Abigail Barnette's Blog, page 25

A Message From The Trout Nation Emergency Foot Update System

Remember last week when I was like, “Yeah, whoo! Back to our regularly scheduled blogging! Also, I’m about to churn out a ton of kick-ass content because look at this amazing way I’ve scheduled my time! I laugh in the face of weekly deadlines! I’m sooooo organized!” and all that nonsense that was clearly going to jinx me?

Look at this stupid bullshit:

Pictured: BULLSHIT.

Wednesday afternoon, I made the mistake of taking a shower without, idk, limbering up first or calibrating my balance or something. I turned around to reach for the conditioner and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor with my left foot beneath me, folded in half.

Lengthwise.

Like a taco.

If you follow me on social media, you’ve already heard about this, probably including that description of my injuries. I spent the rest of the week and most of the weekend out of my mind on painkillers. Which you also know if you follow me on social media because nobody really supervised my phone time.

They didn’t supervise my movie or Kindle times, either, resulting in me purchasing two non-fiction books about Victorian surgery and watching It because I thought it was The Goonies.

Which you also know if you follow me on social media.

Right now, things happening in my foot are apparently not great. The last I saw of it before the cast went on was, swear to god, rectangular swelling. I didn’t know you could swell in a rectangle. It looks like someone stuck a Jenga block in there. That shape, that size. Shit is broken in there. I’m trying not to think about it because all I can imagine is vinyl purse full of Jell-O and loose, broken pottery shards. I’m seeing an orthopedic surgeon later this week.

So, you know, it’s safe to say that this week is a little up-in-the-air at the blog. I’m still on those heavy meds and sleeping most of the time. I’m going to try like hell to get The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp up this week, but I’m really not pushing myself. Please be patient with me, as I have never had an injury this serious before and I don’t really know how to take care of myself because I’m a disaster of a person.

The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp: Prologue

It’s here! The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp is ready to be consumed by your eager eyes! I believe I may have promised the prologue and chapter one this week, but it’s just the prologue. I got a lot of balls in the air right now. If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, please refer to this post in which I explain what I’m trying to do with this experiment. Otherwise, you’re gonna wonder what the hell is happening here.

Prologue

The hologram hung between Fiona Trasket and her brother, her sins glowing in high definition, luminous color. She saw the reverse image glinting in his frosty blue eyes but held his gaze; Blayde might be able to intimidate his business rivals, but she’d known him her entire life. The bully he was. The golden child. The spoiled prince.

“This doesn’t prove anything.” She didn’t even glance at the footage playing in the air above her brother’s desk.

He smirked. “It proves you were at La Mer. That you went inside. That you came out arm-in-arm with one of them.”

Fiona’s skin prickled. “‘One of them.’ Now, you’re starting to sound like father.”

“Someone has to.” Blayde hit a button on his desk console and the image dispersed. He gestured to the chair Fiona had declined earlier. “Please. Sit. It’s in your interest.”

Swallowing against her rising fury, she sat, her back ramrod straight. Yes, she had been at La Mer, the premier merfolk bordello. But she hadn’t been there to fuck. Larkin had needed her help.

“I could release this to the press,” Blayde went on. “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt Larkin. A little controversy before her album drops? Her label would owe me. But the conclusions people would jump to…”

“They would infer that the daughter of the most staunchly anti-Fae Migration families in American politics and industry is having mer orgies with her pixie best friend.” Fiona rolled her eyes. “I’m not a child, Blayde.”

“Then, you also understand that such an act of indiscretion wouldn’t just hurt the family but the very business you depend on to maintain your lifestyle.” He splayed his fingers and lightly tapped the underside of his wedding band on the edge of his desk. “And mine.”

“And Julia’s senate campaign,” Fiona added. “Just tell me what you want.”

“I’d like you to stop socializing with freaks, for a start, Flicka.”

Her hackles raised further at her childhood nickname. “They’re not freaks. You’re small-minded.”

“I look at the future without sentimentality,” he corrected her. “Trasket Holdings remains heavily invested in fossil fuels and the deadline, set by the people you so passionately defend, the people who seek to destroy the human way of life, is fast approaching.”

“How charitable of you to call them people.” Fiona had little pity for her brother’s dilemma. The Global-Astral Energy Compact had been accepted by the Federated Nations twenty years before. All of their lives, Fiona and her brother had listened to their father’s ranting. He’d believed the deadline would never arrive or, at least, never be enforced. Blayde had never doubted their father’s word; now, as the year 2060 drew to a close, time had run out. The pact that had saved the Earth from the human race—and the human race from itself—would be law.

“You’re going to be ruined, you know,” she went on, taunting him. “You had so much time—”

Blayde stood so quickly, Fiona jumped back. Her brother had never committed violence toward her, but he looked like a man capable of murder now. “Five years! It’s been five years since the bastard died. And do you think he’d done anything to prepare the company for the changes to come?”

“No. I think he planned to live forever and challenge the compact again.” Though her tone was sarcastic, she had no doubt that her father had planned to do just that. He’d talked about another run for senate even after the doctors had given him less than a year.

“I wish he had. But he didn’t. And now, we stand on the precipice of failure. Poverty. Ruination—”

“Calm down.” Fiona rolled her eyes at her brother’s dramatics. He did like to perform, as their father had. “There are hundreds of clean energy sources now. It was your idea to cling to the past. You’ll take a hit, getting into the game this late, but all isn’t lost.”

“I had no idea you were so skilled at running a company.” Blayde’s eyes narrowed. “The point is to not take a hit at all. We have a new investor. And with him came some information we can act upon. It concerns the Chiron Corporation.”

“Of course it does.” It wasn’t enough that a rival company had overtaken Trasket Holdings. That it had been a centaur’s business that had overtaken them, that’s what stung her brother. Blayde’s hatred of the astrals in general had narrowed in focus to the CEO of the Chiron Corporation in particular.

Fiona had grown tired of her brother’s theatrics. “Just tell me what you want.”

“You’re the least publicly visible member of our family. You’ve never met the bastard. And I’m sure one of your ridiculous fae friends can disguise you where it counts.”

“If you’re suggesting I seduce him—”

“Oh, no, no. Never. Ask you to sully your pure, virginal image?” Blayde chuckled at that. “A position has opened in Chiron’s executive branch. An internship working for the man himself.”

The laugh she let out startled her brother. It was so satisfying. “Let me go back to college, then. I’m sure the position will still be open when I re-graduate and have the connections necessary to secure a not-at-all competitive internship.”

Blayde regained his composure too quickly. “You’ve already secured it.”

Fiona hesitated, her footing suddenly unsure. “What do you mean?”

“Well, Flicka Starr, a lovely young woman who recently graduated from Vassar with a B.A. in Earth Science and Sustainable Technologies, has secured the internship.” Blayde punched another button on his desk console, bringing up a holomessage between them. With a flick of his wrist, the image turned so Fiona could read it. The Chiron Corporation logo, a stylized centaur brandishing a bow and arrow, twisted and shimmered in the upper right corner.

“Flicka?” she snarled. “Really?”

“Don’t pout. You loved horses,” he snickered. “Which will serve you well in your new position.”

Fiona shook her head. “I’m not doing this. It’s not just ridiculous but unethical in the extreme and illegal. You might be willing to sell your soul for this company, but I’m not!”

“Then I’m afraid I’ll have to hand this video over to the tabloids,” Blayde said with a deep sigh of feigned disappointment.

He brought up the video again, and a lump formed in Fiona’s throat. Larkin.

It wasn’t the pixie’s fault that she’d been at that club. She’d developed a human tendency toward addiction. The sickness had infected the previously impervious species when they had only been trying to help their struggling neighbors on the mortal plane. Somehow, integrating into human society had caused the pixies to take on human traits, not all of them good.

And now, because of the machinations of a man she’d never met, Larkin stood to lose the career and life she’d built for herself on the mortal plane.

Fiona couldn’t let that happen. “What, exactly, do you expect me to do?”

Knowing he had won, Blayde didn’t gloat. “Chiron Corporation is developing some type of new fuel for ocean-going cargo ships. If we can get the jump on him, we might be able to save the company and secure the family legacy.”

“So, I’m a spy.” After years of trying to avoid any entanglement with her family’s shady, grasping corporate schemes, they’d finally gotten her.

“Exactly.” Blayde spread his hands as if to ask why she had a problem with that. “It’s terribly easy. You simply show up, insinuate yourself into as many important meetings as you can, take note of who is coming and going from the office, and report that information back to me.”

It wasn’t the ease or simplicity of the task that concerned her. “And if I’m caught? And charged?”

“Trasket Holdings has a legal defense fund, of course.” Those words were carefully chosen; her brother hadn’t assured her that the legal defense money would be available to her. His concern would always be to protect the company first.

Do it for Larkin. The pixie’s reputation hung by a thread and she didn’t even know it. Fiona could either cut the fragile strand or reinforce it. She took a deep breath. “I want that footage destroyed. And I want proof that it’s gone.”

“You have my word,” Blayde promised. “After I get what I need from you.”

Fiona nodded and rose with a bitter smile. “That’s what family is for, after all. Getting what you need and damn the consequences.”

He smirked and shrugged, and Fiona turned for the door. She’d made it only a few steps before her brother spoke again.

“And Fiona? Don’t discount your seduction notion. I wouldn’t turn down personal information I could leverage against him. I might even owe you a favor in return.”

Her spine straightened further, a steel rod down her back. She lifted her chin and marched out of his office, into the prison of her new double life.

How I set up my bullet journal and manage my time now!

I recently started a new way of scheduling my time so that stuff can get done as opposed to sitting around in varying stages of doneness. A few people have asked me productivity-related questions lately so I thought, hell, why not make a video about it while I set up my bullet journal?

 

(This video just posted this morning, so please give it a little time for Closed Captions to process.)

I’ve been super productive over the last three or so weeks that I’ve been using this method. Fingers crossed that it keeps working. If you try this, let me know how it goes!

The Big Damn Angel Rewatch S01E06 “Sense and Sensitivity”

In every generation, there is a chosen one. No, shit. Wrong show. What am I supposed to do, now? I guess I’ll just have to recap every episode Angel with an eye to the following themes:

Angel is still a dick.
Cordelia is smarter than everyone.
Sex is still evil.
Sunlight isn’t nearly as dangerous as it was in Sunnydale…
…but its danger is certainly inconsistent.
Vampire/demon rules aren’t consistent with the Buffyverse.
Xenophobia and cultural stereotypes abound.
Women are disposable and unrealistic.
Vampires still @#$%ing breathe.
Some of this stuff is still homophobic as fuck.
Blondes, blondes everywhere
Smoking is still evil.
A lot of this shit is really misogynistic.
Some of this stuff is ableist as fuck.
Some of this shit is still racist as fuck.
Fatphobia, staple of the Whedonverse.
Mental illness stigma redux

The Big Damn Angel Damsel In Distress Counter: 8

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.  Even though I might forget that you mentioned it.

WARNING: Just like with the Buffy recaps, I’ve seen (most) of this series already, so I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So a blanket spoiler warning is in effect.

Welcome back, everyone! It’s been…Oh, look at that. It’s been nine months since my last Buffyverse recap. I could have made a whole person in that time. BUT THANK GOD I DID NOT.

If you only come here for the Buffy recaps and you’re like, oh no, she gave up, don’t worry! I did not. I will finish this entire recap, even when season five of Angel goes off the fucking rails. I just had to take a break because E.L. James put a new book out that needed to be dealt with immediately.

So, back to Los Angeles in the ’00s.

We open on a guy with a bag. He’s fleeing from a woman who flying karate kicks him into his open car door. The woman pursuing him is Kate, and she’s pissed off that this dude didn’t come down to the station voluntarily for questioning. I think we need to make note of the fact that she doesn’t just kick the guy once. She does it twice and slams him onto the trunk of his car.

Kate: “You have the right to remain silent. But I wouldn’t recommend it.”

I’m not sure that’s how you’re supposed to do being a police officer. I mean. I guess it kind of is, but it’s not the legal way you’re supposed to do being a police officer.

Back at the station, Kate tells him to look at pictures of various criminal doings. Apparently, this guy was seen with suspected bad guys the same day a county supervisor got murdered. Some of the guys from the station watch the interrogation through a two-way mirror and step in when Kate loses her shit and attacks the guy again. She apologizes to one of the other detectives, who says that the suspect they’re looking for is never going to be found. He says something along the lines of they don’t know anyone who can find him or something, etc. and then we cut to Angel because it’s his show.

Angel is fighting a tentacle monster, fending it off until Doyle and Cordelia arrive with an enchanted sword. After making the heroic kill, Angel gives them the sword and some instructions:

Angel: “Make sure to cut off all the limbs and both heads this time and remember to bury the parts seperately. I don’t want this thing coming back to life again.”

Then he just heads back to the office while Cordelia rages about how rude it was for Angel to leave without saying thank you for their help. She goes on and on while behind her a tentacle reanimates and seizes Doyle, choking him while she continues her tirade and we cut to the opening titles.

This cold open is probably the strongest argument a show has ever made against itself. The quick flip from cop shit that we’ve seen in a million different shows and movies to something fresh and funny and snappy highlights just how freaking weak the crime drama portions of the show are. And I’m gonna just come out and say it: Kate sucks the life out of this whole operation.

It’s not the actress’s fault. It’s the writing. Whoever developed her character was more in love with the idea of the static tough-as-nails lady cop than they were in love with the genre she goes with. Either that or they can’t figure out how to make her fit in both genres at the same time (they should have picked up pretty much any Urban Fantasy novel published around this time). Every scene that’s just Kate feels like it’s part of an entirely different show. The Whedon voice isn’t there. All the dialogue could have been pulled from any mid-’00s CBS Law & Order rip-off job. They might as well have just thrown up a title card that said, “Kate has bad guy problems now let’s get to the monsters.”

After the opening credits, Cordelia and Doyle return to the office covered in slime. And Cordelia is still pretty pissed. When Angel tries to tell her to do something, she cuts him off and says she won’t do anything until he asks them how it went with the tentacle monster.

Cordelia: “You do remember leaving us in a sewer with a giant calamari?”

Angel: “Yeah. And you’re both here. So, I assume it went okay, right?”

Cordelia: “Yeah, it went okay. Of course it went okay. Okay? That’s not the point.”

Angel: “So there is a point?”

Cordelia: “Being that it is possible to brood and show a little interest in the feelings of others.”

As Doyle points out…this is coming from Cordelia. You know things have gotten bad when Cordelia has a point about your selfishness and rudeness. Kate bursts in during the scolding and they go into his office. She shows him the picture of “Little Tony” and says outright, no shit, “He’s a bad guy.” Like, thanks. I couldn’t have guessed a guy named Little Tony who’s in a bunch of pictures the cops took might be a bad guy. Angel tells Kate he owes her a favor and he’ll look for the guy and Kate is like, yeah, no, we’re not doing favors. Also, she’s worried about getting him killed. So, they’re going to do this on the level, with payment from the department and everything.

It feels like they’re dolls someone is smashing together. There is zero chemistry between Kate and Angel. Presumably, because her entire characterization is “she’s a cop and a lady and that makes her a lady cop.”

You know who deserved this spin-off? Cordelia.

Cordelia should have gotten the spin-off.

I’m so furious because I instantly imagined this spin-off show in which Cordelia moves to L.A., gets involved in Hollywood by becoming some big-wig’s secretary, finding out there are vampires all over the film and TV industry, and has to stealthily slay vampires without a) being a Slayer or b) screwing up her chance at a big break.

But yeah. Vampire in a police procedural. That works, too.

Angel tries to be more sympathetic with Cordelia but it comes off as super insincere and anyway, they’ve got a body parts problem. As in, a bunch of them keep washing up along the California coast. Angel says they should check out tide records and Doyle is like, oh, you think this guy has a regular dumping ground and hello, Angel Investigations could have caught Dexter Morgan.

At the station, Kate runs into her dad, also a police, who is dropping off paperwork for his retirement. Judging by how cliche all the cop drama stuff has been, R.I.P. Officer Dad. The gist of the scene is that she and her father are somewhat estranged. Angel calls and we cut to him and Doyle at a pier, where they’ve found Evil Tony or whoever. Kate tells them to get out of there and let her handle it, but Angel spots a yacht pulling up, totally conspicuous. There’s obviously only one thing he can do:

He switches clothes with Doyle and pretends to be a confused tourist waiting for the ferry to Catalina. The guys don’t put up with his clever ruse for long and try to rush him along, but Angel breaks character to beat them up. Just as the police arrive, Bad Guy Tony makes a run for it. But they’ve sent everyone like he’s Jean Reno in The Professional and he gets apprehended pretty quick. Kate is furious that Angel engaged the criminals and leaves in a mopey huff because that’s literally the only thing Kate gets to do in this show. Mope and huff.

Kate takes Bad Guy Tony back to the station so she can make a fat joke:

Tony: “You been running after me for a long time, sweetheart. If I’da known how bad you wanted me, I, I might have let you catch me a little sooner.”

Kate: “And if I had known how much you needed the exercise, I might have let you run a little longer.”

It dawned on me right at this moment in the rewatch that I don’t think I’m good at calling out fatphobia in the Whedonverse. And weirdly, I think it might be my brain glossing past the things that, at that point in my life, contributed to just grinding me down. Before I disconnected my entire self-worth from the fact that I wasn’t skinny anymore after my first child, I was really depressed and had super low self-esteem due to body issues. Right around this time, I was also consuming mostly Buffy and Angel, taping them off TV and binging before binging was a thing. Then, when they came out on DVD, I did the same thing. I just stayed in a Whedonloop because I didn’t realize how often the fat jokes were coming because I didn’t realize I wasn’t a joke, myself. But I kept running back to it because it was the only comforting thing I could consume. So, we’re adding a new number to our list: #16: Fatphobia, staple of the Whedonverse.

Welcome to this super cheerful recap, everyone!

So, Bad Tony makes his one call…to Wolfram & Hart. A clearly evil dude receives a fax with Kate’s personnel file and promises Little Tony that the problem will be taken care of. It’s super sinister, even when it’s revealed after the commercial break that the Wolfram & Hart guy is gonna apparently solve the problem by getting his client transferred out of Kate’s jurisdiction due to a concern for Tony’s safety. And then Tony threatens Kate with violence and Evil Lawyer Man is all, I want that stricken from the record because my client is under stress.

I’m not a lawyer or anything, but I’m pretty sure that if you’ve been Mirandized you don’t get a mulligan on threatening an officer of the law in front of several witnesses including a court reporter.

So, here’s the thing: Kate caused this whole fucking problem for herself by being physically and verbally abusive toward a suspect in her custody. She calls him fat again (#16) in front of his lawyer. Even though the lawyer and suspect are shitty people, they’re 100% protected by the law. Which Kate should have known.

Meanwhile, at Angel Investigations, Cordelia is like, wow, awesome that the case wrapped up so fast! But Angel thinks it was a little too fast, and I agree because we’re only in like, the third bar on the bottom of the Hulu screen. He says his instincts tell him there’s something else that’s up, prompting Cordelia to criticize his instincts as they pertain to stuff like noticing her new shoes. As he explains that men don’t notice women’s shoes, Doyle strolls in and compliments them and asks if they’re new. Which, really, he’s obsessed with Cordelia, so obviously he’s going to notice. Doyle’s contacts underground told him that Tony is still planning something but nobody told him what.

Kate goes to see her father at the local cop bar. Another detective shows up and informs her that everyone has to go to sensitivity training because of her behavior with suspects in the Evil Tony case. And she still thinks she’s done nothing wrong! She gets all snarky and acts like it’s totally unreasonable for there to be consequences. What’s even more unfair is that we have to go to sensitivity training with her, where she pouts and sucks and acts all above everyone when she’s the reason they all have to be there!

I really, really do not like Kate.

The sensitivity training guy introduces a “talking stick” that’s like a giant fucking club. Nobody better give that to Kate, is all I’m saying. The guy gives it to a dude named Heath, who jokes about his childhood being beaten up by his brothers and how his single mom did the best that she could. Like, in front of all his coworkers, he’s baring his soul and shit and having this moment. And this is what happens:

Therapist: “Is there something that you always wanted to say to your mother but never could?”

Kate: “Will you marry me?”

And then everyone starts to laugh at Heath.

Fuck you, Kate. Seriously. Fuck. You.

The therapist pressures Kate into taking the talking stick. Then he lays the fuck into her in the kindest possible way, telling her that her sarcasm and toughness come from a fear of being hurt because she’s been hurt in the past.

I really don’t care. At this point, nothing can salvage this character for me. She became irredeemable the moment she started bullying a coworker at a company-mandated therapy session that’s only happening because she has no self-control.

Angel and Doyle go to meet another Italian guy while he works out. All these mobster guys hang out at the same gym, where this exercising dude overheard them planning something against Kate. Angel goes to tell Kate she’s in danger. Before he can, she apologizes for being so gruff with him and asks him to go to her father’s retirement party with her because she’s nervous about giving a speech. That’s when he tells her that she’s in danger because Tony took a hit out on her. Her response? To act out the tired joke about people in therapy analyzing others:

Kate: “Wow, he’s really acting out, isn’t he?”

Angel: “Well, yeah. He wants you dead.”

Kate: “Well, I get that. I’m just saying that he must be in some kind of pain to have to strike out at others in that way?”

Angel: “Are you okay?”

Kate: “God, listen to me. Suddenly I’m Doctor Laura. Next thing you know, I’ll be talking about ‘processing’ and my ‘inner-child.'”

Get it? Because those are therapy terms? And therapy is making her weak because mental health concerns are for weak people? And therapy is really stupid and the people who need it are all wimpy weirdos? (#14)

Turns out, the therapist guy was hired by Wolfram & Hart. Lawyer guy is worried that whatever the therapist guy is supposed to be doing won’t work. If you were wondering when the supernatural portion of this episode of a vampire television show was going to show up, it’s now. The therapist guy promises that whatever it is he’s doing is going to yield results after the next sensitivity training session. And does so in front of this mildly spooky-looking scene, complete with bubbling cauldron noises:

After the commercial break, we go to the retirement party at the stereotypical cop bar where of course they’re playing the blues because they’re working class. I feel like if you want to set your police procedural show in Chicago, you should set your police procedural show in Chicago rather than try to shoehorn Chicago cop stereotypes into Los Angeles.

Also, you should just write a police procedural so that fans who came to this spin-off for spooky stuff will actually care about this episode.

Kate is nervous about giving her dad’s speech.

Angel: “What’s the old saw? Picture your audience in their underwear?”

Kate: “Way ahead of you.”

And she gives Angel an objectifying once-over.

Can I just state for the record how happy I am that she doesn’t stay his love interest for long? Because even though I know why she’s saying this (she’s under the influence of the nefarious therapist’s emotional honest spell), there is still zero chemistry here.

Kate introduces Angel to her father, who says:

Officer Dad: “Well, good to see her out with a man. I was starting to wonder if she didn’t lean in another direction all together.”

Number 10.

Kate gives an angry speech, turning the whole retirement party into a scathing indictment of her father and every shitty parenting choice he ever made raising her after her mom died. She starts with how she became a cop because it was the only way she could feel close to her dad who totally shut down after losing his wife. Then she moves on to how he never treated her the way he treated the male cops, before shifting gears and talking about how nice her friend’s mom was to her and how she wanted that at home, culminating in:

Kate: “Do you realize that you’ve never told me that I’m pretty? Not once in my life?”

THE BULLSHITTERY! THE UTTER BULLSHITTERY! All of that other stuff leads into that? She lost her mother at a young age and felt abandoned by her father as a result, spent her entire life chasing after his affection and her prettiness is given the most weight in this litany of sins? Wanting to be called pretty gets to be the beat given singled out with the most weight and misery? This is total number 13. You wanna be shocked? This episode was written by three men: Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt, and Tim Minear. And they sat down and they went, “You know what I bet a woman with daddy issues is really bothered most about? Not feeling like her dad thinks she’s pretty.”

I’m just gonna say that as the daughter of a person who was not a father? Getting called pretty was very far down the list of things I craved from him as a child. Like, having my biological parent feel I was in any way worthy of love was of the most concern to me, but what do I know? I’m just a woman who has experienced having a bad father. I’m gonna have to defer to THREE MEN.

During her explosion of emotion, the other detective we’ve seen a lot tells her to keep going, and when she’s done he says she’s brave. Other officers are crying, too, and some are angry that she ruined the party. They all start arguing over their various neuroses and eventually physical fights break out over who has anger issues and shit.

Because get it? Being in touch with their emotions is having a negative effect on their ability to communicate effectively with each other because emotions and mental health are silly. This episode alone is going to give us a #17: Mental health stigma redux.

Cordelia storms into Angel Investigations pissed off that she’s been called in at such a late hour. That’s when she sees Angel and Doyle in Angel’s office with Kate, who’s seemingly drunk on emotional honesty. She invites Angel to the sensitivity training and goes on and on about how wonderful it is. She tells Cordelia that Doyle has a crush on her, which, you know, Cordelia should have probably already picked up on. What’s weird is that Angel does appear to be somewhat moved by Kate’s mentions of his old soul and his deep secrets. He leaves her there with Doyle and Cordelia and goes to the big ass castle that the therapist guy lives in.

I assume it’s the same castle where they shot “Buffy vs. Dracula” because how many literal castles can there possibly be in L.A.? He’s just confronted the guy when we snap back to Angel Investigations, where Kate pulls a gun and says she’s going to go find her father. At the castle, Angel asks the therapist which demon gives him his power and the dude is involved with several. He tries to attack Angel, who transforms into his vampire-self to interrogate the guy.

The police precinct is in a chaos of empathy, resulting in one officer setting all the prisoners, including Evil Tony, free. The prisoners immediately gang up on and beat the officer.

Are we understanding that therapy is really, really bad yet? Do we get that therapy is the villain here? And that it’s funny for people in a traditionally masculine profession to share their feelings?

Angel catches up with Doyle and Cordelia who try to warn him that everything in the precinct is falling apart and Kate seemed kind of dangerous when she headed there. Angel responds by hugging them and they realize that he’s also fallen victim to the evil therapist. The talking stick is cursed. Oh, and Angel is now ashamed that he committed an act of physical violence, but in a funny way, not in a vampire-with-a-soul way.

Again, the villain of this show is a therapist and his evil plot is to make people open about their emotions. Which, by the way, is a theme that gets repeated in Buffy season six.

I’m sorry, but how fucked up are the writers on these shows that they go, “You know what would really cause the downfall of society? If we were all emotionally honest.”

Also, the reason this entire thing is happening is specifically to get Tony out of jail so he can kill Kate. This plan hinged on a lot of fucking chance. One: that she would get sensitivity training and not outright fired for beating up a suspect. Two: That a random officer would be moved to release all the prisoners. Three: That Kate would go to the precinct to look for her father, thus being in the building when Tony gets out.

This is just.

This might be the worst episode of Angel ever. If not, it’s super high in the fucking running.

Recurring Detective Man confronts Kate about the fact that he’s been obsessed with her for years and she’s never returned his romantic affection but we kind of cut away from that to Bad Tony. He recruits some of the other prisoners and they get a bunch of guns and kill an officer. Meanwhile, Angel and Cordelia and Doyle break in through a window, despite Angel’s sensitivity demanding they be more considerate of the people they’ve vandalized.

Tony finds Kate and has a gun pointed at her to make his villain speech. Angel comes in and tries to be a sensitive mediator. Tony drops his guard giving Angel an opening to take him on physically. Doyle disarms one of the henchmen and Kate shoots one. With the danger over, Angel and Kate hug it out.

Rearrested, Tony calls his Wolfram & Hart lawyer. He’s like, yeah, ha ha, we don’t represent you anymore:

Lawyer: “You shot up a precinct and attempted to murder a police officer in full view of witnesses. We can’t risk that kind of exposure.”

Tony: “You’re the one set this thing up!”

Lawyer: “We opened a door for you. The point was for you to walk through it, not blast your way out. The senior partners feel you’ve become a liability. We can’t waste valuable energy on you when there are more pressing issues at hand.”

Tony asks what pressing issues he means, and we see that Lawyer is looking at surveillance video of Angel before he hangs up the call.

Angel and Kate meet at the precinct, where she tells him that internal affairs think someone spiked the drinks at the bar. She asks him if she said anything to him, the implied being, did she say anything about liking him. He tells her no and leaves. Her father comes in and says she embarrassed him in front of everyone and he never wants her to bring it up again. Then he leaves and Kate is sad and alone at her desk.

Therapy ruined everything.

That’s it, by the way. We end with Angel having seen this whole confrontation and just walking away to sad music, as per the stipulations of David Boreanaz’s contract.

Kate has to go. This episode just made me so, so tired. The whole “therapy makes people crazier” joke was played out back in the ’80s and nothing about this episode was new or fresh. Plus, we’re once again centering a character who isn’t particularly remarkable or fleshed out. Tough lady cops with daddy issues are everywhere in media and they gave Kate approximately zero cool angles to make her stand out.

The sooner we get away from Kate (and Angel’s involvement with the police), the better.

July patron video and an explanation of how videos will work from here out.

Hey there, everyone! I’m a total brick and didn’t realize something: when I do thank you videos to my Patron, the names included on the list are different depending on whether you’re in “patron manager” or “relationship manager.” I thought these were basically the same thing. They are not. The patron manager updates with a list of your paid patrons for the month at the end of the month/beginning of the next month. The relationship manager lists people who are patrons regardless of when they signed up or dropped off. As a result of my not being observant, I’ve been missing people left and right!

So, from now on, this is how videos will go down. Blank slate. This is the video for my patrons from July. The patron video that comes out in September will be for patrons who joined in August. And so on. And so on.

And there are a lot of you.

I don’t want to steal the thunder from my July patrons, they’re included in this. It’s a huge deal for me.

We can now pay our rent with Patreon pledges.

You guys have no idea how much that means to me, seriously. Writing is not a high paying gig, and sometimes, rent and bill money is difficult to come by. Whether it’s pledging monthly on Patreon or putting money into my Kofi one time, just showing up and reading and leaving comments, reading my books and recommending them to your friends, whatever way you do it, your participation in Trout Nation is so incredible and precious to me because it helps me shoulder the burden of providing for my family. That’s something that’s not always easy to do with mental illness and physical disabilities. I can’t overstate how monumentally thankful I am for your support.

So, here’s what I did for Patrons in July. I’m super glad I didn’t sit on this idea until later because I’m not sure I could have tied off that many water balloons.

Jealous Haters Book Club: The Mister, chapters thirty-two, thirty-three, and acknowledgments. “Well, I guess that explains it.”

We have come now to the end of our journey together. Unlike our Fifty Shades of Grey adventure, we’re closing this metaphorical chapter without any movie news. The books have fallen off the New York Times weekly bestseller list (at least, as much of that list as they show on their site). It’s out of the top 1,000 on Amazon. Don’t get me wrong; The Mister was a hit.

It’s just not a hit for E.L. James.

So, will she write another book? Certainly not for whatever advance she received for this one. But since several commenters have pointed out that The Mister borrows liberally from SnowQueens IceDragon’s other Twilight fic, Safe Haven, maybe the answer to whether or not we’ll be revisiting our favorite author again lies in whether or not she has some old fanfic lying around.

I wonder what PBS Masterpiece Theater varnish she’ll slap on the next one.

CW: Abuse apologia

So, Mr. Demachi has just turned his shotgun on Moss and commanded him to marry Demelssia.

Oh, Babë, no!

Alessia realizes that she hadn’t thought through her lie about the pregnancy. In a panic, she whirls away from from her shotgun-weilding father, desperate to explain the truth to Maxim. She doesn’t want to force him into marriage!

Manufactured drama like this always makes your characters look real stupid if you can’t justify why they’re having this reaction. We’re being asked to believe that there is some question as to whether the man who rushed to Albania to rescue her, who physically attacked a man for hurting her, who stood up to her father and mouthed off a bunch of shit while the man was holding a gun, actually loves her enough to want to marry her.

As if these are the actions of a person who was just interested in dating around a little, maybe testing the waters.

Since we all know the answer already, trying to wring out this last moment of suspense is cheap and makes Demelssia look like even more of a doormat that she’s already been made to look.

But Maxim is sporting the biggest grin.

Joy shines in his eyes, evident for all to see.

His expression takes her breath away.

The amount of, “Well, I give up!” on display here is astonishing. This is how she writes the climax of their romance? Three broad, store-brand, sentences?

But wait. Just wait for the romantic proposal. After he dramatically gets down on one knee, Moss takes out the diamond ring.

“Alessia Demachi,” Maxim says, “please do me the honor of becoming my countess. I love you. I want to be with you always. Spend your life with me. At my side. Always. Marry me.”

That’s right. Do me the honor of taking the matching title to the one I allegedly don’t want but now clearly define myself with. Oh, and yeah, I love you and want to be with you. But I’m gonna lead off with that countess part because the wealth and status are what our author’s loyal readership really crave.

Alessia’s eyes fill with tears.

He brought a ring.

This is what he came here to do.

To marry her.

No, he came to return those sunglasses you left at his house, organized crime bosses be damned.

He really does love her. He wants to be with her. Not Caroline. He wants her with him, always.

Well, the way this is written, he wants Caroline with him, always. But I have a little writing tip: if you want to give your heroine a romantic rival, it’s better if The Big Misunderstanding about isn’t “I saw her in a shirt at his house before we were together,” and “I saw them hugging on the street.”

Even if we take into account the whole “Albanians don’t really do PDAs” thing that would have maybe convincingly made the hug a BFD, we’ve heard too much about how well-versed she is in American culture for that moment to have ripped her apart and Moss already rescued her from kidnappers once. There is no suspense here for the reader because there was never any point at which they would have truly believed Caroline is a threat.

PS. Caroline is Tanya from the Denali clan who had her sights on Edward in Twilight.

So, of course, Demelssia says yes and Moss jumps to his feet and lifts her into his arms and we go into his POV.

“I love you, Alessia Demachi,” I whisper. Setting her down, I kiss her. Hard. Closing my eyes. I don’t care that we have an audience.

In fairness, it would have been weirder if you kept your eyes open, making deliberate visual contact with all these people.

Right now. Here. In Kukës, Albania, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.

Happiness? In Albania? In this economy?

So, they stand there frenching for an uncomfortably long moment until her father clears his throat and motions them apart by threatening them with his shotgun.

No shit, he points a shotgun at his presumed pregnant daughter and the man who just proposed to her.

Mr. Demachi is confused about the countess thing, and the translator tries to help. A couple things about the translator:

A few people brought up how fucking weird it must be for the translator to be sitting here during all this violence and people drawing guns. Now, a marriage proposal involving English nobility.

And this whole time, his girlfriend is waiting at the car

He’s going to have to try to explain all this shit to her on the ride back and she’s going to be so perplexed that she won’t know whether she’s angry she missed it or angry that her boyfriend was put into this danger in the first place or both. There is going to be shouting in this car on this long ass ride. Some of it will probably be directed at Moss and Tom.

Anyway, remember when I said the thing about how we didn’t need the whole backstory of these minor characters and that was shitty writing and ha ha, E.L. James, what a shitty, shitty bad writer you are?

I had to look up something in one of my own books for consistency and I did the exact same thing. I have this character who I must have found real interesting because I gave him a husband and a passion for surfing and all sorts of details that were fully unneeded because he’s just a random guy the hero is talking to at work in a conversation that is only there to get interrupted by an emergency.

I was like, “Fuck an IceDragon. Jenny, you hackpocrite.”

Hackprocrite (noun): One who criticizes faults in the work of others while being guilty of those same faults, themselves.

But just to be clear? The Mister still completely sucks. There’s no escaping that, even if the criticism is coming from an unreliable narrator here.

To get Mr. Demachi to understand what a count is (because Demelssia refers to Moss being a count), the translator references Lord Byron.

“Like Lord Byron?” Thanas asks.

Byron?

“He was a baron, I think. But he was a peer, yes.”

This is my favorite part of this book, hands down. It really, really is. When I first read it, I squealed with the most malicious delight.

Friends.

The woman who claims to have done such in-depth research on Albania. The one who bragged about her expertise and the painstaking steps she took to portray the country faithfully.

Didn’t bother to look up whether or not there were counts in Albanian nobility.

There are.

Wait. It gets so much better.

If you read that article, you find out that the title was reserved for Albanian nobility in Italy. How did the Albanians end up in Italy? Skanderbeg, the Albanian hero we learned about last semester. Referenced in that article as “founding father of the Albanian nobility and nation.”

This is the second Google search result for “counts in Albanian nobility.” Third for, “are their counts in Albanian nobility.”

She didn’t even google it. She just assumed that Albanians, with the rich history she painstakingly researched all the way back to the 1960’s, wouldn’t understand noble titles.

And…

And.

She actually has Demelssia use the word “count” instead of “earl.” In Albanian. She says she’s a “Kont,” which I phonetically agree with. So writing the Albanians not understand what a count is despite using the Albanian word as an equivalent to earl to explain it to them is just…chef’s kiss. You’ve outdone yourself, SQID.

And it. gets. so much better. Stay tuned.

Back in the story, Tom makes a crack about this being a great tale to tell their grandchildren and Mr. Demachi breaks out drinks–but just for the men, because horrible patriarchal Albanian backward peasants, am I right?–while Moss once again describes Demelssia the way men talk about their “missing” wives to the local news before confessing to the murder.

She shines. Her smile. Her eyes. She takes my breath away.

Then they toast and Mr. Demachi announces that Moss and Demelssia will be married in a week.

And that’s the end of a three page chapter.

We stay in Moss’s POV as we go into the final chapter of the book. A chapter that really didn’t need to be its own chapter so I’m not sure why the hell it is. According to my kindle, it’s only four pages, anyway.

Moss watches Demelssia run to her mother.

They embrace and cling to each other as if they’ll never let go, and both begin to silently weep in that way women do.

You know. In that way. The kind of way where women cry. That kind of woman crying.

It’s…affecting.

Try to sound less impressed by your bride’s tearful reunion with the mother whose life she feared for.

Then Demelssia approaches her father and Moss is like, ready to fight him again, just in case.

I hold my breath, poised to intervene if he so much as lays a finger on her.

I don’t mind heroes who are willing to commit violence to protect the heroine. I do mind heroes who constantly remind us that they would commit violence to protect the heroine, especially in moments where the tension has broken and things seem somewhat resolved.

Demelssia, however, has a touching moment with her abusive father who she once feared would kill her.

Demachi raises his hand and gently holds her chin.

That sentence comes directly after “so much as lays a finger on her,” and I laughed out loud imagining Moss tackling Mr. Demachi to the ground.

“Mos u largo përsëri. Nuk është mirë për nënën tënde.”

Alessia gives him a timid smile, and he leans down and kisses her forehead, closing his eyes as he does. “Nuk është mirë as për mua,” he whipsers.

So, her father said not to leave again because it’s not good for her mother, and then he added that it’s not good for him, either.

I look at Thanas, waiting for his translation, but he’s turned away, giving them this moment–and I think maybe I should, too.

Okay, first of all? Thanas isn’t a sign language interpreter. He can listen to them speaking Albanian even if his back is turned.

Second, WHY ARE WE GETTING THIS ABUSE APOLOGY BULLSHIT? This man sold his daughter. Not even sold! Put her up as permanent collateral on a loan! She ran away because she thought her choice was to either marry an abusive guy or be murdered by her abusive father! HER MOTHER HELPED HER ESCAPE THE COUNTRY TO PROTECT HER FROM HER FATHER AND “BETROTHED”.

I just…

You know what, we’re going to move along to the next scene, still in Moss’s POV. He’s laying in bed at the Demachi house, where he’s been forced to stay.

I lie awake staring at the dancing, watery reflections on the ceiling. The patterns that form are so comforting in their familiarity that I grin. They mirror my ecstatic mood. I’m not in London, I’m at my soon-to-be-in-laws’, and the reflections are from the full moon, skipping over the deep, dark waters of Fierza Lake.

Recalling the Thames motif at this point does not work. It’s been too long since we’ve seen it. They spent too much time in Cornwall to make this anything more than a moment where the reader thinks, “Oh, right. The water thing.” It stops you rather than drawing you in emotionally.

So, anyway, Demelssia sneaks into his room and gets naked. Sorry,

I toss back the covers, and she slides into bed beside me, gloriously naked.

According to my Kindle’s search function, Demelssia is just downright fucking glorious.

“her glorious tits”
“a glorious smile”
“her glorious dark hair”
“her glorious hair”
“a glorious smile”
“a glorious smile”
“gloriously naked”

They have sex, complete with yet another list of body parts in place of actual description of what they’re doing:

She’s unleashed; her fingers, hands, tongue, and lips are on me.

It’s like, five paragraphs of stuff copy/pasted from earlier sex scenes. You know, the feel of her, her head thrown back in ecstasy, burying his face in her hair, etc.

No mention of a condom or pulling out because, you know, since they’re getting married it’s implied that they’re both down to breed right the fuck now, without any on-page discussion about it.

Hey, remember the part where her family is all puritan and stuff?

Although if her father knkew she was here, he’d shoot us both, I’m sure.

Then why are you taking this risk, you fucking marble?!

There’s more abuse apology:

Her emotional reunion with her mother–and her father–was affecting. I think he does love her. Very much.

No. If he loved her, he would not be willing to sell her to a mobster. He would not beat her. He would not be willing to kill her. This is irresponsible and shows that E.L. James still hasn’t learned that domestic violence is bad. This is chilling.

Moss thinks about how great it is that despite her upbringing, Demelssia is her own person.

Plus, she’s taken me on a epic journey of self-discovery with her.

A journey of self-discovery with side trips to a museum and the hard lesson that sometimes, you have to fly business class.

He thinks about how he loves her and wants to spend the rest of his life with her, in case that hasn’t been hammered into us by now, and then they tell each other they love each other and once again talk about how her father might be willing to murder her.

“I think your dad will shoot me if he finds you here.”

“No, he’ll shoot me. I think he likes you.”

I know this is supposed to be jokey and cute but it probably would have worked better IN A SITUATION WHERE WE WEREN’T TALKING ABOUT A MAN WHO ACTUALLY WAS WILLING TO MURDER HIS DAUGHTER.

James’s enthusiastic willingness to write about serious subjects without any sensitivity or consideration is sick.

Finally, Moss asks Demelssia if she’s okay after her ordeal, and she apologizes for lying about being pregnant. Moss is like, that’s okay, I want kids, which is a great conversation to have after you’ve blown your load in someone.

I ease her onto her back and make love to her once again.

Mindful. Beautiful. Fulfilling. Love.

As it should be.

Later this week we’ll be married.

I can’t wait.

I just have to tell my mother.

Yup. That’s the line James chose to end the entire book on. This whole thing. Multiple kidnapping attempts, human trafficking, child abuse, spousal abuse, poverty, and death. And we go with a mention of a character who appears in one scene and how she’s not going to approve of this match.

The final page is followed by a chapter-by-chapter list of the music referenced, even if that piece has been referenced multiple times. It is nearly all Bach.

Now, I wanted to touch on something in the acknowledgments. They start off with thanks to her editor and a team of people at her publishing company, people at another arm of the company, and then:

Thank you to Manushaque Bako for the Albanian translations.

Followed by thanks to her agent and agency. Then:

Thank you to Grant Bavister from the Crown Office, Chris Eccles from Griffiths Eccles LLP, Chris Schofield, and Anne Filikins for advice on earldoms, heraldry, trusts, and property matters.

Huge thanks to James Leonard for his tuition in the language of posh young gentlemen.

She consulted one person about Albania and that was for the language translations.

She consulted five people to make sure she got the details of English aristocracy juuuuuust right.

Remember all the bragging she did about her in-depth research of Albania? Bako is the only person thanked for any sort of consultation on the country. Not about the culture. Not about the history. About translating her dialogue.

But it was really, really important to make sure we got an accurate feel for just how rich, important, and well-bred the English upper-class is. Albania she could just wing, right? She’s been there. She’s had stew. She read up on organized crime and communism. What more could there possibly be to a place that is so less than England?

She even consulted two people on clay pigeon shooting. Two people on clay pigeon shooting. One on Albania, to make sure her dialogue was translated appropriately.

I’m just gonna say it: if this bitch ain’t a Leaver, whoever is writing her characterization is just as garbage an author as she is because it’s inconsistent as fuck.

My final thoughts: This book started out with promise, then rushed headlong into total garbage. The first few chapters were written with careful pacing and insight into the characters. Then, it veered off into Poldark fanfic before becoming a somehow more xenophobic rip-off of Taken in which the role of Liam Neeson is played by an earl/model/DJ/photographer/composer who just can’t resist a museum.

There was actual promise here. Laziness, greed, and prejudice derailed it. And if she’s out of fanfic to recycle, her next offering will be even worse.

That’s a wrap on The Mister. Jealous Haters Book Club will resume with Beautiful Disaster recaps, and Jealous Patrons Book Club will start this week on my Patreon with a look at Safe Haven, the second Twilight fanfic E.L. James monetized. Some readers have asked me if the recaps of Safe Haven will be archived for those who can’t afford to join the $10 tier right now. Absolutely. Get on the ride when you can.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogcast.

State Of The Trout: We Now Return To Our Regularly Scheduled Program (In A Minute)

The Mister is drawing to a close. I know you all wish that it could go on forever because you’re fully immersed in the rich, gripping plot but all good things must come to an end. What happens next, though?

Well, we go back to what we were doing before. Beautiful Disaster recaps are returning. Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel recaps will come back. I’ll finally finish watching True Blood. And of course, I’ll probably continue to have two or more mental breakdowns per year because that’s just how I live, baby.

But there will be more! So much more! Starting September 6, The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp will premiere here. It will be available exclusively on this blog in weekly installments. Come see if I can pull off the greatest feat of my writing career: turning an absurd joke idea into an actually decent book.

Can’t wait for September 6? Become a $1 or above Patron of my Patreon in the month of August and you’ll get access to the prologue (featuring Fitshaced Friday meme Blayde Trasket) next week! That’s before anyone else! You can be in the know and tell all your friends.

And finally, in other Patreon-related news, starting this month, $10 and up patrons will be enrolled in Jealous Patrons Book Club, where I will do exclusive recaps. Of what, you ask? Well, we’re gonna start off with an in-depth review of Safe Haven by SnowQueens IceDragon, the Twilight fanfic that became The Mister. Yes, for just ten dollars a month, you’ll experience second-hand all the details SnowQueens IceDragon remembered from her Las Vegas vacation, the overwhelming and gratuitous use of the word “fuck” (1-20 per page), and a heroine even clumsier in fanfic than she is in canon. These recaps will start next week and then there will be at least four a month each month thereafter.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print. In the meantime, spread the good news of John Gayheart Johnson, Business Centaur.

Jealous Haters Book Club: The Mister, chapter thirty-one or “That scene in Pulp Fiction where everyone has a gun pulled on everyone.”

Huzzah and here we are! The penultimate installment of this round of Jealous Haters Book Club. The Mister is thirty-three chapters in total, but the last two are so pitifully short that I’m going to combine them rather than prolong our misery. I’ll post a more comprehensive update on blog things later this week but since a few people have asked, yes, we will be returning to Beautiful Disaster.

More importantly, however, we’ll be returning to our recaps…with a theme song, courtesy of Bunny. Since Bunny is a big MST3K fan, the song is meant to be sung to its theme tune. If you’re unfamiliar with it, here you go:

 

In the not-too-distant future,

Somewhere in Michigan,

There was a gal named Jenny

Who fell in love with Ed Sheeran.

She read some tripe that made her say

“These authors suck, they cannot stay!”

She grabbed a red pen with a curse

And in her scathing wit she hits

The very awfulest and worst!

“I’ll dissect cheesy novels,

Whatever you can find. (la la la)

I’ll sit right here and read them all

To save you peace of mind.” (la la la)

Now keep in mind, Jen can’t control

How bad these crap books get. (la la la)

So try not to get so annoyed

You do something you’ll regret!

Jealous Hater Roll Call:

Wisecracks! (A-plenty!)

Anger! (You’ll catch it!)

Blayde Trasket! (Hot stuff!)

Weeeed! (*sharp inhale*)

If you’re startin’ to feel the urge to rage

At certain talentless hacks, (la la la)

Then repeat to yourself “That’s what Twitter’s for

Right now I should just relax …

For Jealous Hater Book Club, Trout Nation!”

Since we left the last chapter with Demelssia seeing Moss, it’s only fair that we jump into his POV for his reaction in the next chapter. His heart beats hard while she stares at him and he stares back at her.

She looks stunning. Slender. Sweet. Her hair wild. But her skin is pale. Paler than I’ve ever seen her before, and she has a graze on one cheek and a bruise on the other. There are dark circles beneath her eyes that are shining with unshed tears.

A lump forms in my throat.

What have you been through, sweetheart?

“Hello,” I whisper. “You left without saying goodbye.”

And then we dive right back into Demelssia’s POV because this book is nothing if not a whiplash tour of our protagonists’ every god damn thought. It’s so annoying to have a teeny slice of Moss’s POV just so he could throw out a pithy line. He gives like, a single thought to the fact that she looks so beat up and then immediately it’s the rom-com one-liner. That could have easily been the chapter hook of the last chapter, in Demelssia’s POV, and then we could have opened the next chapter with what comes next in Demelssia’s POV, but god forbid a single breath doesn’t go by in which we get both characters’ reactions to it.

You know what? One time, I had a hard time figuring out which POV I wanted a story to be from. You know what I did? I wrote the same book from both POVs and published them both. I’m not saying that I’m in a place of expertise or skill to advise someone as successful and with such a masterful grasp of prose as E.L. James but like…

Anyway, Demelssia’s reaction:

Maxim is here. For her. Everyone else in the room disappears. She can see only him. His hair is touseled. He looks pale and tired, but relieved.

EVERYONE IN THIS BOOK NEEDS TO BE GETTING MORE IRON. OR SUN.

His startling green eyes drink her in, and his words touch her soul. The same words he used when he came to find her in Brentford.

How does she miss the mark so fucking badly? That line means nothing to the reader at this point. Absolutely nothing. But James set up, “I’ve got you,” to the tune of something like twenty-two times in the manuscript. THAT is the line that needed to get worked in but she was already seeing the blockbuster movie in her head when she wrote this and “you left without saying goodbye” was the line that seemed more cinematic.

But there’s a question on his face, beseeching her. It’s asking why she left.

Who’s asking? The question? His face?

He doesn’t know how she feels about him. But he came anyway.

He’s here.

He’s not with Caroline.

This is a lot of information to infer from a single glance at his face.

She lets out a small, sharp cry and races into his waiting arms. Maxim cradles her against his chest, holding her tightly. She inhales his scent. It’s clean and warm and familiar.

Maxim.

Never let me go.

And this is when Anatoli comes in and sees this embrace and Demelssia’s father stands up all furious. Demelssia tells Moss to trust her and he’s like, “always,” and we go into Moss’s POV.

Alessia turns to her father, who’s looking from us to the arsehole who kidnapped her.

Here’s an interesting point: up until the last chapter, he was still wondering if she’d been kidnapped or if she’d left on her own. Even though he sees she’s bruised up and junk, he never has the explicit thought that oh, clearly I was right, she was kidnapped. There’s no realization that we see on his part. We’re simply meant to fill in on our own.

After Moss talks about how handsome Anatoli is, Demelssia says something in Albanian.

There is a collective gasp of shock that rattles through the room.

What the fuck did she say?

What she said was that she’s pregnant and Moss is the father.

I feel a little dizzy. But wait…She can’t possibly…We only…We used…

She’s lying.

Her father reaches for his shotgun.

Fuck.

Wait, wait. Are you telling me that Demelssia is actually using some of the cleverness and ingenuity we’ve been told she possesses? On the page? Right in front of God and everybody?!

We go back to Demelssia’s POV because why the fuck not. There are six POV switches in the eight pages of this chapter.

“You told me you were bleeding!” Anatoli screams at Alessia, and a vein in his forehead pulses with wrath.

Mama starts crying.

“I lied! I didn’t want you to touch me!” She turns to her father. “Babë, please. Don’t make me marry him. He is an angry, violent man. He will kill me.”

So, like, did anyone else get the feeling throughout the book that her father knew this and just didn’t care? I can’t remember if it was put that way explicitly, but I got the feeling that her father, being an abusive man himself, didn’t give a shit about Anatoli’s violent temper. Maybe I just misread things. Either way, I’m not sure why she thinks this is going to convince her abusive father not to marry her off. She shows them the bruises around her throat as proof of Anatoli’s violence.

“What the fuck!” Maxim bellows, and he lunges at Anatoli, grabbing him by the neck and throwing them both on the floor.

Both Anatoli and his neck? I’m very confused by this phrasing because like, tackling or tumbling or even bringing or falling would make more sense than Moss throwing himself on the ground.

But don’t worry about that, because it’s time for a POV switch:

He’s fucking dead.

Adrenaline coursing through my body, I take the fucker by surprise, knocking the breath out of him as he hits the floor with me on top of him.

Okay, one, Moss can’t possibly know that he knocked the wind out of Anatoli because that’s not something that’s visible. It’s a physical experience. Or, if we’re watching Buffy or Angel, something that frequently happens to vampires.

Second, we’ve now reached a point where the quick-cut POVs are overlapping. Again, if you want us to see the same thing twice from different POVs, there’s a way to do that. In fact, you’ve already done that before, Erika. Remember the two books you wrote from Christian Grey’s POV and you never did the third and fans are fucking furious about it?

So, Moss punches and strangles Anatoli before slamming his head into the tile floor until Alessia starts screaming and Tom has to pull Moss away and Mr. Demachi grabs a shotgun to threaten both Moss and Anatoli.

“You’re like all Englishmen,” the arsehole snarls. “You’re soft and weak, and your women are hard.”

“Soft enough to beat the shit out of you, you piece of crap,” I snap.

Oh, watch out with that potty language, Miss Steele.

As the red mist clears, I can hear Alessia fretting behind me.

Consider this: Demelssia grew up in an abusive household and was betrothed to an abusive man. She’s just watched the man she loves become incredibly violent, to the point that it makes her scream in fear. You’d think that would be something that comes up when we flip back to her POV, right?

Of course, you don’t think that. You know what this book is at this point. Nothing is a red flag if the hero is doing it.

Alessia’s father stands between the two men, looking at each of them in consternation.

“You come into my house bringing violence? In front of my wife and my daughter?” he addresses Maxim and his friend Tom.

Demelssis wonders what Tom is doing there and watches as the translator tells Moss what Mr. Demachi is saying. Moss apologizes, says he loves Demelssia and doesn’t want to see any harm come to her at the hands of a man…so, I guess a woman would be fine? Anyway, Mr. Demachi has words for Anatoli, as well:

“And you. You bring her back to me covered in bruises?”

“You know how spirited she is, Jak. She needs to be broken.”

“Broken? Like this?” Baba points to her neck.

Anatoli shrugs. “She’s a woman.” His tone implies that she’s of no consequence.

Thanks for cluing us in on the tone because otherwise, that whole exchange would have seemed super progressive and respectful of all womankind.

Again, I’m not sure how we’re supposed to reconcile Mr. Demachi’s abhorrence of violence toward his daughter when Demelssia has said more than once that he’d kill her if she dishonored him. Is he fine with her getting beaten by him, so long as nobody else does it? That makes sense, in a way, but the fact that it does make sense makes it seem wrong in the context of a book that makes very little.

So, Moss is about to go ham on Anatoli again but Demelssia stops him. Then her father calls her a whore and she’s like:

“Babë, Anatoli will kill me,” she whispers. “And if you want me dead, I’d rather you shot me with that gun you’re holding, so I might die at the hands of someone who is supposed to love me.”

It’s annoying me to see “Babë” in dialogue and “Baba” the rest of the time. That’s my own personal picky little annoyance, though. I can’t say that as a stylistic choice it’s necessary wrong.

Moss puts himself between Demelssia and her father, just in case Mr. Demachi was gonna take her up on the offer. Anatoli tells Mr. Demachi that the betrothal–and the money he was going to loan him in return for Demelssia–is off the table. So, basically, Mr. Demachi didn’t even sell his daughter. He put her up as collateral for a loan he was going to have to pay back anyway.

“Loan?” Maxim says. He turns his head slightly and speaks so that only Alessia can hear him. “This arsehole paid for you?”

How often are we gonna have to read the word “arsehole” in this chapter? This is turning into that annoying Buick commercial that’s out right now where they say “Buick” so much that it ends up making all the words around “Buick” sound like white noise and nonsense.

But no, Moss, he didn’t pay for her. That’s the fucked up part. I just said that. Aren’t you listening to me?

Maxim faces her father. “I will match any loan,” he says.

“No!” Alessia exclaims.

Her father glares at Maxim, furious.

“You dishonor him,” Alessia whispers.

HOW?! I guess I’m not as versed in Albanian culture as E.L. James is from her two trips and the stew her husband can make, but how on earth do you “dishonor” someone by offering money for their daughter when they’ve already made it abundantly clear that you’re open to that arrangement?

Anatoli says something about how he should have fucked Demelssia.

Maxim lurches at him, bristling with anger once more, but Anatoli is ready this time. From his coat pocket, he whisks out his pistol and takes aim at Maxim’s face.

Whisks?

“No!” Alessia shrieks and she darts quickly in front of Maxim, shielding him.

This is the second time one of them has put themselves between the other person and the barrel of a gun. What’s funny about this one is that we know Moss is taller than Demelssia, so Anatoli could still shoot right over her head.

“I don’t know whether to shoot you or him,” Anatoli snarls at her in his mother tongue, and he looks to her father for permission.

I thought Anatoli was Italian. So…is he speaking Italian? But it’s polite of him to ask permission to murder Mr. Demachi’s daughter. Here’s the fucked up part:

Baba stares back at Anatoli and then at Alessia.

Like, maybe what you say is “don’t shoot anybody.” Baba still has his own gun out. He could take care of this Anatoli problem like, right now. Instead, he’s considering whether or not Anatoli should shoot his daughter.

Alessia leans forward. “What are you going to do, Anatoli?” She jabs her index finger at him. “Shoot him or me?”

But there’s no real danger, Demelssia points out, because she took all his bullets. When Anatoli aims at Demelssia, Mr. Demachi jams the butt of his shotgun into Anatoli, who falls on the floor and attempts to shoot Mr. Demachi. But of course, the gun is empty, just like Demelssia said.

“Go!” Baba bellows. “Go now, Anatoli, before I shoot you myself. You want to start a blood feud?”

“Over your whore?”

“She is my daughter, and these people are guests in my house. Go. Now. You are no longer welcome here.”

Anatoli gazes at her father, his fury and impotence written in every tense muscle on his face. “You’ve not heard the last of this,” he snarks at Baba and Maxim.

“And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids!”

Anatoli takes off, and Mr. Demachi lays into Demelssia for dishonoring the family. He moves to strike her, but Moss protects her and loses his entire shit:

“Don’t you dare touch a hair on her head,” I snarl, towering over him. “This woman has been through hell. And all because of you and your shit choice of a husband for her. She’s been kidnapped by sex traffickers. She’s escaped. She’s gone without food. She’s walked for days with nothing. And after all that, she was resilient enough to get herself a job and hold body and soul together with barely any help. How can you treat her this way? What kind of father are you? Where is your honor?”

This doesn’t go over great with Mr. Demachi, who listens to rest of Moss’s tirade before cocking his shotgun and telling Moss he’s going to have to marry Demelssia.

Shotgun wedding. Get it?

My Impression So Far: This book just needs to figure out how to end itself. This just needs to be over.

Troutcation Redux

“Jenny, you’re always on god damn vacation.”

Well, you know what? My cousin has an awesome cabin and I intend to use it when she’s not there. That’s what we’re doing. I’ll be holed up there in all of the majesty of the Upper Peninsula, seeing waterfalls, playing board games, and occasionally working on a little masterpiece I like to call The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp.

Think of me every time you go to the bathroom in an indoor-plumbing situation this week. The Mister recaps resume (and thankfully, hopefully, will be finished) next week.

Jealous Hater Book Club: The Mister chapter thirty or “To the rescue! I swear! Any time now!”

I’m going to take a moment here to recognize my Patreon patrons for the month of July. Usually, I do this in a video but due to my phone being a super asshole, the video I filmed went away into the ether, never to return. So, allow me to force your eyeballs onto this list of people who donated $5 and up in the month of July:

Adriane
Amy B
Anastasia
Barbara W
Breanne B
Casey C
Christie E
Christina G
Debbie M
Emily B
Erin R
Jenny D
Kari
Katharine W
Kathryn G
Kira P
Kirsten W
Lauren B
Lindsey L
Linsel
Lucy G
Miriam W
Miss Kitty Fantastico
Nicola H
Olivia B
Rebecca P
Roma
Ryan F
Sandy B
Sarah R
Sarah A
Shanti M
Smelter P
Stormy K
TeJay the Mad
Teresa D
Vallie M
Veerle VV
Victoria M
Ximena D

Thank you so much for your patronage and you’ll be named in the combo July/August video. If you’re not a Patron, you can see past videos and the weird shit I did for them on my YouTube channel. Everybody, let’s give them a big hand because without their support, this place wouldn’t run as smoothly. And I mean. This place doesn’t run smoothly. So just imagine how bad it could be.

And remember, even if you can’t support my efforts monetarily, you being here and reading these words is always support enough. I’m so pleased to have such a cool bunch of people who come read my silly stuff and then say really smart and awesome things in the comments.

So, now it’s onto the bad part of this recap. Ha ha, just kidding, it’s ALL bad. But here’s the part where I have to give a CONTENT WARNING: Not only is there a violent attempted rape (which I don’t excerpt), there’s also suicidal ideation and more discussion of intimate partner violence.

We’re almost done. Let’s do this.

We pick up chapter thirty exactly where twenty-nine left off. In other words, the chapter was ridiculously long, had no hook, and needed to be broken up somehow. So, the hook we ended up with was Demelssia looking at her steak and the next chapter being Anatoli just seconds later telling her she should eat.

Again, notice how the villain of this book so strongly resembles the “hero” of the most popular romance novel franchise of all time?

Demelssia refuses to eat and Anatoli says:

“In that case I think it’s time we went to bed.” The tone of his voice makes her look up sharply. He’s sitting back in his chair, watchful. Waiting. Like a predator.

[…]

His eyes on her, intense, darker. She’s paralyzed by his stare.

From Fifty Shades of Grey:

I am mesmerized…watching him like one would watch a rare and dangerous predator, waiting for him to strike.

Just saying.

Anatoli is like, look, this is happening, I’m going to rape you. She fights back and he drags her off to the bedroom for a super graphic and violent assault that I’m not going to excerpt here because it’s horrific. She only gets him to stop by telling him she’s on her period, which works. He says they should wait and leaves her alone to cry.

How long can she cry before her tears dry up?

Moments. Seconds. Hours.

Yes, those are indeed measurements of time.

So, after the attempted rape, there’s a section break and Anatoli tells her they’re suited for each other and he gets in bed with her. Then there’s another section break and time has passed. Demelssia wakes up at dawn and Anatoli is still asleep. She slept in her clothes and realizes she could run from him.

Beside her duffel she spies Anatoli’s suitcase. Maybe he keeps his money in there….If he does, it could help her escape. Carefully she unzips it, not knowing what she’ll find inside.

It’s neatly packed. There are some clothes–and his gun.

Demelssia realizes she could kill him right now and get away.

A tremor runs up her spine, and her breathing shallows. He’s kidnapped her Beaten her. Choked her. Nearly raped her. She despises him and everything he stands for. She’s terrified of him. She raises her trembling hand and takes aim. Quietly she releases the safety. Her head is throbbing, sweat beading on her brow.

This is it.

Her moment.

Her hand wobbles, and her visions blurs with her tears.

No. No. No. No.

Four this time. Serious business.

She’s not a murderer.

This makes sense and is consistent with her character. We know she’s a kind person with a tender heart. I just wish there would have been maybe a little bit more here. Like, an acknowledgment that she can’t prove she’s been kidnapped, that she’ll go to jail and almost certainly be put on trial in a country where she doesn’t speak the language and has no allies, that kind of thing. Because it would have hammered home her predicament a little more. Real-world details like that up the stakes more by narrowing down the options the character has.

She turns the gun around. And stares down the barrel. She’s seen enough American television to know what to do.

She doesn’t want to blindly accept her fate. This is one way out.

She could end it all, now. Her misery would be over.

Hold up. Is the implication here…I mean, I don’t have to preface it with a question. The implication here totally is that people in Albania need to learn how to commit suicide because they aren’t Westernized enough. Of all the fucking weird shit in this book, this might be the weirdest. Demelssia knows how to kill herself because she learned it on American television. As if there is no way she could have possibly put together “shoot self in face = die” on her own. Because she’s from Albania.

I just.

People paid money for this book.

FUCK ME I PAID MONEY FOR THIS BOOK.

The thing that stops her from killing herself is the thought of her mother and the fact that someone would have to clean up. Which, again, those are really fucking true-to-life thoughts when someone considers suicide.

She crumples to the floor. Defeated. A failure. She cannot take her own life.

Yes, absolutely, thoughts you have when you decide not to commit suicide, as your brain frantically tries to convince you to go through with it. 100%.

She doesn’t have the gumption.

…uh.

Everything was actually going really well until this point. Honestly, I was thinking, “My god, this is accurate. This is actually a true-to-life depiction of someone’s thoughts when they’re in suicidal despair. Wow! E.L. James did a good job with this.”

And then I got to “gumption.”

Gumption is positive. Gumption means resourceful. The ability to take initiative to find solutions other people might not be bold enough to ask for.

Gumption is not a word you use to describe a trait someone is lacking because they didn’t complete suicide.

The sorrow is overwhelming.

This is a sentence you never, ever need in a scene where your POV character has just tried to kill themselves. If it’s not obvious that they’re overwhelmed by sorrow when they’re putting a gun to their own head then you’ve failed and need to rewrite the scene.

Look. There are moments of actually good writing with a nuanced understanding of the subject matter in this book. And that’s why I’m so furious. A good editor who wants an author to present their work in the best possible form and an author invested in their own work enough to put aside their ego could have made this book so much better. And that’s infuriating.

Demelssia decides to take the bullets out of the gun and put it back. Anatoli wakes and Demelssia takes a shower and breakfast has arrived. Then, they have this conversation that I swear to Dog could be inserted anywhere into Fifty Shades Darker or Fifty Shades Freed and it would fucking fit:

“You stayed,” Anatoli says quietly. He seems subdued, though he’s as watchful as ever.

“Where would I go?” Alessia replies warily.

He shrugs. “You left me once before.”

Alessia stares at him. Mute. Despondent. Exhausted.

“Is it because you care for me?” he whispers.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she says, and, sitting down, picks out a pain au chocolat from the bread basket.

He takes his seat opposite her, and she can tell he’s hiding a slight and hopeful smile.

Seriously. I was inspired to rewrite this as Ana and Christian, in their first-person, present tense:

“You stayed,” Christian says quietly. He seems subdued, though he’s as watchful as ever.

“Where would I go?” I reply warily.

He shrugs. “You left me once before.”

I stare at him. Mute. Despondent. Exhausted.

“Is it because you care for me?” he whispers.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I say, and, sitting down, pick out a pain au chocolat from the bread basket.

He takes his seat opposite me, and I can tell he’s hiding a slight and hopeful smile.

Anatoli is Christian Grey. E.L James managed to write a book that confirms that the hero of her first series was an abusive monster, contrary to her repeated insistence that he’s just troubled or whatever. I wish it was on purpose but I can’t believe that it would be.

We check in with Moss’s POV now, where he’s considering the many tourist options of the city.

Tom and I wander across the vast Skanderbeg Square, which is close to the hotel. It’s a clear, chill morning, with the sun reflecting off the multicolored marble tiles that pave the gargantuan space. It’s dominated on one side by a bronze statue of Albania’s fifteenth-century hero on horseback, and on the other by the National History Museum. Although I’m anxious to get to Alessia’s town to find her home, we have to wait to meet our interpreter.

I’m unsettled and jittery and unable to keep still, so to kill time Tom and I take a quick walk through the museum.

You have got to be fucking kidding me right now with this bullshit.

I distract myself by snapping numerous photographs and posting the odd one online.

Are.

I get told off twice, but I ignore the officials and continue to take photographs surreptitiously.

You.

It’s hardly the British Museum,

Fucking.

but I’m fascinated by the Illyrian facts. Tom, of course, is preoccupied with the displays of medieval weaponry;

Kidding.

Albania has a rich and bloody history.

Me.

Your girlfriend has been kidnapped by her abusive fiancé. You go to a museum as a guest in her country, snidely remark that it’s not as good as the Museum in your country, and ignore the rules even after being reprimanded by guards because you have to post on Instagram. Which, by the way, if that doesn’t fucking come up in this book later, like she sees his Instagram and knows he’s coming after her or something, I will dress up like a pirate, run into a Barnes and Noble, yell “Argh, I be piratin’ this book,” grab a copy of The Mister and run into the street with it, where I will set it on fire.

Just kidding. I tried to burn an E.L. James book once. It wouldn’t even catch. It barely smoldered.

The elements don’t even want anything to do with this crap.

As for Tom, his friend with war-related PTSD, “of course” he’s going to want to view only the most bloodthirsty parts of the museum. Because that shit couldn’t be a trigger at all. And while we’re on the subject of “rich and bloody history,” you know who else has a rich and bloody history? FUCKING. ENGLAND.

This English author is really writing about another country having a “bloody history” when her country went out and colonized 3/4 of the world but ofuckingkay.

At ten we stroll down one of the tree-lined boulevards toward the coffeehouse where we’ve arranged to meet our translator.

STROLLED?

WHERE IS THE URGENCY? WHERE IS IT? WHERE!?

I am struck by how many men are sitting around drinking coffee outside, even though it’s cold.

Where are the women.

Inside where it’s warm because they’re just a little bit smarter than the men?

They meet their translator, get his full name and a backstory and good news, he brought his girlfriend and we get her backstory as well!

She wants to come with us.

Well, this could get complicated.

Yes. And that’s why the author should not have added a superfluous character. We don’t need to know much about the translator at all.

What do you know of Kukës?” I ask Drita directly.

She gives Thanas a nervous glance.

“That bad?” I eye them both.

“It has a reputation. When the Communists fell, Albania was…”

ENOUGH WITH THE GOD DAMN COMMUNISTS.

By the way, they have this whole chat over a cup of coffee instead of like, on the drive.

“Shall we get going?” I ask, eager to leave.

YOU COULD HAVE FUCKING FOOLED ME.

In Demelssia’s POV, we’re desperately grasping to meet word count:

Under any other circumstances, Alessia might have enjoyed this journey. She’s had a lightning tour of Europe’s highways. But she’s with Anatoli, the man she’ll be forced to marry–and she still has to face her father when they reach Kukës.

Wow, really? Are you going to be forced to marry Anatoli? Things are all coming together now. I wasn’t quite sure what motivated you to attempt suicide earlier in this chapter.

She sees the sea and it reminds her of Maxim and Anatoli is like, oh, I have some properties here in Croatia and the entire scene is there for no reason at all. We pop back to Moss’s POV where he describes the chaos of driving in Albania (which, from what I understand, is a valid observation) and an interesting-looking building that their translator explains is a hotel that’s been under construction for a long time.

We. Don’t. Need. These. Details.

If you want to show people photos from your vacation, put them on Facebook. Not in your fucking novel.

We also have to hear about how the translator’s parents learned English from the BBC World Service while it was banned by the Communists because it’s important to get more backstory about an extremely minor character who shows up 94% into the novel. Why? So Moss can assert British supremacy.

It transpires that the BBC, and most things British, are held in high regard by Albanians. It’s where they all want to go.

They all want to go to the BBC. You heard it here first, in a sentence that doesn’t say what the author thought it did.

Because this is a child’s social studies report on Albania, we also learn about Kukës winning the Nobel Peace Prize for taking in Kosovo refugees escaping genocide.

Is that…is that the bad reputation the town has?

They drive through the mountains, where Moss is shocked to have cell signal. Oliver calls and says the police want to talk to Demelssia, that some stolen stuff has been recovered from the break-in, and that the traffickers were wanted for other crimes already. Then there’s a lot of stuff about the landscape and how beautiful it is that I’m going to skip because the author should have, as well.

In Demelssia’s POV, she and Anatoli go to a diner, where he’s super agitated and won’t let her talk to her mother when he calls her. Then it’s back to Moss’s POV:

Close up, Kukës is not what I thought it wouldd be. It’s a nondescript town of weathered Soviet-style apartments build in blocks.

Then there’s a history of the town. Not shitting you, when it was built, how it gets its power from a hydroelectric dam, and again, no women. The hotel they stay at is American-themed, so we hear all about how it’s decorated and what the owner looks like and what the rooming arrangements are for all four people on this trip now, and then it’s FINALLY time to give a shit about the fact that they’re about to rescue Demelssia.

HA! Nope:

“Yes. What time would you like to go?”

“Five minutes. Just give us time to unpack.”

He’s gonna unpack.

Before he goes to rescue the love of his life.

He’s gonna take the time to unpack.

Steady on, Trevethick,” butts in Tom. “Can’t we have a drink first?”

Hmm…As my father would say, some Dutch courage always helps.

“A quick one. And just one. Okay? I’m going to meet my future wife’s parents–I don’t want to be stocious.”

Nevermind, they’re going to unpack and go for a drink.

You guys, I just can’t, anymore. I just want to put my head down on my desk and take a nap.

We cut to an hour later and they’re outside Demelssia’s parents’ house:

We’re on a large plot, surrounded by naked trees, though there are a few firs and a sizable, well-kept vegetable patch. The house is painted a pale green and has three stories and two balconies that face the water, from what I can see. It’s larger than the other houses we saw on our way here. Perhaps Alessia’s folks are affluent. I have no idea. The lake looks magnificent, lit up with hues of a fading winter sunset.

On the outside of the house, there’s a satellite dish, and it reminds me of a conversation I had with Alessia.

Was it the conversation where she told you she didn’t live in Kukës? Like, seriously, she lives an hour away? It’s not a geographically huge city, looking on the map. It’s like, three square miles.

Anyway, is anyone else having a hard time reconciling Demelssia’s stories of her hardscrabble childhood with a three-story lakeside retreat, a sprawling lawn, and a satellite dish? Just me? The way she described her home I thought she would be living in a half-under ground dirt-walled hovel thing like a moisture farmer on Tattooine.

Moss goes up to the door and knocks.

My heart is pounding, and in spite of the cold a trickle of sweat runs down my back.

This is it.

Game face on, dude.

I’m about to meet my new in-laws–thoough they don’t know it yet.

Remember, he’s not sure if Demelssia was kidnapped or left, but he’s been leaning toward kidnapped, right? So, why is his thought that he has to bring his game, rather than some kind of hope that they’ve heard from Demelssia or know where she is? And if he doesn’t think Demelssia is in danger, isn’t he just acting exactly like Anatoli, assuming he can make a woman marry him if she doesn’t want to?

So, here’s an interesting thing:

The door half opens, and a chink of light behind her reveals a slight, middle-aged woman in a head-scarf.

This is 100% pure speculation on my part here but is it possible that we’re supposed to have read Demelssia as coded-Muslim this whole time but the author just like, never used the word? We’ve heard about Demelssia wearing a headscarf and referring to Christianity as her grandmother’s religion, her home is in an area where a lot of Muslims live, and the stereotypes about abusive patriarchal customs and forced marriage and honor killings are exactly what I would expect James to present if she were trying to get across that her character was Muslim. Demelssia’s mother even tells Moss that he can’t be there because her husband isn’t at home. It feels like James wanted to write a story with a Muslim heroine but thought all the stuff she wrote would sound xenophobic if she used the actual word because what she wrote was super xenophobic. I can’t say for sure that’s what happened, I’m just saying that’s how it comes off to me as a reader.

Anyway, Moss tells Mrs. Demachi that he’s come to ask her husband for permission to marry their daughter, and we go back to Demelssia’s POV.

“Our final border crossing, carissima,” Anatoli says. “Back to your home country. Shame on you for leaving it and skulking away like a thief and dishonoring your family. When we return, you can apologize to your parents for the worry you have caused them.”

This dialogue is like like the first scene of a soap opera airing on a Monday after a hell of Friday cliff-hanger.

The chill in the air reaches through her clohtes and entwines around her heart. And she knows it’s because she’s pining for the only man she’ll ever love.

Well, I’m glad she knows why. I was worried she forgot.

Anatoli puts her in the trunk.

“Get in. It will be night soon,” Anatoli snaps as he holds open the lid.

The night belongs to the djinn.

And she’s staring at one now. That’s what he is. The djinn personified.

Okay, but djinn can be either bad or good. I have this feeling that James thinks djinn means like, the devil or demons.

Anyway, Demelssia’s in the trunk now.

Over at Demelssia’s childhood home and in Moss’s POV, Mrs. Demachi asks him to come inside. He takes off his shoes and notes that he’s glad his socks match and how Demelssia is the reason for that and like, damn, dude. Get yourself together. He describes the house, which I’ll skip because it basically boils down to colorful, folksy rugs and blankets on everything and framed photos around. Of course, he sees one of Demelssia playing the piano and then he actually sees the piano, etc. Maybe I should care about this whole section more but I just don’t because the kidnapping/chase has been dragged out for so long now.

Mrs. Demachi asks for news about Demelssia, and Moss tells her that she worked for him and they fell in love and they were very happy.

“How do you know that she wants to marry you?”

Ah!

“In truth, Mrs. Demachi, I don’t know. I haven’t had the chance to ask her. I believe that she’s been kidnapped and is being brought to Albania against her will.”

Like, I feel like her mom would know that her daughter has been kidnapped, though, if Anatoli is bringing her back.

Moss tells Mrs. Demachi that Demelssia told him she doesn’t want to marry Anatoli.

“My husband will return soon. And it is for him to decide what will become of Alessia. His mind is set on her betrothed. He has given her word.” She looks down at her clasped hands. “I let her go once, and it broke my heart. I don’t think I can let her go again.”

“Do you want her to be trapped in a violent, abusive marriage?”

Her eyes whip to mine, and in them I see a glimpse of her pain and her insight, swiftly followed by her shock that I know–this is her life.

Mrs. Demachi’s motive here is absurd. She risked everything to send Demelssia away. Mrs. Demachi put herself in danger just to make sure Demelssia could escape that life. And now the excuse is, well, I’ll just miss her so ding-dang much? Not buying it.

Mrs. Demachi tells Moss he has to leave but says he should come back at eight because that’s when they’re expecting Demelssia to return.

I have a question.

WHY THE FUCK DOES THAT NEED TO BE A THING?

This rescue is so fucking convoluted and it didn’t need to be. We didn’t need the translator and the translator’s girlfriend and their entire backstory. We just needed, “After we picked up our translator,” and then move the action forward. We didn’t need them to arrive at their hotel and have a drink or go to a museum or to get the history of Albania at this point. We needed them to drive up to the Demachis’ house and boom, the action moves forward.

None of this was an attempt at suspense or creating tension. It’s just here to make the book longer. Nothing here is working. There’s a big misunderstanding that just got abandoned, I guess, because Demelssia didn’t go with Anatoli because of the misunderstanding, she was just really upset about it while she was with Anatoli and it changed her behavior and reactions zero percent. There’s a problem with the time table that’s slowing everything down. Moss needed to come home and find the fucking note, believe she left him, and then have some kind of memory or clue that she didn’t leave on purpose and now it’s days later and oh no, now there’s really a time crunch. This book is a master class in how to not write romantic suspense. The stakes can’t be high if the risks are too low.

But no, we have to account for every hour of the god damn day, we go back to the hotel bar and wait with Tom and Moss until Moss says he can’t wait anymore and they go to the house early. After a section break, they get there and do the whole nervous-to-meet-the-parents thing because Moss knows he has to prove he’s a better option for Demelssia than Anatoli is.

Maybe you should open with, IDK, “I’m an earl.”

I’m going to cheap out on you a little here and just summarize the scene, but I do have to give you this picture of Mr. Demachi:

Demachi is older than his wife; his face is weather-beaten, his hair more gray than black. He wears a somber dark suit that lends him the air of a Mafia don. His eye give nothing away. I’m glad he’s half a head shorter than me.

We had to get the organized crime in there somehow, right?

Anyway, the scene goes on with an exchange of information all the parties probably already know. Moss tells Mr. Demachi that he knows Demelssia ran away because of the arranged marriage. When Mr. Demachi asks Moss why he’d want to marry Demelssia’, his answer is that he loves her. We go back to Demelssia’s POV, where she’s expecting to be beaten upon arrival. They get there and she notices the extra car outside but she’s so focused on getting to her mom that she doesn’t really think about it. Instead, she runs in and sees Moss sitting with her dad.

He’s here.

And the chapter ends.

My Impression So Far: This book needed to be half as long as it is and include twenty-percent of the characters and details. Why do we need to know about the translator and his girlfriend? Why did they have to be named and given backstories? In this genre, they didn’t. This is supposed to be suspense. The time to introduce a side character with a rich and interesting backstory is not and never will be during what should be the fairly fast-paced climax of a romantic suspense novel. What’s worse is, even as bad as Fifty Shades Freed was, and even as obvious and boring and ridiculous as the kidnapping plot in that book was? It was more exciting and more tightly paced than this. And that was supposed to be erotic romance, not romantic suspense.

Every time I write one of these recaps, I’m chilled to the bone by the knowledge that in the Berenstein universe exists a version of E.L. James who has deft instincts for plotting, pacing, and characterization.