Finding yourself and love after abuse.
Plot: Dr. Turner is on the cusp of tenure after years of working to rebuild her professional reputation from a smear campaign by an abusive ex when she finds out that her department is getting evaluated by consultants. You know what that means. It’s job cuts time! Her friends suggest this may be an opportune time to start challenging herself by stepping out of her comfort zone. You know what that means. Sex with a stranger. It always means sex with a stranger. Only Naya’s a terrible flirt and an even worse drunk so she mostly just hangs out with Jake, the cool dude she met at the bar before throwing up on him and then finding out he’s part of the consulting team evaluating her department. Oh and her ex is back. Shenanigans ensue.
So I obviously took my infamous approach to plot teasing, which is to be a bit flippant, and you might expect that based on the title and the cover and the actual description for the book, that you’re getting a fairly fun, light read. You are not. I am deeply fortunate in that I’ve never been the victim of intimate partner violence, and I was still at defcon 1 damn near from the first chapter to the last page. There’s this really sweet, almost too sweet even romance in the centre of what might as well be a five alarm fire with an actively abusive, powerful asshole lingering in the shadows waiting to strike. We’re talking physical abuse, emotional abuse, manipulation, gas lighting, revenge porn, and possible stalking (and yes some of it is on the page).
Not to get dramatic, but this book being billed as “Chick lit” and having a cutesy cover is an inditement of our society as a whole. This is a very, very serious story about a victim of abuse and the incredible effort, constant external forces, and extreme patience by others that it can require to pull someone out of the metal prison their abuser puts them in, even after they’re gone. There are no doubt thousands if not hundreds of thousands of readers that would resonate with Naya’s struggle and the story who will never see it because they only read Serious Fiction and this is only Fiction For Girls. There are likewise already dozens of negative reviews on Goodreads saying that this book was not for them because it made them so intensely anxious that they couldn’t enjoy the love story they were actually here to read about. Because when women write stories, those stories are only apparently marketable as Chick Lit (which is of course in and of itself a derogatory term – this isn’t Real Literature, it’s, you know, LITERATURE FOR CHICKS who are by their very nature too simple and emotional to appreciate Real Literature).
Setting all that aside though – let’s talk about the story. The characterization is very superficial. The only thing we know about Naya other than her demographics and that she has 2 friends is that she is a habitual liar. She lies all the time to everyone and often for no reason. This is a common trait in victims of domestic violence, but also isn’t at all clear that it is a trait she gained after getting involved with an abuser. This makes her an unbelievably frustrating heroine to root for, and of course you are supposed to, when she is constantly the cause of her own unhappiness.
Jake is even more two dimensional. He’s got a snobby ex wife and a pair of friends so you know he’s not a psycho, but everything he does and says in the book are like an instructional on what to say to who and when, and less like a person. There is one brief moment when he deviates from complete perfection, caused of course by Naya explosively self-sabotaging, and that scene just frankly didn’t read true to the character at all.
The most two dimensional is Naya’s ex. He is the definition of a mustashe-twirling villain. He’s not one type of abuser. He’s all of them, and it’s because he hates women and wants to flex his power over every woman, but especially strong, intelligent women. We don’t even get to see what Naya saw in him in the first place, which makes it very difficult to feel sympathetic towards her making a professionally sketchy decision to date this guy in the first place, and then separating him from her friends because her friends could tell from the jump that he sucked and she doesn’t like being told she made a bad call. And then doing the same thing with Jake, but that time it’s okay because he’s not a monster I guess.
What I’m getting at is that the plot – a not always easily sympathetic but generally decent victim of abuse trying to get out from under the thumb of an abuser with immense power over their lives and the many ways in which victims make themselves smaller rather than risk an out that could harm them worse is a very important one, and it is depicted here with a lot of care but also some unflinching honesty. If you love books for the plot, this story is a good one. If you’re the sort of reader that enjoys deep characterization, you will likely walk away disappointed.
That said, this was Williams’ first novel – and it’s brave and well done. I will definitely put another one of her books in my TBR.