Three’s a crowd.

Publisher: Bantam Press (Random House)
Pages: 372
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-593-07021-5
First Published: 2012
Date Reviewed: 8th April 2014
Rating: 4.5/5

Ellen drowned and Hannah has never got over it. The event haunts her still, twenty years later. When she starts to see Ellen in places that reference their past together as friends, as well as at her work place, Hannah wonders if it’s time to go back for therapy. But there’s something nagging at her, and, illusion or not, she feels it’s time to finally discover what happened whilst she herself was in Chile.

In Her Shadow is Douglas’s beautifully written fourth book. It’s a lot slower in pace than the author’s previous work, The Secrets Between Us, but the pace is warranted and it gives Douglas a lot of time in which to explore the themes she chose to include. Likewise the plot is fairly predictable, and this appears to be intended so that you focus on the ‘right’ things.

The book sports an unreliable narrator who presents a fantastic opportunity for the reader to really delve into what’s going on. Hannah is quite obviously unreliable from the very start and with good reason – during the chapters where the adult Hannah looks back on her childhood you’re inevitably presented with a child’s view of life. Where Hannah says that Ellen is a drama queen, where she says that Ellen is too lucky, beyond a couple of choice quotations (that of course could be coloured by jealously themselves), it is apparent that Hannah isn’t seeing reality. Hannah, once good friends with a boy called Jago, becomes the third-wheel when she introduces Ellen to the ‘circle’. That she is, in a way, third wheel, is true, but she is very wrong about the friendship in general.

What is most interesting, as the reader reads on and learns just how wrong Hannah’s thoughts of Ellen are, is that it’s Hannah who is better off. Due to Hannah’s unreliability, the reader can see for themselves not only the truth, easily, but also explore the way jealously affects people, and the extent to which it can destroy a person. And it is exactly because Hannah is too young to know what’s she’s doing that she enables you to see what’s really going on. Because she does not understand what she sees, she ends up telling you the reality just as much as her erroneous thoughts. Indeed it’s intriguing to think that whilst the first-person generally means less knowledge of others, usage of the third-person in this book would ironically have led to less knowledge of Ellen.

And so Douglas shows us just how much perception can play in the construction of opinions. Of course we all know this, but by using a child and making what’s actually going on a horrendous abuse, the author really hones in on it. And it shows how children will latch on to what works for them – a father who hugs his child when their own parent doesn’t, means he must be a good person and that his daughter is lying. Hannah isn’t mature enough to recognise dangerous obsession and abuse; she sees what’s on the surface.

It’s not a spoiler to say that abuse and mental illness is at the heart of this novel. Throughout the reader is presented with the questions – is this man violent? Is this man interested in young girls? Is he mad? There is also Hannah’s mental stability to consider. Jealousy is of course an issue in itself but in her case it’s intertwined with anxiety, fear, and regret. Perhaps it makes Hannah feel better to confine her feelings of guilt to the same box as her jealousy – it’s easier to push bad memories away if you believe the person was awful.

Hannah also has an issue with identity – the boy who kissed her becomes her brother, Hannah isn’t happy in her career, and her parents, though supportive, are not the affectionate kind.

This is where the slow-pacing makes the most sense – in that at first you might find it slow without reason, but as the book continues you see why Douglas has opted to use it. There is just so much to consider. Douglas wants you to really understand Hannah, to see what she thinks and how she got it wrong, to see what her life is really like, and as the book progresses you realise that perhaps it’s not ‘just’ that Hannah was wrong about Ellen, maybe Hannah isn’t as good a person as you thought. Is she misguided, is she led by her lack of information? And what on earth will she do to make things right? There are no huge shocks in this book, no big climax. There isn’t supposed to be.

In Her Shadow is a book with a main character you may not completely like but who you can relate to; you will find yourself rooting for her to learn the truth. There are many injustices and misunderstandings here and it is not a simple case of age making someone wiser. The book does end relatively quickly, and one plot thread in particular is wrapped up in a couple of pages and not particularly satisfactorily, but there are no threads left hanging.

In Her Shadow is a wonderful study of personality, mentality, and its extremes. It may make you want to praise it to the hills or it may not – either way it’s likely you’ll find it difficult to put down.

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When one marriage leads to another.

Publisher: Tinder Press (Hachette)
Pages: 324
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-755-39436-4
First Published: 1st March 2013
Date Reviewed: 7th April 2014
Rating: 3/5

When the fire started burning down her polygamist community, Amaranth took her two daughters and escaped. Happy to marry and comfortable with her growing family, if uneasy about the ceremonies, Amaranth was glad to defend her people as women left and those living nearby took an interest in what was going on. But after her good friends leave and her husband draws their daughter too close, the first wife knows she and her daughters must leave, too.

Amity & Sorrow is the story of the plight of a mother who has become too used to her life. Interestingly, it is not so much about the plight of her daughters, which is the reason for some of the issues.

There is just something ‘off’ about the book. The cult is presented fairly well, but the writing style doesn’t fit the subject. Even though the reader knows the cult is bad, and has the details to imagine the situation, the literary style of writing distances you from it. The story may include the information, but it doesn’t truly try convince you of it, even if you are convinced.

It’s interesting to look at the choice the author made as to where the mother and daughters would end up. On the one hand you have them crashing the car into what many would see as a backwards place – a farm worked by only a couple of people; an ancient television set; a rarely-used petrol station; a lack of modern technology despite its day. What this choice means is that the family have little opportunity to see what life is like for the vast majority, to get used to the ‘new’, and to rehabilitate. This in turn means that the book lacks any big moments in the plot besides those in the flashbacks and at the end, and that whilst they escaped you might not feel as though the women will truly live life to the full, especially as Amaranth seems happy to remain in the first place they find.

But on the other hand, this lack of modernity, this lack of computers (other than one instance in a town) and so forth, mean that the family are eased into the world. It means that the changes in Amaranth especially (the girls will be discussed in due course) are slow and she has time to get back to life as it was when she was a member of society. You see more of her adjustment than you would if she’d found herself in Silicon Valley, or the like, where the change would have been immediate but only on the surface for its suddenness. Beginning in the middle of nowhere in a place more familiar in lifestyle, there is perhaps less of a chance she’ll return to the husband who brainwashed their daughter.

The sisters, Amaranth’s daughters, Amity and Sorrow, were born on their father’s land and therefore their reaction to their mother’s escape is, if not in words, that she has kidnapped them. Sorrow especially wants to return; she is the sister most brainwashed by her father, the cult’s leader. It is in Amity, the less extreme of the two, that the reader gets to see the most progression. Amity is more open to change, and whilst it may seem a little too fast a progression at times, Amity’s growth makes up for the little growth otherwise.

It is in Sorrow’s experience, specifically, that the story lies, and it’s also in her life that the potential dissatisfaction with the ending is to be found. She is not as developed a character as the others, in fact it could be said that she is a plot device; yet without her Riley wouldn’t have been able to explain her points. Sorrow was impregnated by her father, who had sex with her, having brainwashed her so much that she believed it was important and right that she and her father ‘make Jesus’. Whilst not commented on in the text itself, there is the obvious theme of consent running throughout the book. Incest itself is discussed.

And because it is this event that wakes Amaranth to the reality, finally, (if even then late in the day), the story continues on with Sorrow’s extremist beliefs taking what amounts to the biggest element of the book. Sorrow is always looking for a way back, because she doesn’t know any different and she is at an age where she won’t listen to her mother, especially not a mother who has left her, Sorrow’s, glorious father. The issue here is that whilst Sorrow’s extremism is believable, the extent to which she is, to all intents and purposes, encouraged, is not. Amaranth spends very little time with her daughters, even though, as the one person in the three who knows about the real world, she should have been helping them. Instead she starts to make a life for herself by herself.

A warning here to anyone who doesn’t want to read too many details: the ending of the book needs to be discussed because of what it effectively does, and will be in this paragraph. Amaranth, though obviously scared and still suffering from the manipulation and abuse under her husband, shows, in leaving the cult, that she still has her wits about her. She knows what is right and wrong both in regards to her own beliefs and the world at large, and she takes her daughters away from their father. Due to this escape, it is hard to believe that in the real world, such a woman would ultimately leave her daughter back at the cult’s land together with the father, after having tried and failed to convince the daughter to return with her to their new home. Maybe she would leave her temporarily while she went to the police for help, but leave her there for good? You can’t say that due to the possibility for danger, as the daughter is very unstable, it is best she stay away from Amaranth and Amity – the girl has had no chance to change and the handful of days during which there was space to influence her were not enough. At worst there are places she could be sent away for care. Perhaps Riley is showing us just how brainwashed and scared someone can become, but given everything that Amaranth does and thinks beforehand, the conclusion is not at all sufficient.

Where Amity & Sorrow gets it right is in the small things – the wondering about the changes to the world since Amaranth left it; the comparisons of dress and its relation to sexuality; the overall consideration of religious cults; to some extent, Amity. But with its poor choice of voice, underdeveloped characters, and the knowledge the reader will be left with when it’s over – the knowledge that what you’ve read is very wrong on a completely different level to the basic wrongness of the cult – one would be hard-pressed to recommend it for its story. You could try to come up with an explanation for the ending, but this is one book for which the ending is impossible to make right.

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Bizarre – but then that’s life.

Publisher: Windmill Books (Random House)
Pages: 242
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-099-55852-1
First Published: 2000
Date Reviewed: 17th February 2014
Rating: 4/5

Mona’s childhood came to an effective end when her father became ill. Holidays ceased to occur, her father stopped being interested in anything, and Mona coped by becoming a quitter. Successful and talented, she slowly quit everything she was good at before she became too successful or happy. Passionate about maths, the one interest she didn’t give up, she is given a teaching job despite a lack of formal qualifications, and comes to love the job, but her coping method isn’t quite usual, even amongst those who are also unusual.

An Invisible Sign Of My Own is a focused take on life and all its idiosyncrasies. Further than the superstition mentioned in the blurb, the book studies obsessive compulsiveness and depression. It is, at its heart, a look at two groups of people who are often one and the same – those who cope in unique ways, and those who live in ways that aren’t the norm.

The book is at once very positive and negative. It looks at idiosyncrasies and dark issues in the same bizarre way as Bender’s later work, The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake, whilst having a foundation of pure despair. This is not the book to read whilst you are upset yourself, indeed whilst the conclusion may show a sort of conquering of depression, the atmosphere of the story and characters are dark enough to be almost too easy to relate to if you’re having a bad day. This is of course as much a drawback as a triumph. Bender’s choice of idiosyncrasies may for the most part be unrealistic, as much as the word can be used when dealing with the subject, but if anything this helps the reader emphasise and/or understand more. By having that distance between reader and book – the distance of the distinct behaviours – the content is more welcoming, because anyone who has experienced depression, OCD, and/or the sort of tragedies in the book, is going to find it easier to see it from a fly-on-the-wall perspective. The pain may be the same, but the difference in delivery means that you’re not going to feel targeted and at the mercy of an author whose other characters dislike what they see in those who aren’t coping.

The story, in which no quotation marks are used, is somewhat predictable, but it is obvious that this is part of the idea. In order to understand Mona as the author wishes you too, you have to see where the book is headed. Mona is at once the main character and one of many. She may be the narrator but the story focuses on, for example, the plight of a child whose parent is dying of cancer, just as much. What Bender shows, via the subtext, is how important it is that society in general truly recognises that people cope with pain and despair in different ways and that when those ways do not fit the norm, or what is expected, these people are still looked after. An Invisible Sign Of My Own isn’t about leaving people to fend for themselves (so long as the issues are known), indeed it is very much the opposite, and due to that it forces you to look beyond appearances. In the case of the child of the parent with cancer you have a child that looks for cancer – indeed almost hopes for cancer – in everyone she meets due to her undisclosed feeling of detachment, whose idea of numbers in nature is morbid, naïve, and dangerous, and who, for her young age, suggests things such as suicide as though they were something to do when bored. This is a girl too young to really realise what she is saying whilst knowing exactly what is happening. Other children, albeit not faced with terminal illness, show how naïvety about subjects they don’t yet understand have disastrous consequences. And Bender lets the disaster happen, to shock, to teach, to illustrate just how important care and education are.

An Invisible Sign Of My Own is at once easy and difficult to read. It’s strangeness can at times bely its message, suggesting that Bender just wrote a lot of madness without anything in particular to say, or worse, that she thinks it is okay. It’s tough getting to the heart of it, and likely often times you’ll wonder what in the world you’re reading. It may be barmy but that’s the surface dressing; it’s worth reading to get a glimpse of lives that don’t tick boxes, and there is plenty relevance in its content to fit our lives in the non-fictional world, too.

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The One you don’t need to drop anything for – except the building you’ve been contracted to demolish, of course.

Publisher: Carina Press (Harlequin)
Pages: 177
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-426-89433-6
First Published: 10th September 2012
Date Reviewed: 20th June 2013
Rating: 5/5

With his brother running the family’s lodge and his home town, Whitford, being rife with gossip, Mitch prefers to stay away, making full use of the travel his demolition business requires. His meetings with women are strictly no-strings and he’s spent time with many of the women in Whitford, leaving before any attachment can form. Now back to help broken-legged Josh, the arrangement with new-girl Paige is the same as any other. Paige has a business too, and no intention of leaving her adoptive town, but that won’t necessarily make it easier to leave once the couple realise they’ve more than just sexual chemistry.

All He Ever Needed is the first book to deal with the boys in Maine, and the fourth book in the Kowalski series overall. The family aspect is different to the other three, given the lack of children and the fact the siblings don’t live near each other, but this is made up for somewhat by the sheer number of secondary characters that form the backdrop of Whitford. The character development is fantastic, each person in the lives of Mitch and Paige is detailed well enough that the reader can feel as though they live in the town themselves.

This is not a story of giving up what you like in order to be with another, indeed the no-strings arrangement itself is to save Mitch and Paige from the hassle of working out which elements of their lives to leave by the wayside. Both characters are ambitious in their own right – both have built their own businesses almost from scratch, and whilst there are no plans for any leaps financially, both like what they’ve made. Stacey never suggests that either should give up their dreams, beyond the odd understandable moment of wistfulness, and the reader is likely to be satisfied with the resolution at the end.

The chemistry is fine. The characters may not commend themselves to memory quite as much as, say, Sean and Emma (Sean and Emma having a particularly comic arrangement) but it works, and Stacey makes a strong enough case for their being together. The sex may be the initial reason for the match but there aren’t too many scenes with it included; the overall set-up of the family dominates the book, as is expected by now.

The book lacks the secondary romance that a few of the others have, concentrating on Mitch and Paige and taking the odd glance at other people just to keep the town dynamic. A few premises are created, which the reader will later find were the planning stages for future books.

The only blemish is, perhaps, the way the characters remain steadfast. This may sound the reverse of the above paragraph that lauds ambition, but it is the repetition rather than the fact that is more the issue. For example much of Paige’s decision to swear off men has been influenced by her flighty mother’s numerous going-after-him relationships, but once love enters the equation Paige’s continuing self-imposed rule seems a little redundant as you know what the ultimate conclusion will be. Nevertheless it is a far cry from ruining the book and is but, as said, a blemish.

All He Ever Needed may feel very different to the previous books, but with good reason. The change of setting was necessary for Stacey to introduce these cousins that were often mentioned in the previous trilogy, and the sentiment is still the same. These Kowalskis are certainly a different part of the family, but there is enough similarity to appeal to fans of Joe, Kevin, and Sean.

All He Ever Needed is all you ever wanted in the continuing saga of the Kowalski family.

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The quest to be her knight in shining (iron) armour.

Publisher: Mira Ink (Harlequin)
Pages: 352
Type: Fiction
Age: Young Adult
ISBN: 978-1-848-45060-8
First Published: 25th October 2011
Date Reviewed: 6th December 2013
Rating: 3.5/5

To be with Meghan, the new queen of the Iron Kingdom, Ash needs to become human. His traditional faery self will never stand being in the kingdom for long and now he has made an oath to Meghan he cannot break it. There must be a way to gain a soul, and together with Grimalkin, Puck, and the Big Bad Wolf, he is determined to discover the way. He might discover someone, too.

The Iron Knight is the fourth book in The Iron Fey series that is technically a spin-off as the series was satisfactorily completed by The Iron Queen. As a spin-off from a different viewpoint it will likely interest some fans and irritate others.

And it must be said that although the reader already knew that Ash wanted to find a way to be with Meghan, there is a lot in this book that could be considered clutching at straws. There is very much the sense that this book was written to keep the series going when it didn’t need to be, and there are some elements that bare questioning besides the basic reason d’etre.

This may be considered a spoiler but at the same time it must be discussed because of the way it changes everything you have read and believed previously: Kagawa has chosen to bring back a character who had died before the series begun. The reason is obvious – it creates angst, conflict – but it is undeniably unnecessary. And due to the events that occur, the emotions renewed, it ultimately means that the reader may feel short-changed by Ash and Meghan’s relationship; Kagawa, whether deliberately or not, makes a great case for Ash not being with Meghan. Furthering this the end of the book ensures that he pretty much has his cake and eats it – but not in a way that shows immortality, rather it confirms the supposed suggestion that Ash should not be with Meghan. It sets up a situation that no partner wishes their beloved was in, and means that the reader will likely close the book wondering how long Meghan would put up with it if she were a real person.

It must be said that if you’ve found Puck’s constant chatter and stupidity to be annoying previously, this book is not for you. In times of great anguish there is Puck being sarcastic, in times of death there is Puck being disrespectful, and so on. Puck is a constant source of ‘pulling you out’ of the story.

A great deal of the book is reigned by the above three points. But although they continue from beginning to end there comes a point where they are of no consequence.

Kagawa’s skill undeniably lies in the themes she creates, the studies and messages she proposes, no matter whether she follows through on them or not. (A previous example may be found in my discussion post about the use of technology in the series.) In The Iron Knight, this skill is shown in the author’s study of what it means to be human. This section of the book is fantastic – it is thought-provoking, heart-wrenching, and grounding, at the highest level. In order to gain the right to become human it is inevitable that Ash must contempt the meaning of mortality and humanity, indeed if he hadn’t the book wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on for the concepts the reader would want to bestow on Ash. This part of the book is lengthy, Kagawa details so much but not necessarily in the way you would expect. She ‘shows’ in every way, and explores the little things so easy to forget. It of course has the additional effect of making you feel sorry for what Ash will lose before you remember that you yourself will be going through the same, being what Ash wants to be; thus the book has an extra sobering effect. True to form, despite the extremely real impact this part of the book has on the reader, it is still fantastical. In fact this section is more magical and fairy-like than the rest of the book.

Once you’ve been through this section it is difficult not to feel that the rest has been worth it. It may not be in literal terms, but if this section was the swan song of the series then it would practically be a suite.

The ending does lessen the effect a bit. On one hand you could say that Ash’s eventual fate is a peace-offering, on the other hand it can be considered an opportunity wasted. Undoubtedly the overall atmosphere and tone of the series suits the ending Kagawa has written, but many readers affected by the study may feel as though an ending that suited the study would have had a profoundly moving conclusion.

In brief, The Iron Knight is unnecessary as a sequel, and the ‘revived’ character may dampen readers’ feelings in general. However as a study the book is excellent. This is a story that truly has something for everyone however each person must be willing to journey through that which they consider a trial to reach it, and it may not be considered enough of a reward to do so.

And as much as that may be a little off-putting it is irrefutably apt as it is exactly what the characters must do on their quest.

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