Militantly Romantic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
militantlyromantic) wrote2020-08-23 09:26 pm
militantlyromantic) wrote2020-08-23 09:26 pm
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Review: Thrown, by Colette Auclair
This book and I were not friends.
Auclair's a solid writer, but she's not a strong one. And there's no question in my mind that she's far more interested in girls riding horses than anything else. To be clear: that's fine. Write books about women in competitive dressage, please. That sounds like it could be a good story. But here it feels like she realized, business-wise, that romance is both a more open market to enter and tends to sell better than just about anything else. It's not that I don't admire practicality in creators, because we've all got to eat and most writers either have a second stream of income (e.g., a day job or a partner or both).
However, here, the romance feels like it's a distraction from the real story. Amanda, the female protag, is a dressage professional who, after losing a life-long friend to a riding accident, and witnessing said accident, has PTSD and cannot force herself to compete. To make ends meet she's training students, which is how she ends up taking a contract with a TV star out in Aspen for the summer, to teach his two daughters.
Amanda, for all that she's healing from trauma, has her shit together, and immediately finds ways of dealing with the fact that the two girls are both suffering emotional neglect and spoiled little terrors, all at once. Meanwhile, she's got plans to get herself back into the ring and to get to the Olympics.
All of this? Engaging.
Our problem lies with Grady. Grady is a) one of those charming people who knows they're charming, which I find almost always hints at sociopathy, b) a hot mess of contradictions, and c) has red flags all over the damn place.
Grady's background is that he was raised by a single mother who is some type of East Coast socialite, it's not super clear what her deal is, but she's self-serving in a dangerous way. Despite knowing this, he still allows her around his children, which, kind of just the tip of the iceberg of his questionable parenting when I think about it.
In any case, Grady married Anne, and had the two girls with her. Their marriage was falling apart over him not being home much due to work, when she was in a car accident and died. Instead of, oh, I dunno, taking some time off and making sure his kids were okay, say, he hires a string of nannies, who, shocker, the girls run off.
But so far, all of this is crap that can be overcome in a romance. This is the genre of reforming rakes, it's cool.
The red flags start to go off the first time Grady gets irrationally angry at Amanda for one of the girls tripping and falling. She rightly points out that there were no undue dangers in what they were doing. Later, he apologizes, but the whole thing just sits badly.
Turns out it should, because later in the book, upon finding out that Amanda shared a part of her past with a guy she was having a fling with earlier in the summer, but not with him or any of his confidantes, he uses the fact that she at one point after her friend's death took too many pills and had to go to the hospital for overnight observation against her. And not just a little bit. Oh no. He accuses her of being mentally unstable, of being unsafe to be around his children--whom she has been safely teaching to ride for over two months at this point--and has her move off the Aspen property and into a hotel because she can't be trusted around his family.
Not that there's a single way in the world to apologize for that behavior, but the first thing he does when he realizes how phenomenally fucked up it was (note: about a week and a half later, while he's away on a press junket,) is to send her flowers with the note, "I'm sorry if I hurt you." If? IF, motherfucker?
By the end of this book, the only reason I had any reservations about her leaving this psycho was because then the girls would have been without a stable parental figure. That's, uh, not how you want to feel at the end of a romance novel.
Auclair's a solid writer, but she's not a strong one. And there's no question in my mind that she's far more interested in girls riding horses than anything else. To be clear: that's fine. Write books about women in competitive dressage, please. That sounds like it could be a good story. But here it feels like she realized, business-wise, that romance is both a more open market to enter and tends to sell better than just about anything else. It's not that I don't admire practicality in creators, because we've all got to eat and most writers either have a second stream of income (e.g., a day job or a partner or both).
However, here, the romance feels like it's a distraction from the real story. Amanda, the female protag, is a dressage professional who, after losing a life-long friend to a riding accident, and witnessing said accident, has PTSD and cannot force herself to compete. To make ends meet she's training students, which is how she ends up taking a contract with a TV star out in Aspen for the summer, to teach his two daughters.
Amanda, for all that she's healing from trauma, has her shit together, and immediately finds ways of dealing with the fact that the two girls are both suffering emotional neglect and spoiled little terrors, all at once. Meanwhile, she's got plans to get herself back into the ring and to get to the Olympics.
All of this? Engaging.
Our problem lies with Grady. Grady is a) one of those charming people who knows they're charming, which I find almost always hints at sociopathy, b) a hot mess of contradictions, and c) has red flags all over the damn place.
Grady's background is that he was raised by a single mother who is some type of East Coast socialite, it's not super clear what her deal is, but she's self-serving in a dangerous way. Despite knowing this, he still allows her around his children, which, kind of just the tip of the iceberg of his questionable parenting when I think about it.
In any case, Grady married Anne, and had the two girls with her. Their marriage was falling apart over him not being home much due to work, when she was in a car accident and died. Instead of, oh, I dunno, taking some time off and making sure his kids were okay, say, he hires a string of nannies, who, shocker, the girls run off.
But so far, all of this is crap that can be overcome in a romance. This is the genre of reforming rakes, it's cool.
The red flags start to go off the first time Grady gets irrationally angry at Amanda for one of the girls tripping and falling. She rightly points out that there were no undue dangers in what they were doing. Later, he apologizes, but the whole thing just sits badly.
Turns out it should, because later in the book, upon finding out that Amanda shared a part of her past with a guy she was having a fling with earlier in the summer, but not with him or any of his confidantes, he uses the fact that she at one point after her friend's death took too many pills and had to go to the hospital for overnight observation against her. And not just a little bit. Oh no. He accuses her of being mentally unstable, of being unsafe to be around his children--whom she has been safely teaching to ride for over two months at this point--and has her move off the Aspen property and into a hotel because she can't be trusted around his family.
Not that there's a single way in the world to apologize for that behavior, but the first thing he does when he realizes how phenomenally fucked up it was (note: about a week and a half later, while he's away on a press junket,) is to send her flowers with the note, "I'm sorry if I hurt you." If? IF, motherfucker?
By the end of this book, the only reason I had any reservations about her leaving this psycho was because then the girls would have been without a stable parental figure. That's, uh, not how you want to feel at the end of a romance novel.