I met Tillie Cole at an author signing recently. She was adorable and so fun to talk to that I actually expected to like her book as much as I liked her. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. It Ain’t Me Babe is about Mae and Styx, who saw each other across a fence when they were kids for a fleeting moment, but never forgot each other. Mae grew up in a sadistic cult. The night she is supposed to marry the cult leader she makes a daring escape, is injured, and ends up passed out in the compound of a motorcycle club. Styx is the president of the club, his hobbies are drinking, killing, and using sign language to communicate so that only those closest to him know he suffers from a horrible speech impediment.
There are a lot of disturbing things happening in this book, from the explicitly brutal rape of an eight year old girl, to the constant use of derogatory slurs, and profanity that was so overused that it just seemed slightly ridiculous. As the mother of a nine year old girl, it’s possible that the child rape ruined the rest of the book for me. Still, my biggest problem was the lack of editing, which seems to be one of the pitfalls of the self publishing trend. To me, an unedited book tends to be too distracting to enjoy, since my OCD brain picks out every little detail that seems off, and there was quite a bit, from vocabulary, to dialog, to punctuation.
While I love a good romance, there just wasn’t anything for me to enjoy here. That said, her listing on amazon has almost 400 5-Star reviews, so maybe I’m wrong. Except I’m not. Ms. Cole herself is adorable, though.
Some quotes from the book, for your reading pleasure:
I searched for the wound… Her leg.
A huge, gaping gash, deep enough that her muscle was exposed, some pitted fuckin’ rag attempting to stop the flow.
It weren’t working for shit.
Checking her pulse, not able to find even a lick of movement, I could only surmise one thing: bitch had croaked.
“Fuck, girl. You got beer-flavored nipples or some shit? Why’re Prez and Doc going nuts for your skinny pale ass?”
Rolling my head back against the wall, I groaned. Pull yourself together, Styx. You’re the Prez of a fuckin’ gun-trading MC and you’re acting like a damn bitch pussy.
Fuck me, she was beyond beautiful. Even at eleven, I thought that shit true, but now she was way more than a goddamned ten.
