Tag: s

Skirt Day

  By

★★★½
“Those kids became my enemies.”

skirrtdayGuaranteed to put anyone off education as a career, this stars Gallic sex-kitten from the 80’s, Isabelle Adjani, now all middle-aged and playing French literature teacher Sonia Bergerac. whose career has devolved into hell – hence the line atop this review. She’s teaching a teenage class who, virtually without exception, clearly don’t want to be there, when she finds a gun in one of their bags. A struggle erupts, and when the dust settles, Sonia has the gun, a student is lying on the floor with a bullet-wound, and a siege situation has begun. On the outside, police negotiator Labouret (Podalydès) is having a bad day himself, trying to avoid a blood-bath, while his political masters try to spin news of the unexpected hostage crisis. But inside the theater, Sonia finds that it’s not just political power that grows from the barrel of a gun: she hasn’t ever had pupils pay such impeccable attention to her lessons before…

Made in 2009, this has, if anything become even more topical in the light of the refugee crisis which has become a hot-button issue in Europe of late. For this pulls few punches in its criticism of those who adopt politically-correct policies, simply to avoid trouble with minorities. The title refers to one of Sonia’s unusual demands, a day that women can wear skirts without the risk of harassment by political or religious conservatives, and writer-director Lilienfeld is also scathing in his criticism of immigrants who don’t integrate into their new homeland (a later reveal indicates it’s the latter aspect which is most important), as well as, it appears, yelling at local kids to get off his damn lawn. It is almost certainly the case that aspects of this will make more sense to a local audience; viewers outside France have to work backwards from what’s presented, to read Lilienfeld’s view of French society, rather than the other way around. However, he is also careful not to paint the pupils with a single brush: some are every bit as aggrieved with the status quo of appeasement as Sonia – and, arguably, with greater justification.

It’s not a film without its problems. The exterior scenes don’t have anything like the same impact, and the end feels almost like the director ran out of things to say, and opted for the simplest way to tie up all the loose ends, regardless of how abrupt it might seem. But it’s still genuinely thought-provoking – not something we find often in our genre here – and even if you don’t necessarily agree with everything Lilienfeld has to say, he deserves respect for saying it in a reasonable way. Adjani, who largely came out of retirement to make this, does a great job: the scenario sounds kinda silly, yet largely through her portrayal of a woman at the absolute end of her rope, it becomes plausible enough to work. Hard to imagine anything like this coming out of Hollywood, that’s for sure.

Dir: Jean-Paul Lilienfeld
Star: Isabelle Adjani, Denis Podalydès, Yann Ebonge, Sonia Amori
a.k.a. La Journée de la jupe

Super Cops

  By

★½
“Less a review, more of a warning.”

supercopsNot, in any way, to be confused with Jackie Chan/Michelle Yeoh vehicle Super Cop, this one barely has enough action heroine content to qualify here, despite the presence of both Khan and Oshima, who must have been in Taiwan for the weekend or something, and agreed to take on roles of a local cop and a Japanese Interpol agent respectively. Despite a feisty misunderstanding when they first meet, Khan mistaking Oshima for a thief, this is much more about brother and sister Siu-Tong and Chee-Loy, who head to the big city in search of their uncle. They end up getting work in a restaurant, except this brings them into conflict with the local gangsters – fortunately, the brother is kinda good at kicking ass, and this leads to ever-increasing waves of thugs descending on the eating establishment. Really, you wonder why anyone goes there to eat, since it seems barely five minutes goes by without the need to order replacement glass-topped tables.

Meanwhile, Khan and Oshima are seeking to trap heroine dealer Billy Chow, and the two plot strands, which have been so disparate I was seriously thinking this was a pair of films edited together on Godfrey Ho’s day off, finally converge. This happens at an open-air banquet celebrating Chow’s birthday, to which all the characters are somehow invited. Hey, look! More tables through, over and into which people can be hurled! The action is okay in quality – there’s some scampering around a train at the opening which looks genuinely dangerous – yet severely deficient in quantity. Instead, a lot of the running time consists of more or less blatant padding, such as the brother dressing up in drag to ensnare his boss at the restaurant. It’ll have you yearning for the subtle comedic stylings of Benny Hill.

There’s not much point in saying more: I wasted enough time watching this, and don’t feel you should have to waste time too, as I struggle toward the usual word count. Just know that this one is for Khan and Oshima completists only, and even they will find little here worthy of their attention. There’s certainly absolutely nothing super about it.

Dir: Chiang-Bang Mao
Star: Chia-Hui Liu, Ka-Kui Ho, Cynthia Khan, Yukari Ôshima
a.k.a. Huo tou da jiang jun

The Sleeping Partner, by Madeleine E.Robins

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆

sleepAt the age of 16, the intelligent and spirited daughter of a country baronet, Sarah Brereton –the girl who would become the Sarah Tolerance that series fans know and admire– fell deeply in love with her brother’s fencing instructor, and he with her. (For modern readers, it’s important to recognize that in that day, teens were expected to mature and become responsible early; 16-year-old girls might well be married. So this wasn’t some sort of sick, pedophilic situation; Sarah was a young woman with the passion and impetuousness of youth, but in her society she was a woman, not a child, and Charles Connell was a normal, decent male.) Because of the class difference and paternal opposition, though, this relationship didn’t lead to a happy engagement and marriage, but to a hasty flight to the Continent, with Sarah disgraced, disowned by her family, and consigned to permanent Fallen Woman status. (Fallen men in her culture didn’t suffer any similar opprobrium.)

Like many people in that pre-antibiotic era, Connell died young, leaving her in effect a widow without ever having technically been a wife. Now, some 12 years later (we’re up to April, 1811 in this volume), she’s living in London under an assumed name, to spare her family from embarrassment. To support herself without resorting to the usual expedient of prostitution (friendless and helpless women in that environment being, pretty much invariably, sexually exploited women), she’s created the profession of “agent of inquiry” –a private investigator, in our parlance– for herself, putting her unique abilities to use. She’s smart, inquisitive, brave, able to move in a range of social circles and to pass for a man when she needs to, well trained by Connell in the use of a sword, and not afraid to pack and use a pistol. (In this volume, the level of violence in her physical altercations is again dialed down to the one-star level; but her weapons do come out, and she can definitely defend herself with aplomb.)

Her latest client is a young married woman, who desperately wants Sarah to find and rescue the lady’s 16-year-old younger sister (daughter of a peer), who’s disappeared, leaving behind a note indicating that she’s eloped with an unnamed lover. Obviously, this case stirs some very deep-seated feelings for Sarah. It will get more personal and wrenching, rather than less, as she investigates. And series fans won’t be surprised that there’s more to the mystery than at first meets the eye.

Many of my general comments on the preceding two books of the series apply to this one as well. Robins’ prose style and characterizations are as fine as ever; not just Sarah, but all of the characters (good and bad) are thoroughly real people whom we like, pity or detest. (Some are old friends from the earlier books, some are newly met.) The period flavor is as rich and rewarding as ever. (As usual, a concluding “Note on History, Faux and Real” explains the historical background, and where the author’s slightly alternate world diverges from ours in a few details.) Considering the kind of case our heroine is investigating, and the fact that she lives in a cottage behind her (also Fallen –“the black ewe of her generation”) aunt’s high-class brothel and has a prostitute for a close friend, sexual content here is relatively minimal. We also get a glimpse here of Sarah in church, which helps to deepen her character. Like many people of that day –including Jane Austen herself, a writer whose influence Robins readily admits– she doesn’t wear her faith on her sleeve, but it’s there, to a lot greater extent than some of the more ostentatiously pious might give her credit for. (Then and now, many of the latter tend to forget that a Christian society has to be, first and foremost, a community of forgiveness.) And the volume isn’t simply treading water in terms of the development of the series; there’s significant growth and change in relationships here.

Why, then, only four stars, when the two previous books got five? For only one reason. Here, in the resolution/explanation of the skullduggery at the heart of events, there’s one major logical contradiction (which is impossible to explain without a spoiler). Robins papers it over without any real explanation (and it’s possible she actually didn’t recognize it herself!), but because it’s central to the resolution of the book, I had to reluctantly deduct a star for it. But it’s still a great read!

A couple of notes are relevant on the way words were used differently in 1811 than today. First, a clergyman here is said to be “Unitarian.” Today’s “Unitarians” are somewhat similar to the “Deists” of Sarah’s day (except that most today would be even more skeptical, and less willing to accept a label of Christian, or even of theistic). “Unitarians” in Sarah’s world, however (like the slightly later March family in Little Women) were what are sometimes called “Biblical Unitarians,” holding orthodox views on the atonement and the authority of Scripture, and definitely not Deists –in other words, much more conservative than the term suggests today. Second, the word “whore” is used in these books simply as the normal word for what we would today call a prostitute. Obviously, it was an inherently insulting term to apply to a woman who was NOT in that trade, but for those who were, it didn’t have any particularly insulting connotation; the girls themselves used it as a normal self-designation. No speaker today would use it, even to a woman who is a sex worker, without a deliberate intention to hurt and demean; but in 1811, there generally is no such intention (and usually no such effect).

This is the latest Sarah Tolerance book to date –published in 2011, seven years after the previous one. It isn’t clear whether Robins intends to continue the series past this point. If not, there are features to this volume that could make it a satisfactory conclusion to what will then be a trilogy. But if the author does ever intend, in the future, to visit Sarah’s London again, I and I’m sure a goodly number of other fans will eagerly come along for the ride!

Author: Madeleine E. Robins
Publisher: Plus One Press, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Sweet Revenge

  By

★★
“More sour than sweet.”

sweet-revengeAh, the eighties. A time of big guns and even bigger hair, going by this underwhelming entry, which sees Allen as feisty and well-lacquered reporter Jillian Grey, who gets too close to the white slaving operation run by Mr. Cicero (Landau). [Even though he operates out of the Philippines, he’s still kidnapping girls out of bars in Los Angeles, which seems logistically inefficient, shall we say] She is abducted and offered for sale, only to break out of the auction with a couple of other American girls – the non-Caucasians are, it appears, left to their own survival – pausing only to rescue international perfume smuggler, Boone (Shackelford). Believing Cicero has also kidnapped her daughter, Jillian convinces Boone to join her and the girls in an attack on the white slaver’s compound – but to get the necessary weapons for that, they’ll first have to help out his outlaw friend, Buddha.

Shudderingly uneven in tone, this would have worked much better if the makers had figured out whether they were going for Romancing the Stone style hi-jinks or New World Pictures exploitation, because what we get here doesn’t work as either. The problem with the former is Boone, who demonstrates the thin line between endearing and irritating, falling firmly on the latter side, as the result of Shackleford’s painful lack of charisma and acting talent. The latter, meanwhile, is defused by the almost complete lack of nudity; save one bit of skinny-dipping, the rest of the film would likely merit a PG these days. There’s lots of running around with automatic weapons, of course, and an energetic amount of things being blown up, plus you get Gershon in what may well be her first feature role, apparently knowing martial arts and making far more of an impression than Shackleford. You can certainly see why, almost 20 years later, she’s still working and he isn’t.

Indeed, the film as a whole would be significantly improved if Boone was removed entirely, and the film concentrated solely on Grey and her sidekicks, even if the whole subplot about the heroine’s daughter is half-baked at best. Just have that happy-go-lucky trio going up against Cicero and his gang of (fortunately, incapable of aiming) goons, and you could have something looking like a better-financed version of an Andy Sidaris film. Though admittedly, you would need some more gratuitous hot-tub action as well, before it would reach that level. Instead, you have something trying to be too many things and appealing to too many audiences, instead ending up as a film which is no better than “somewhat satisfactory” for just about anyone.

Dir: Mark Sobel
Star: Nancy Allen, Ted Shackelford, Gina Gershon, Martin Landau

Suffragette

  By

★★★
“Worthy, rather than worthwhile”

suffragetteI generally find that films based on historical events, which also feel the need to make up entirely fictional characters, occupy a bit of an awkward middle-ground, as if they want both to be documentary and drama. Such is the case here, with a somewhat clumsy combination of  people who actually existed, such as suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Davison, who was fatally injured in a protest at the 1913 Derby, with an entirely made-up heroine, Maud Watts (Mulligan). She works in an East End laundry, but become part of the burgeoning movement to win women the vote, after her trip to the House of Parliament, in support of a colleague testifying there, turns into Maud having to speak on behalf of her friend. As Maud’s commitment to the cause grows, she is jailed, her marriage breaks down and she loses custody of her son, but remains unwavering in her support. Indeed, she becomes more militant, alongside chemist Edith Ellyn (Bonham-Carter), with the group moving into more hardcore methods of protest.

I can’t argue with the performances here, which are, almost without exception, upper-tier stuff: Mulligan’s transition from laundry lady into crypto-terrorist is particularly well-handled, bringing the audience on the journey of enlightenment with her. The problems are more elsewhere. That this is based on history – and well-known history at that – means there is precisely zero tension here. We know they’re going to end up getting the vote – though it didn’t happen, on even the most limited terms, until after the Great War, years after the events depicted here. So scenes like the protest at Parliament, where David Lloyd-George announces there will be no change in the law, and Maud is arrested for the first time, have little or no impact. The script also borders on the misanthropic: between abusive husbands, an abusive boss and a police officer (Gleeson) devoted to bringing the movement down, there is literally not a sympathetic male character to be found here, except perhaps Edith’s husband, who is so bland and uninteresting, you’ll forget him entirely.

The film climaxes with the events of that Derby Day, and again, the impact is diluted since we know it’s going to end in Davison’s death (the question of how intentional or accidental it was remains unanswered; naturally, the film frames it as an act of heroic martyrdom). The movie ends in newsreel footage of the subsequent funeral, without giving Maud any particular closure, and she just happens to be nearby at the time, a fortunate observer to a pivotal moment in history. A few captions fill in the blanks, and everyone heads off for a nice cup of tea. For it’s all terribly British, mostly replacing righteous anger with polite indignation, and despite Mulligan and her crew acting their crinolines off, is only somewhat successful at capturing the passionate beliefs that I sense these women actually held.

Dir: Sarah Gavron
Star: Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Anne-Marie Duff

Sicario

  By

★★★½
“Not sponsored by the Mexican Tourist Board.”

sicarioThis has no small element of local resonance, kicking off in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler (albeit filmed in New Mexico!), where an FBI raid on a house uncovers dozens of bodies in the wall and a booby-trapped basement, all the results of the Mexican cartels encroaching on the United States. In the aftermath, lead agent Kate Macer (Blunt) is invited to join a group working to take down the mobsters responsible, in particular cartel boss Fausto Alarcón. To that end, she joins a force that heads across the border to Juarez, and extradite one of his associates, and then begins a plan to prod the gang’s leader in America, Manuel Diaz, into returning to Mexico for a meeting with Alarcón. Heading the force are CIA “advisor” Matt Graver (Brolin) and the even more shady Alejandro Gillick (del Toro), who has extremely personal reasons for wanting Alarcón brought to justice. Neither have quite the same attention to… procedural detail, shall we say, as Macer, and she soon discovers her new partners will go to absolutely any ends to achieve their goals.

I’m just glad we saw this before going on holiday to Rocky Point, because between this and the documentary Cartel Land (as well as Backyard), we’ve crossed Mexico off our travel plans for the foreseeable future. Hell, Tucson is now looking a bit dubious. For it doesn’t exactly paint a glowing picture of American’s southern ally: even the cops are as likely to be gangsters as anything, and brutal violence is a casual part of everyday life. It’s a setting where, the film seems to be saying, you have to be every bit as brutal if you’re going to go against the cartels, and Macer’s high belief in “justice” is portrayed as idealistic and innocent to the point of naivety, when contrasted with the unflinching savagery of the opposition. Indeed, for much of the second half, she’s little more than a place-holder, present solely so the CIA and their assets can continue to operate with official sanction. The film becomes much more about Graver and Gillick, and the final mission sees the heroine taken out of action entirely, when her presence is no longer needed.

However, up until then, Villeneuve delivers tension by the truckload, during the opening raid, and in particular during the extradition raid to Mexico, when potential threats lurk absolutely everywhere. It had us growing very familiar with the edge of our seats for a lengthy period, and I’m feeling a bit more optimistic about the upcoming Blade Runner sequel, which Villeneuve is also directing. I’d rather have seen more of a character arc from Macer, perhaps buying further into participating in the grey-area methods of her associates, instead of becoming a bench player in what I was expecting to be her own story, and that’s why it falls short of getting unqualified approval here. However, as a grim action-thriller that pulls no punches in its depiction of the (probably unwinnable) drug war, it checks of all the necessary boxes and achieves its goals.

Dir: Denis Villeneuve
Star: Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Daniel Kaluuya

The Screaming Staircase, by Jonathan Stroud

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆

screamingstaircaseThis opening installment of the author’s Lockwood and Company series is a brisk-paced tale with easily flowing prose that would be a quick read for most folks. It’s a novel that will appeal to fans of the supernatural, as well as of feisty heroines.

Technically, this could be called fantasy, since it’s set in an alternate England. Aside from the Problem and its ramifications, the setting is much like the real world. (I originally thought it might be supposed to be our world, decades into the future, but a reference to capital punishment existing in England at the time of a 50-year-old murder precluded that idea.) But the ramifications of the Problem are big. For half a century, ghostly apparitions have become VERY common in England (it’s not said whether that’s true in the rest of the world), and universally recognized as real.

The ghostly Visitors aren’t always malevolent; but they can be, and their touch can kill. Curfews keep people indoors at night, iron and other charms are commonly used to ward buildings and people, and agencies that deal with apparitions are respected and profitable. But though most agencies are run and supervised by adults, only some children gifted with the sensitivity can see, hear or sense ghosts directly; and they lose this sensitivity as they become adults. So the field operatives of these agencies are tweens and teens; well-paid for their work, but subject to lethal danger all the same. Lockwood and Co. is atypical in not having adult supervisors; the teen owner and his two associates (one of whom is our narrator, Lucy Carlyle) are on their own.

This brings us to one point that’s admittedly unrealistic. I don’t mean the idea that society would countenance putting minors in harm’s way. If that’s what it took to handle something like the Problem, politicians and pundits who now wax eloquent about protecting children and the merits of child labor laws would hesitate about one nanosecond (if that). But it’s not likely that they’d tolerate three teens living together on their own and running their own business. True, Lockwood’s an orphan. But he’d been “in care” at one time, and I can’t see them voluntarily letting him out of it. Lucy’s a runaway, though not without some reason; and the fact that her Talent made her the main breadwinner for her mother and sister would give the former a big incentive to want her back. (Her cavalier abandonment of her family is the one blot on her character for me; I can see leaving, but not just abandoning without a goodbye or any further thought or contact.) We don’t know where George’s parents are; they’re not even mentioned.

This is Stroud’s way of freeing his teen characters to act on their own without adult guidance, and let his teen readers vicariously fantasize about being free to have their own adventures and show the mettle they think ((sometimes with a basis!) that they have, even if adults don’t agree. It’s certainly a conceptual flaw in the premise, though. (Like Ilona Andrews in her Kate Daniels series, he also doesn’t deal with the massive revolutionary social and ideological implications that a cultural admission that the supernatural is real would have.) But I still found this a great read!

With its teen characters, this is marketed as a YA novel. In keeping with that, it has no sex, hardly any bad language, and no wallowing in ultra-grisly or gross violence (though the feeling of danger is very real). But it’s not in any sense a dumbed-down or pablum read; it’s a quality work, which can easily command the appreciation of adult readers. Stroud delivers a well-constructed plot, excellently drawn main characters whom you readily like (with the single caveat above) and root for, and a style that’s about as pitch-perfect as one could ask for. The tone is mostly serious, and the author is one of the best I’ve read at evoking a menacing Gothic atmosphere in the right places. (If you’re a buff of haunted house yarns, you owe it to yourself to “visit” Combe Carey Hall –vicariously, with the light on.)

But he also knows when to insert a light leavening of humor, and the interactions of his three teens are as real-seeming as they come. Lucy has a great narrative voice. I classified her as an action heroine based on how she handles herself here in life-threatening physical challenges that demand guts, speed, and agility, although the foes she’s combatting aren’t flesh-and-blood humans. Intensely romance-allergic readers can take note that there’s none of THAT here –though I could imagine Lucy and Lockwood as a couple in a few years. And Lockwood’s a smart, resourceful, capable hero, in the psychic detective mold.

Bottom line: this is good, clean supernatural fiction, as it’s meant to be! I think most readers of that genre will eat it up with a spoon.

Author: Jonathan Stroud
Publisher: Doubleday, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Son of the Morning, by Linda Howard

  By

Literary rating: ★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆

sonofthemorningTime travel! A smart, strong-inside heroine who learns to kick some butt! Secrets buried in long-lost documents! Medieval knights, and a castle in the Highlands! Action! Danger! Romance (sort of)! What more could one want for a great read? Well –quite a bit, actually, as my literary rating indicates. (To be fair, though, the book has genuine positive points, and my wife –we read it together as our “car book”– has stated that she’d give it four stars.)

The most obvious positive feature is main character Grace St. John. An intellectual, gentle, slightly overweight woman of about 30, who’s never been exposed to violence or significant hardship, in the first chapter she witnesses the sudden, brutal murders of both her husband and her brother, who are her only family and the center of her world. Framed for their killings and forced to flee for her life, with no warning and nothing but the clothes on her back and her laptop, she’s forced to learn to survive on the street, and off the grid. Driven by a determination to avenge her loved ones, take down the killer, and translate the documents that contain the mystery he’s willing to kill for, and needing to stay alive to do that, over time she believably transforms into a street-smart woman who can take care of herself, fight and use a gun if she has to. (And on a couple of occasions she does have to.) She’s a very well-drawn, admirable character that the reader readily likes and roots for.

All of the other major characters are also vivid and well-developed, including a really hateful villain. The plot is nicely constructed, in the main; some aspects are broadly predictable, but it also included a couple of major surprises I did not see coming. Howard writes well, for the most part; there are a lot of finely-turned phrases, touches of wry humor that balance the serious tone, and effective construction of scenes and evocation of atmosphere. (One reviewer complains about the time devoted to Grace’s paralyzing terror, right after the trauma of the killings, over crossing a street to use an ATM machine, and to her problem in finding a place to relieve herself; but to me this was a way of showing the situation she started from, in all its extreme difficulty, and gets us right inside of her head in the midst of it, with no sugarcoating.)

For me, though, the negatives were significant. A major one is the treatment of the Templar angle. Since the 1950s (beginning with a now-discredited hoax which any number of pundits and writers still pass on as fact) a pop-culture mythology has grown up around the Templars as guardians of Deep Dark Secrets that supposedly discredit Christianity. The classical version is that Christ didn’t die on the cross, but rather lived on to marry Mary Magdalene and sire the line that became the Merovingian royal family of France. Howard leaves out the Mary Magdalene-Merovingian scenario, but she creates her own wrinkles on the theme. Regardless of their beliefs about religion, readers with any grounding in serious historical or biblical studies will recognize this as the kind of thing that you might read in a supermarket tabloid. It’s not helped here by the fact that, even taking the book on its own terms, the Templars’ interpretation of the physical evidence that leads them to their supposed theological discoveries is so logically flawed and implausible as to be ludicrous. But this whole motif isn’t introduced until the penultimate chapter. (And on the other hand, Howard does take the existence of God seriously, and has a relatively high Christology; and Grace, in the same chapter, offers an excellent simple explanation of theodicy in terms of free will. So while many Christians will have problems with the book, it won’t please hardcore religion-phobic readers either.)

Howard’s writing background and credentials are rooted in the romance genre; and though the cover of this edition and the cover copy don’t clearly identify this book as a romance, it does embody some of the genre conventions. One of these is explicit sex –of course, not all romance novels feature this, but this one does, to a considerable degree. Except where crucial dialogue is embedded in these scenes, they can usually be skipped over by readers who don’t appreciate that sort of thing (so if you want detailed evaluation of those parts, you’re reading the wrong review!). But the problematic elements here go deeper; for a “romance” genre novelist, Howard can be singularly tone-deaf to what makes for real romance.

It’s no spoiler that Grace and medieval Templar knight Black Niall will be a couple, since the cover copy tells us so. Grace and Niall, during the course of the book, experience a cross-time psychological connection (at first, just in dreams) that allows them, at times, to experience each other’s voice and presence. This is never explained, and doesn’t really come across as credible. But it focuses strictly on intense sexual attraction; there’s very little if any element of getting to know each other as anything but sex objects. That continues when they meet in person. Given that Grace is portrayed as a person who takes sex seriously and has never been with any man but her husband, this comes across, as even she recognizes, as out of character. It isn’t really plausible either, and rather than making the relationship come across as a “love for all time,” as the cover copy bills it, it seems more like a heat period. I didn’t feel any kind of personal emotional connection between hero and heroine for most of the book. And while I respect Grace for her past scruples, the juxtaposition with Niall’s background of womanizing, and the unspoken implication that this somehow verifies his virility and desirability as a partner, tends IMO to reinforce a really unhealthy double standard for males and females.

A couple more quibbles are worth mentioning. Howard has done some historical research, shown by the array of apparently accurate factoids she can muster here and there. But it’s apparent that her research consisted of mining for factual snippets in areas where she realizes that she’s ignorant. She does not have a general warp-and-woof knowledge of the medieval world, and that allows her to make a few noticeable (to me, at least) errors. I was also frustrated with the plot device of a character being secretive without any good reason to be, simply to artificially exacerbate the conflict. So on balance, I did like the book; but it wasn’t the four or five-star read it could have been with different handling.

Note: There is some bad language here, including a number of f-words, which come mostly from the villain(s); but even some of the good characters cuss some.

Author: Linda Howard
Publisher: Pocket Books, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Spy

  By

★★★★
“Girls with guns and buns?”

spyIf not perhaps your prototypical action heroine, this is a thoroughly amusing and very entertaining feature, managing both to spoof and pay homage to the entire genre of its title. Susan Cooper (McCarthy) is really good at her job, which is being a support analyst for the CIA’s top agent, Bradley Fine (Law). He is gunned down while on the trail of a stolen nuclear warhead, by the evil Rayna Boyanov (Byrne), who also knows the identity of all the agency’s other field agents. Susan, who has been behind a desk her whole career, so is unknown to the outside world, convinces her boss she should go after Rayna, much to the disgust of Fine’s colleague, Rick Ford (Statham). What is supposed to be an “observe and report” mission becomes more, after Cooper saves Boyanov’s line and becomes part of her inner circle, giving her a chance to find the location of the missing bomb, yet also putting Susan in grave danger.

I’ve seen McCarthy before, most notably enduring (thanks, Chris!) Bridesmaids, where she seemed a bit of a one-note actress: “It’s funny, ‘cos I’m big.” I was expecting much the same here, with not much more than two hours of fat jokes. However, on the basis of this, I was wrong; just as Peter Dinklage is an actor who happens to be short, so it appears McCarthy is an actress who happens to be large. For instance, at one point, she has to pretend to be a bodyguard assigned to take care of Rayna by her father. She nails it, spitting out lines such as, “I’m gong to reach through your fucking body and rip out your back like a fucking werewolf” [yeah, it’s gleefully R-rated for language] with such a remarkable degree of badass commitment, that she is entirely convincing as such. Hell, there’s even a brawl in a kitchen, whee Cooper goes up against an assassin sent after Boyanov, which is remarkably solid [and makes sense, because it was set up earlier, when we see a video of Cooper during her training where she showed similar skills]. Implausible? Well, not if you’ve ever seen Sammo Hung in action.

Beyond McCarthy, what particularly elevates this is a slew of excellent supporting performances. While Byrne chews the scenery to very good effect as a villainess, it’s Statham and Hart who steal just about every scene they are in. Statham is, more or less, parodying every other role he has had, spinning utterly implausible tall tales of his derring-do, e.g. “I’m immune to 179 different types of poison. I know because I ingested them all at once when I was deep undercover in an underground poison-ingesting crime ring.” Hart, we have known and loved for some time due to her BBC show, Miranda, and she plays much the same delightfully klutzy, self-effacing persona here, to the extent we suspect she probably wrote her own dialogue. This trio form a solid foundation, off which McCarthy can bounce her personas, to excellent effect, and I’m now rather more confident in Feig’s upcoming reboot of Ghostbusters. The female cast there did initially seem more than a tad stunty, but on the basis of this, he and McCarthy would seem to have a decent shot at pulling it off. A very pleasant surprise, on a number of levels.

Dir: Paul Feig
Star: Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Jason Statham, Miranda Hart

The Strong One, by David Wittlinger

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

Full disclosure at the outset: David Wittlinger and I are Goodreads friends, and in a couple of Goodreads groups together. Despite some off-putting aspects of the book description, I was impressed by his attitude toward his writing, as expressed in his comments in these groups; so I wound up accepting his offer of a free e-review copy. (As yet, there is no print edition.)

strongoneProtagonist Brianna is a young ex-stripper who’s now the live-in girlfriend of tough thug Wade, the shady bouncer at the mob-connected Cleveland strip club where she used to work. Brianna sees herself as pretty worthless, and doesn’t expect to be loved; but she doesn’t know that Wade is secretly video-recording their sexual encounters, and that he’s done this to other girls as well. When she accidentally makes that discovery and he finds out she knows, he chokes her half to death, and locks up her car keys so she can’t escape when he’s called away temporarily. But he’s underestimated her resourcefulness, and she manages to escape with her car, his laptop (and its sexual contents), a bag of his cash and his revolver, which she’s grabbed for her protection though she’s never held a gun before. Since he wants that computer back badly, and has a vengeful disposition and a long reach, she’s in for a dangerous time.

Readers definitely need to be warned here about sexual content and bad language. We get a look into the ugly world of the porn industry, with some graphic descriptions of porn videos. We also have a couple of explicit sex scenes outside the porn context. Brianna’s had a terrible upbringing that no child and teen should have to endure (but which huge numbers DO endure, in real life!), and her sexual attitudes are wildly misguided, at several levels, IMO –and I don’t think the author would disagree. (Related to her view of herself as worthless, for instance, she likes being spanked, having her hair pulled and being called a “slut” during sexual activity.) That kind of thing doesn’t make for pleasant reading. She also has, as another character observes, “a mouth like a sailor;” she uses the f-word a lot (as, she points out, everyone else in her world does as well) with some other bad language and occasional religious profanity, and we hear the same speaking style from Wade and his low-life associates..

None of this material, though, is gratuitous. The author has immersed us in Brianna’s world to provide a realistic picture of what it’s like –not to promote it, but to give us the motivation to change it. The immersion is graphic; more graphic than I’d have made it, but that doesn’t mean the author’s decision was wrong. He’s created Brianna as a fully-fleshed, realistic person and given her the freedom to be who she is, warts and all, as he shares with us the story of her personal growth, which is the core theme of this novel. (And like any baby learning to walk, she’s going to have to crawl first.) For me, this book earned its stars in the degree of artistic and moral integrity the author showed in handling difficult material; in the quality of his character development, in the strength of his message of growth and empowerment, and in the degree of complex emotional engagement with the characters that he was able to evoke. (A day after reading it, I was still sorting my emotions out!)

Wittlinger writes with a great deal of craftsmanship –not just for a first novelist, but for any novelist. His plot is tight and linear, ably constructed. Violent action doesn’t occupy relatively much of the text (though when it happens, it’s gripping, intense, and nail-biting); the stress is more on character development and human relationship. (I considered this a plus.) Nonetheless, there’s a high degree of suspense throughout; and the author’s particularly adept in heightning it by cliffhanger chapter divisions and changes of viewpoint character between chapters. His level of description and detail is, as Goldilocks might have said, “just right,” and he makes adroit use of symbolism in places. The western Pennsylvania Appalachian setting is brought to life very nicely (I passed through the region once, so have some personal acquaintance with it). Both Brianna and Brandon are living, breathing characters you like in spite of their faults. And the ending is one that’s particularly powerful, evocative and gut-wrenching –but no spoilers here!

Like many self-published novels, this one was only proofread by the author before being published (and most authors will agree that it’s hard to effectively proofread your own work). I promised him I’d proofread this one, and was able to identify a number of minor typos and editorial issues, which will be corrected later. But these didn’t interfere with my understanding of the text, or ability to read it easily.

The Strong One is the first novel of a projected series. I’m now invested in Brianna, and interested in watching her future growth!

Note: As mentioned above, readers should be STRONGLY warned about explicit sexual content and bad language issues. (The book earned its stars in spite of, not because of, these factors.)

Author: David Wittlinger
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, currently only as an e-book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.