some truly, deeply problematic things going on here, on top of the bad/schlocky writing, and the gross descriptions so prevalent in my mind’s limited knowledge of what’s bad in the romance genre. So, in the following review I’m going to justify my one star rating of this book by describing The Gross [broadly, the terribly stomach-turning descriptions, characters, and plot points in this book], The Bad [the technical problems – especially in the plot], and The Unforgivable [the glossed-over sexual assault].
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The Gross: I’m going to jump right in on the most obvious issue I have with (my own idea of) romance novels: the sex scenes. But this isn’t going to be what you think it is; I am not a prude. Nothing turns my stomach faster than euphemistic language about body parts. “Her sex” is bad enough. This book also talked about running his fingers along “her slit.” But the description that almost made me hurl was “her pink bits.” Nope. Vomit. Say vulva. There is nothing gross about that word. A good sex scene is hard to write, and you don’t need to go full-on erotica (though honestly, I think hardcore erotica is far more enjoyable to read, more real, and sexier than the euphemistic stuff), but why have a very descriptive scene only to censor over the words everybody is paying their good money to read? Pick a lane. Give me actual adult sexual content, or have everything fade to black. Please?
I looked at a bunch of the reviews of this book, astounded as I was that it was so highly rated. Where language was used as a fault, the line “my vagina senses are tingling” was often cited. Cited as gross and crass. Sorry, this was a line I found truly funny and endearing, used as it was by a female character who was grossed out by the villain of the story, a serial sexual predator. To me, it was a great Spiderman reference, and an honest thing for a woman to say. I’ve heard such comments from female friends before. Seeing this comment from the romance reading community really saddens me, because not liking an honest use of body parts, but championing “pink parts” is only fueling the female body shaming that is so prevalent in our society.
“Now if you’ll excuse us, we have a happy ever after to start” is the line that ends the bulk of the novel, before the epilogue. Once you’ve scraped the vomit out of your mouth, there’s also the ending of the epilogue, where after the main character “proposes” off-handedly on the couch, they have sex, and then he asks her if that was a yes, and she confirms it, the narration says, “after she said yes he did things that made her say it a whole bunch of times naked.” Then they fist-bumped. End of novel. Yeah… Did I mention they’d only known each other for a little more than six months at this point? Yea, I think that’s kind of fast…
But romance novels are stereotypically bad in this department according to me, who knows little to nothing about them. What other gross stuff happened in this book? Let’s start with the male lead, Mack, who winks at everything in a skirt. There are paragraphs where he literally winks at the woman he’s talking to three times within said paragraph. She’s always super charmed. This is supposed to be endearing behavior. Then there are a whole chapter where the sex the characters are having is compared to the national anthem – wanting to sing it, wanting to wave a flag, saluting this with that appendage. Barf barf barf.
I could go on, but this book isn’t for me, really. I’ll just close with a line I really did like from the book: “Smells like a camel exhibit in here.” This line is said by the bros when they come in to rescue Mack from his depression on losing the girl, and they find him in squalor. This book could broadly be described as smelling like a camel exhibit.
The Bad: The biggest plot error I found in this book happened near the end. A group of the team is running to meet the “inside guy” who will distribute the dossier on the villain to the press as they march in to his book launch. They get there to find their inside guy knocked out, and another security guy holding the dossiers they were literally carrying to the meeting (he knocked him out to take them away, even though he didn’t know what was in them – not to mention that they weren’t actually there in the first place). Terrible editing!
There are other things – characters switching their mind on something deeply held from paragraph to paragraph, a convoluted plan to expose the sexual predator at his own event, and thinking that’s the only way to take the guy down, when in real life a reporter will take information at any time, not just when tricked into it. But it is the real lack of understanding of the human character that really bugged me.
The secret that Mack is carrying with him is that his father was abusive and murdered somebody, and is in jail. Mack changed his name out of embarrassment, and lies and tells people his father is dead. He is made into the villain towards the end of the book, because he “lied” to Liv, his love interest, about this. They had known each other for some time longer than a week and shorter than a month. They were not dating (she was adamant about that), and had slept together just twice. But he was a liar now, because he had a “secret identity” and lied about his father. People just accepted that that was a terrible thing to do. No! If that’s your past, it is yours, and you don’t owe that information to anybody that early in a relationship. Sure, you need to own up to it before you talk marriage, but not before you’ve started dating. This doesn’t have anything to do with his character, but his father’s. Shaming him for “not being honest” and having him have to come to terms with it, and be open about it publically, is just *not* something that he has to do. Weird morality here. I know it was stretched to add drama, but I think it does a disservice to his great trauma in life.
I don’t believe a group of people should take matters into their own hands to investigate a person on sexual harassment on behalf of other women. I don’t think they need to use their friend’s van (literally an FBI-style surveillance van that nobody seems to think it is weird that a friend just has – a van that never plays an important role except that it doesn’t drive fast). I also don’t think a former cop is going to play along in a game of entrapment with a bunch of youngsters out for the thrill of taking down a celebrity chef. I especially don’t think people are going to trust the “inside guy” who is the security guard for the big bad. There is absolutely nothing that any characters do (aside from taping the bad guy) that moves the plot forward. It is all them falling into luck or information that others provide. Everything happens to them. This is just not the makings of a well-written book.
The characters were also so bland and uniform, with the exception of “The Russian” who was all caricature and comic relief, and whose lactose intolerance goes into play when they almost got caught because of the smell of his fart while they were hiding. Hilarious? No. So juvenile. And also, it was from vegan cheese, which the author says “is still cheese” and thus causes him the same problem as cheese. Speaking as a chef, that’s not how lactose intolerance works.
And, can I quickly gripe about the fact that the tech whiz who can break into a computer in 2 minutes, take out the contents of said computer in 30 seconds, breaks down all the banking info in an hour to tie the sexual predator to dozens of victims financially, also says he will be unable to edit a video (literally cut it off at all), in the hour they have during a drive, so by showing the big bad to be the big bad, they will also expose Mack’s terrible history and show him too to be a liar? Remember, this is literally exposing that his dad was a bad guy… again, not seeing the problem for Mack (as if that would kill his reputation)… but also: press stop on the tape? In an hour I, a complete novice, could learn to edit video enough to be able to stop a video when I wanted it to stop. The drama was unnecessary, and the mechanism to achieve it is so utterly stupid.
I also don’t love the fact that it takes a group of men to save women who were the victims of sexual assault. I also don’t love the message that women have to be a certain way when it comes to coming forward (even though they try to say otherwise, it was very moralistic against anybody being quiet). I very much don’t love the fact that they called the sexual predator – who honestly had unwanted, forced sexual relations with many women – a mere “sexual harasser.”
The Unforgiveable: Let’s talk about consent. The second time the main characters have sex, Liv expressly says ‘hey, I haven’t given you consent to have sex again.’ He then says that fingering her isn’t sex. Then proceeds to finger her. Then grabs her, carries her to a bed insider her own house, and then has sex with her. Without actually obtaining consent. This isn’t even an instance of tacit consent, because both parties are acting in a certain way and advancing the same act. She literally denied him consent by saying he didn’t have it, and that was never cleared up. Even if she never said no again, that’s pretty terrible for him to just assume.
Also: this happened immediately after he just shows up at her house. They had had sex once. She said she’d call after 3 days. He comes over after two, not calling specifically because he said that she’d have probably said no to his coming over. It was dark, she thought he was an intruder. She hit him with a shoe. She has to apologize to him for hitting him, and clean him up. Hey. In my mind, this dude is a psycho at this point. If you don’t buy into the 3 days before a call, fine. But then you pick up the phone. Don’t just show up at a near-stranger’s house. Don’t do it at night. Don’t sneak up the stairs. And don’t get mad when she’d mad because you acted like a psycho. And then most certainly, listen to her when she says that you don’t have consent to have sex with her again, and go on fingering her immediately thereafter.
This book is bad on a lot of levels, but the sexual assault scene tarted up to look romantic just made me seethe inside, especially because this whole book attempted to be a “bros don’t let bros sexually assault women” morality tale.
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