Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆
I’ve come to the conclusion I prefer bad films to bad books. A bad film can be appreciated and offer entertainment in unexpected ways. I’ve rarely found that to be the case with literature, which just… lies there, dully. If a movie sucks, then you can at least allow it to drift into the background, while you check your phone, play with the cat, or do household chores. A bad book, on the other hand, requires every bit as much effort as a good one: the return on that investment is just a great deal less.
Not that Girl Fights Back is truly bad. There are few books that are the publishing equivalent, say, of Plan 9 From Outer Space. But it is strikingly mediocre, with a heroine whose name might as well be “Mary Sue” rather than “Emily Kane”, since she’s so idealized. I mean, five minutes in the company of this teenage girl, and a hardened professional espionage agent melts like butter: “He must have glimpsed in her eyes just then the immense wellspring of compassion and forgiveness that made its home there, and sighed as his shoulders visibly sagged, perhaps under the weight of the knowledge that she could indeed forgive him.” Damn. That’s a sentence and a half. He’s not the only one: Everybody Loves Emily, it appears, whether it’s her school-friends or lethal ex-CIA operatives.
She is the daughter of George Kane, a man with a murky past, who works as a chauffeur/bodyguard for a former government executive, who also appears to have been involved in his share of previous shenanigans. To cut a long story short, their past comes back to haunt them: the estate where they live is attacked one night, by a group seeking information about a research project into “super soldiers” with which both George and his employer were involved. The attackers think Emily is part of it; fortunately, she is out in the woods that evening, and is able to return later and rescue her father, who clues her in to the situation. So, what does she do, after overcoming the shock of all these traumatic events, to foil those hunting her?
If you guessed, “Return to school, as if nothing had happened,” you are the author of this book.
Seriously. I know she’s a martial arts wizard, and there’s such a thing as “hiding in plain sight.” Still, this ranks as among the most baffling of decisions I can remember a character making. She could have hidden out with the rest of her family, or gone on the run independently. Nope. Back to class and hanging out at the dojo it is. There’s also the striking way in which a major character is suddenly disposed of: “____ died that night, having never regained consciousness.” Well, that’s a shocker, especially since they had been quite chatty over the preceding hours.
The martial arts heavy nature of the action is also somewhat problematic, since this kind of things is hard to describe: reading about kung fu, tends to be a bit like reading about juggling. It’s nowhere near as exciting as seeing it, unless the writer is particularly good. Antoine is not, and we get sentences such as, “Emily slid one hand along her arm, until it became a ridge-hand strike to the side of her headgear, and in the ensuing confusion jabbed to the center of her chest.” Not exactly painting a thrilling word-picture, is it?
The book does possess a philosophical tone, which occasionally hits on some nuggets of interest. I particularly liked this one, on gender differences: “Boys fight for dominance, she thought, which means that at some level they understand they must preserve their defeated enemy. Otherwise dominance will not have been achieved. But girls fight to injure or eradicate. They have no use for a defeated enemy, which makes them much more malevolent than boys, she concluded.” Overall, however, that’s the exception rather than the rule, and I reached the end with absolutely no interest in seeing what happened next.
Author: Jacques Antoine
Publisher: Amaterasu Press, available through Amazon, both as an e-book and a paperback.
Book 1 of 7 in the Emily Kane Adventure series.