Book Review: Vow by Wendy Plump

This is a very difficult book for me to rate. On pure writing, it’s five stars or more; the lady can WRITE. Her prose is drop-dead gorgeous. The problem I had was that her pretty words didn’t overcome my frustration and disgust with the author and her husband. She comes across as very honest – she lays her sins out for all to see which is very admirable – but if she had been a character in a novel, I’d have HATED her. She’s oblivious. She’s a liar, a schemer, a cheater. I had no sympathy for her at all. The longer I read, the more frustrated I became with her awfulness. I don’t know why she even married her husband, who at the best of times she didn’t seem to like very much. They didn’t seem to be in love even at the beginning of their courtship. And when she was cheating on him, she came across as a selfish wench and he was blind to her indiscretions which made me think he was an idiot since she was very flagrant about her extramarital activity.

After three affairs, all of which she would claim were based on love, she discovers her husband has a mistress and an eight month old baby. They live a mile away from her. My empathy peaked for her when she was discussing the other woman and her child. No matter what she has done, it has to be brutal to discover your partner has a child with a person outside the marriage. But even then, she said she wanted to keep her husband, and I just felt so exasperated. WHY? He wasn’t a good husband and she wasn’t a good wife. It seemed to me a vacant union for years. Why hold on to this person who has hurt you so badly?

These questions are answered with her rather confounding and blasé pronouncement that she took her vows, she really only meant the “till death do us part” one. “Forsaking all others” was a dare.

Wendy Plump is a master at words, and I will read anything else she produces. That said, I stopped reading Vow at 74% because I didn’t like her, her husband, or her marriage which was marbled with lies and deceit. It made my skin crawl. It is so hard to respect someone who cheats, and I guess I, like her husband, just could not trust her. I couldn’t trust her to get me through the book feeling like her infidelity mattered, and was made beautiful.

I will try anything else she produces, but this one was just too… ugly.

Pre-Ordered Book Stack

I’ve pre-ordered a stack of books that look so yummy:

Carolina Girl by Virginia Kantra. I became a fan of Virginia Kantra with her Sea Witch series. Those were deeply emotional, just amazing books. I haven’t read the first in her Dare Island series, but I assume thee contemporaries have the same lush quality as the Sea Witch series.

 

 

 

A Woman Entangled by Cecilia Grant. I’ve bought all of Cecilia Grant’s books though I’ve not had a chance to read any of them yet. I feel strongly that I will like these books (once I sit down and read them) because Jane and Dabney at Dear Author have raved about them and my taste is similar to Dabney’s.

 

 

 

The Duchess Hunt by Jennifer Heymore. This one just sounded like a good story and it had pretty good reviews, so I’ll give it a whirl.

 

 

 

 

An English Bride in Scotland by Lynsay Sands I’ll just quote from the blurb: Annabel was about to take the veil to become a nun when her mother suddenly arrives at the Abbey to take her home… so that she can marry the Scottish laird who is betrothed to her runaway sister! So yes, I had to get it.

 

 

 

To Capture A Rake by Lori Brighton. This involves a gigolo as the hero, a premise that makes me a bit apprehensive. I enjoyed Escorted by Claire Kent though, so I might be able to enjoy this one too. It’s a challenge, but I’m up for it.

 

 

 

The Perks of Being A Beauty by Manda Collins. A snappy title and beautiful cover made me give this one a go.

Loving Destiny

This morning my attention was drawn to this post about the book Destiny by Sally Beauman. The post was written over three years ago, but people still find it and comment on it, and the comments are universally positive. More than positive. We are like nomads after a war, who find each other and create our own little clan. We are the Destiny Lovers (dum-dumm-dummmmmm!).

The book endures because it is powerful. The characters remain alive in my head. When I am in London or Paris, I look for them. I have been known to follow their footsteps to places mentioned in the book, to see with my own eyes how Beauman created art from that curving road, or that small church, or that house. It makes me feel closer to the story – and the story… wow. I’ve simply never read anything more powerful. The world is full of amazing literature, great works of art, and some of which I’ve read and enjoyed. But no book has ever made me feel as completely absorbed as Destiny.

I love how that 1987 book continues to touch people, to attract them to this blog. This, my friends, is the meaning of magic.

Quaint English Alleyways

I live in a neighbourhood that has a lot of alleyways. You can get to any point in town by sneaking through a twisting alleyway. Every time I walk through one, I think I’m in a Dickens novel.

Here are a few, which don’t seem very Dickensian to me in the daylight but at night…oh yeah. High drama.

Rebel Genius: Why I Love Anne Rice

I discovered Anne Rice through Belinda. It is a mesmerizing book, utterly convincing even though it is rather grotesque: it is the story of a 40 year old man in love with a sixteen year old girl. In interviews, Anne Rice said she actually wanted to make the girl fourteen, but her publishers vetoed that idea. The fact that I love this book, and hate the setup, is at the centre of why I love Anne Rice.

Anne Rice is a difficult woman. She has done some unpopular things, such as loudly taking offense to an unflattering Amazon review and recently set her legions of fans on a reader who used a copy of Pandora for a crafts project. These things make Anne Rice appear to be thin skinned, and maybe she is, but they also force me to recognize a certain difficulty in Anne Rice that I can’t help but admire. She causes a ruckus. She refuses to shut up when someone posts a review that she feels is misguided or stupid. If she were an artist, she’d be scrawling graffiti on overpasses and wearing t-shirts that say FUCK THE POLICE. She is a genuine rebel.

In the early to mid-2000s, Rice rediscovered the Catholicism that had so enraptured her in her youth. She became a hard-core Christian. Her website was almost unreadable for all the Jesus-love going on there. She handled her religion as she handled her books: it was in your face, and while there was deep thinking (she is a genuine intellectual), there was also her bedrock certainty that she was correct, and anything less than total agreement was…well, apostasy.

Her son, Christopher Rice, a talented author in his own right, was openly gay and people would ask her questions about how she handled that, considering the Catholic church’s stance on homosexuality. She would answer seriously that she would pray for her son, that she loved her son, but she could not question the authority of the church.

That broke my heart. In that transaction she illuminated an issue that probably many Christian families face. It seemed to me utterly wrong. Your child is your CHILD. And yet she believed that her child was sinning.

I would read her Tweets, hoping she might say something about one of her S&M novels or Lestat, only to be given a Psalm to contemplate or a bland warning not to sin.

Thankfully, that didn’t last long. Just as abruptly as she rediscovered her religion, she totally renounced Christianity. She wrote on her Facebook page that:

I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life.

Those who loved her and believed along with her probably felt some betrayal. She had probably seemed like such a major score for the Lord. But she was as firm in her anti-coviction as she had been in her conviction. But many of us breathed a sigh of relief. Does this mean we’ll get more sex novels? Maybe some more vampires? Whether or not her art would suffer for her beliefs, I was more excited just to get some Facebook updates from one of my favourite authors without worrying that I was going to have to quietly disagree with whatever religious message she had that day.

That whole period, which frankly seemed a bit bizarre from the outside, was valuable inasmuch as it demonstrated her integrity – she was determined to live by her own conscience and nobody else’s.

Another incident comes to mind – the details are barely remembered but I’ll try to get it right. A few years ago, JP Morgan foreclosed on her $3.6 million Rancho Mirage home. She was unapologetic about it and said she wouldn’t stop buying beautiful places to live because she liked beautiful places. It was natural to her to simply see the foreclosure as an inconvenience (at best) and not change her thoughts on the way she ought to live. She wanted what she wanted, and there was nothing that was going to get in her way.

I love that kind of thinking.

All her determination and refusal to accept anything less than what she wants goes into her novels, which are bursting with detail and vividness. They are rich and dense and filling as a flour-less chocolate torte. Only a personality that refused to compromise on her vision could have produced the Beauty books. When she wrote them, her publisher didn’t want to buy them. The publisher had no idea what to make of them. But Anne Rice didn’t tame them, soften them, or allow them to be written by committee in order to make them palpable to the masses. She went to a braver publisher, and sold them exactly as they were written. And they, like the author, are difficult. Not difficult to read but they challenge you. They ask you what you’re afraid of sexually, and why.

Anne Rice lives and writes at the far edge of the bell curve. By rights she should be a minor figure whose appeal is limited. But ironically the fact that she is so committed to her own vision – be it sex slavery or vampires – means she manages to attract huge swaths of readers. She is utterly delightful to read, whether fiction or a Facebook update. She is today’s only living rebel, a genuine feminist who refuses to be anything other than what she wants to be. And she’s a damn fine author. All writers should strive to be as independent-minded and as difficult.

Read & Review At Any Cost

Readers, bloggers and reviewers can now get an early copy of At Any Cost on NetGalley. You can also pre-order it at iBookstore.

And don’t forget, add it to your to-be-read list on Goodreads and add your reviews as soon as you’ve read it.

So many people have been following my progress as I’ve written the book, and I am so thankful for all the support. I’m so eager to hear your response to the book.

Read, enjoy, review!

Pre-Order At Any Cost on iTunes

Squeee! Just in time for the weekend, my first print book, At Any Cost, is now available to pre-order on iTunes! The release date in May 28. (Oh. Mah. Gawd. I’m all twitterpated from the excitement!)

My Experience With The NHS

For the past two years I’ve had a problem with my hip. I’ve managed the pain with ibuprofen and exercise and for the most part it’s been tolerable. However, over the last week I’ve been taking ibuprofen every two hours and it still wasn’t touching the pain. I decided the time had come to see a doctor. And that meant I’d have to interact with the NHS. (Note that my FI has private insurance, and I can use it once he has me on his policy, but I am not on the policy yet. And also note that we don’t have to be married for him to include me. In fact, he can include anyone he wants – friends, even, if he wanted to.)

My anti-socialized medicine stance has been well documented. I loathe the idea of the NHS. I hate that people consider medical care “free” when in fact it is damn expensive: everybody pays a huge amount in taxes to support this infrastructure that encourages people to abuse it. (National Insurance, a salary tax, pays for the NHS. That means working people pay for it and those who aren’t working get a free ride.)

The horror stories that we hear in the USA were enough to send chills down my spine: long waits, subpar care, and premature deaths are common. And in my own imagination, all this takes place in a grim, drafty Gothic hospital that is no doubt haunted by previous occupants.

I was very much dreading this trip to the doctor surgery.

I had been warned to expect a month’s wait for this visit since it wasn’t urgent. I called on Tuesday and was in by Thursday morning. So far so good, I guess. I sat down in the waiting room and got a text from my FI saying that he hoped I brought my Kindle, because it was gonna be a long wait. I pulled out my Kindle and only read half a page before the nurse called my name.

Okay. Nice.

I met with the doctor who examined me, asked questions, and then set me up for an x-ray, which would be in a nearby neighbourhood at my convenience (it is a “walk-in x-ray clinic” – something I’ve never heard of before). She gave me a prescription and sent me on my way. I was in and out in 10 minutes. It felt very strange to walk out of a doctor office without paying even a co-pay. In fact, the office wasn’t even set up to accept payments. It was downright bizarre.

The prescription cost £7.

My own experience with the NHS has been amazing. I hate to say that – my conservative creds are in danger here. I still have moral problems with it (slavery has been abolished for ten generations now, and I can’t fathom why it is okay to demand doctors give their labor on demand without appropriate compensation.) But I have to be honest and say it was probably the smoothest doctor visit of my life.

Maybe it is different when a patient needs a hip replacement or a liver transplant. But for this visit, the NHS was a total win.

A Fairytale: The Devil and The Seven Coins

The man returned from war. All his friends had died in the war, and all his family had died while waiting for him to return. The small house where they all lived was empty, and overgrown with moss and bugs. The man was completely alone and achingly sad. He had so much sadness inside him that he couldn’t decide who or what to mourn first.

One day the man went for a walk in the woods. It was very quiet and dim in the woods; even on the sunniest days, the thick canopy of trees blocked the sun, leaving a dappled, dancing light, fragrant, spongy ground, and almost total silence. It was here that the sadness of his life and the despairs of war would lift, briefly, and could find a state of being that was nearly calm. Because it was the only place he could go that didn’t bring back memories of his lost family or the war, he went to the woods often, spending many hours a day roaming the footpaths, thinking.

When he heard a little flurry of footsteps in the dried leaves on the ground, he was immediately on alert. He spun around and saw the devil. Though the devil appeared as a dapper middle-aged man, he knew that this was the devil. But he was not afraid. He stood very still and waited for the devil to state his business.

“You are alone,” the devil said.

The man nodded.

“You have nothing.”

The man nodded again.

“I can return your life to you,” he said. “I’ll give you a loving wife, children, a home and family and friends. I’ll give you more money than you can possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes.”

The man said nothing, so the devil continued.

“All you have to do is live for seven years on seven coins. Your pockets will be full of money but you can’t spend it. You will always have food, but you can’t spend any money on anything else. You may spend only seven coins.”

“And at the end of seven years,” the man said, “I’ll have all these things?”

The devil nodded gravely.

“What if I fail?”

The devil smiled. “After all you have been through, do you really believe you can fail?”

The man did not know what he was capable of anymore. He didn’t know if he could live for seven years on seven coins, but he knew that during the war, he’d lived in the most appalling conditions with the promise of nothing. And he had returned to nothing. At least this way, he reasoned, there was the possibility of something.

“But what if I fail?” he asked again. “What do you get?”

“Your soul, of course,” the devil replied.

The man took the offer.

The first year, he lived in the woods, and he saved all seven coins. He roamed the woods, eating meals the devil always provided, exactly as he said he would. The second year, the man left the woods and went into the city. He was smelly and unshaven, and most people looked at him strangely. He wandered the parks, and thought about the war. He thought about the wife the devil would provide for him, and the life of calm peace that would follow. The third year, he was a ragged figure. His hair had grown long, his body ached from walking and his spine had curved downward, so he walked with a pathetic hunch. The fourth and fifth years, he wandered to neighboring villages, his condition worsening every step. The sixth year, he returned to the city where he was such a ragged figure that nobody showed him even the smallest kindness. The seventh year, he returned where he started. Seven years after he met the devil, as he was walking through the woods, he heard the same flutter of footsteps and saw the devil.

“How much money have you spent?” the devil asked.

The man held out seven coins. “I’ve spent none.”

“Very good,” the devil smiled. Seeing that the man had kept up his part of the deal, the devil allowed him to bathe. The devil then cut his hair, and shaved his face, and even cut his fingernails and toenails.

“Now you may meet your wife,” the devil said.

The man was nervous. After dreaming of her for seven years, he was certain he would love her, but less certain that she would be as passionate about him. “What if she doesn’t like me?” he asked.

“She’ll like you,” the devil replied. Indeed the solider was now a very handsome man, tall and lean with a look of sad determination in his eyes.

The woman was lovely, plump blond perfection with kindness and compassion radiating from her like a corona. She loved him at first sight. She ran to his arms and kissed his parched lips and told him she loved him. She couldn’t live without him; she had waited seven long years to meet him and had been so afraid that he would not love her. He assured her he did love her. He could never not love her, not now, not when she had been all he was living for those long seven years.

She invited him home to meet her father so he could ask for her hand in marriage.

That evening he met her father and her six sisters. He was so handsome now that all the sisters loved him. All the sisters wanted to marry him! They ran their hands through his sweet-smelling hair, they sat on his lap, they kissed him and begged him to marry. “I only want to marry her,” he replied and looked to the girl he had been promised.

Heartbroken, one of the sisters threw herself out of a window that evening. The next morning, upon discovering her death, the five other sisters were so heartbroken, they too killed themselves.

The man was once again left alone. He had lost everything from another senseless act that made no sense to him.

He went into the woods to weep at his bitter fate. To his surprise the devil appeared beside him.

“Why?” he asked. “I did everything you asked! I gave you seven years of my life, I lived on seven coins for seven years.”

The devil smiled and shrugged. “The money was beside the point,” he said. “Instead of one soul, I’ve now got seven.”

At Any Cost Cover Reveal

I’m super excited about the sleek and sexy new cover for At Any Cost, my romantic suspense thriller featuring a Secret Service agent and his protectee. The release date is May 28. What do you think?