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Consequences
Twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth did not plan to break up his marriage when she had an affair with her law school professor. But she did. Fifteen years later, she’s still coming to terms with the consequences of her youthful trying to love a stepdaughter who hates her, financially and emotionally supporting an ex-wife who will never forgive the betrayal, and enduring the relentless overtures of a sister-in-law who’s determined to be her best friend. As her sister-in-law plunges into a reckless affair and her stepdaughter aggressively explores her sexuality, Elizabeth finds herself forced to reconsider her definition of love, commitment, and responsibility—a process that finally releases her from the shackles of her past mistakes and shows her the way to her own happily-ever-after.
280 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 2015
1 person is currently reading
316 people want to read
About the author
M. Jane Colette
26 books78 followersM. Jane Colette’s left-brain persona spends a lot of time in board rooms, “war rooms” and court rooms parsing lies. Her right-brain persona longs to be an iconoclast and artist. When nobody’s looking, she writes poetry (badly) and throws paint at canvas (less badly). Tell Me is their first collaboration, and celebrates their joint love affair with Calgary, Montreal, texting and impractical shoes. ~ HarperCollins Publishers
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 2, 2021
Consequences of defensive adultery
Consequences of aggressive confidentiality
Consequences of exothermic radiochemistry
Consequences of scientific falsifiability
Consequences of infectious microbiology
Consequences of persistent paleontology
Consequences of artificial tranquility
Consequences of accidental infertility
Consequences of...
Anyway, I don't read much tragedy, or much erotica, or...
... or much romance, so I picked this book up knowing that it may not be my plate of hummus. To my fortune, it turned out to be a delight to read; a relaxing experience, in fact. I read the first half in one sitting, and the remainder over a few weeks. (That should tell you more about my terrible time management skills than the quality of the book, by the way.)
The characters in Consequences (of adultery; the defensive kind) are vivid, human, and just as annoying (and as dramatic) as people in real life. While most novels are a telling of a story, this one is a telling of a telling of a story, which adds an interesting layer to the events within it — a world on top of a world, granting the reader access (undeservingly, almost) to a private, intimate conversation between the main character and her lover. I must...
Consequences of aggressive confidentiality
Consequences of exothermic radiochemistry
Consequences of scientific falsifiability
Consequences of infectious microbiology
Consequences of persistent paleontology
Consequences of artificial tranquility
Consequences of accidental infertility
Consequences of...
──────────────
What are you doing?
— I don't know. I just love that title.
──────────────
Anyway, I don't read much tragedy, or much erotica, or...
──────────────
You're a terrible liar, lover-mine.
— Stop interrupting me!
──────────────
... or much romance, so I picked this book up knowing that it may not be my plate of hummus. To my fortune, it turned out to be a delight to read; a relaxing experience, in fact. I read the first half in one sitting, and the remainder over a few weeks. (That should tell you more about my terrible time management skills than the quality of the book, by the way.)
The characters in Consequences (of adultery; the defensive kind) are vivid, human, and just as annoying (and as dramatic) as people in real life. While most novels are a telling of a story, this one is a telling of a telling of a story, which adds an interesting layer to the events within it — a world on top of a world, granting the reader access (undeservingly, almost) to a private, intimate conversation between the main character and her lover. I must...
──────────────
What a convoluted way of saying you liked it.
— That's it. I'm not uttering another word!
What if I do this...
— Aaaah...
──────────────
May 6, 2017
The way Elizabeth's story of her marriage—her relationship with her husband, and the relationships with her stepdaugher, sister-in-law, and his ex—is framed by the explicit encounter between her and her lover makes reading this book a really interesting experience. Her lover interrupts her, teases her, plays with her, pushes her.... It changes how the reader understands their relationship. It takes her storytelling in different directions. It's a family drama, very real and raw and sexy and tragic and funny. I'm not quite sure how else to describe it. It's a really great book.
May 6, 2017
I couldn't put this book down. The relationships between all the women feel so real. The way the story is told is really sexy and different. I loved loved the ending.
August 20, 2017
I got this book through Goodreads giveaway hosted by the author and I liked it so much I wanted to leave a review.
Consequences Of Defensive Adultery follows Elizabeth (not Liz unless she loves you), a lawyer whose tumultuous relationship with her husband and his family pushes her into... well, "defensive adultery." As she navigates her way though her relationships with the men and women who have become important in her life - some by choice, most by circumstance - Liz ends up confronting her own past and allowing herself to grow as an individual and learn to love the most important person of all: herself.
I did not expect to like Liz as much as I do. She's a cheater. You know that going into the story - it's literally written on the book's face. But as she talks to her unnamed, faceless lover-of-the-moment, you begin to feel for her. The way she relates to people, her little quirks, the men she chooses to cheat with, all of these things paint a vivid picture of a woman you can't help but empathize with.
If you've been following my reviews, you know that characters make or break a story for me, especially leads. MJ Colette KNOWS how to write characters. The motivations, the actions following the motives, and the reactions to the actions of the whole cast of characters (1) were so distinct from one another and (2) made PERFECT sense based on the development I as a reader saw for each character. This isn't a 2-dimensional character erotic novel. These people feel real, you will feel like you could step right into their world. You can't help but root for them.
When, at the end, I felt a surge of pride for Liz - who I feel I know well enough that I can use the nickname - I knew I wouldn't be able to get this book out of my head.
Now, the aforementioned faceless lover. The book opens with a chapter of dialogue between him and Liz, and I was thrown at first by that. Not enough to DNF (not that close to the beginning; I'm no quitter) but perhaps jarring enough to cause someone else to DNF it. I understand that his sections were to push the story along, but when I read them I didn't really get much out of them. They offered explanations of things that I felt were obvious at times and they did more to draw me out of the overarching story. That said...
(SPOILER-ish)
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
when he holds Liz while she cries after the scene with Zia and Brian and the painting
.
.
.
.
(END SPOILER)
...I felt that moment with him was a strong enough addition to the text that the rest make sense, if only to keep that emotional breakthrough scene in the novel.
I gave Consequences 3.5/5 stars, though I'm leaning towards a 3.75... You guys read it and let me know what you think!
Consequences Of Defensive Adultery follows Elizabeth (not Liz unless she loves you), a lawyer whose tumultuous relationship with her husband and his family pushes her into... well, "defensive adultery." As she navigates her way though her relationships with the men and women who have become important in her life - some by choice, most by circumstance - Liz ends up confronting her own past and allowing herself to grow as an individual and learn to love the most important person of all: herself.
I did not expect to like Liz as much as I do. She's a cheater. You know that going into the story - it's literally written on the book's face. But as she talks to her unnamed, faceless lover-of-the-moment, you begin to feel for her. The way she relates to people, her little quirks, the men she chooses to cheat with, all of these things paint a vivid picture of a woman you can't help but empathize with.
If you've been following my reviews, you know that characters make or break a story for me, especially leads. MJ Colette KNOWS how to write characters. The motivations, the actions following the motives, and the reactions to the actions of the whole cast of characters (1) were so distinct from one another and (2) made PERFECT sense based on the development I as a reader saw for each character. This isn't a 2-dimensional character erotic novel. These people feel real, you will feel like you could step right into their world. You can't help but root for them.
When, at the end, I felt a surge of pride for Liz - who I feel I know well enough that I can use the nickname - I knew I wouldn't be able to get this book out of my head.
Now, the aforementioned faceless lover. The book opens with a chapter of dialogue between him and Liz, and I was thrown at first by that. Not enough to DNF (not that close to the beginning; I'm no quitter) but perhaps jarring enough to cause someone else to DNF it. I understand that his sections were to push the story along, but when I read them I didn't really get much out of them. They offered explanations of things that I felt were obvious at times and they did more to draw me out of the overarching story. That said...
(SPOILER-ish)
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
when he holds Liz while she cries after the scene with Zia and Brian and the painting
.
.
.
.
(END SPOILER)
...I felt that moment with him was a strong enough addition to the text that the rest make sense, if only to keep that emotional breakthrough scene in the novel.
I gave Consequences 3.5/5 stars, though I'm leaning towards a 3.75... You guys read it and let me know what you think!
June 2, 2017
Consequences proposes, in a roundabout way, the concept of “defensive adultery”—adultery, in other words, committed in response to one’s partner’s wrongs (be they emotional abandonment or sexual affairs), a way of salving oneself after a lover’s cruelty, or of creating enough emotional distance that the lover’s wrongdoings can’t hurt you. In the novel, the narrator Elizabeth relates the story of such adultery to her current lover as they… do lover things.
In her story, which occurs before she takes up with her current lover, she begins an affair with a professor whose marriage to another woman, Zia, has crumbled. Into the empty space steps Elizabeth, only to discover that, once she is the wife and no longer the lover, she is put in Zia’s place as her husband takes newer, younger lovers on the side. Zia angrily haunts their relationship—in no small part because she has a daughter with the professor, a daughter who is shuttled between Zia’s and her father’s homes; also in the mix is the angry, pansexual, pierced and tattooed daughter-in-rebellion Sasha, the narrator’s blood daughter Alexandra, and Sasha’s godmother, Zia’s and Elizabeth’s friend Annie.
It’s a tenuous trembling thing, this web of people pulled together into a knot of relationships, all painful, all vital, but all the push-pull kind of hate-love. Elizabeth is strung between them all, hero and aggressor and victim in one, more naturally reactive, struggling to become active on her own. She is, in other words, extremely human.
The story is told through Elizabeth’s voice, cut through with conversations between Elizabeth and her current lover, who controls and tortures her (only as much as she agrees to and enjoys) as she recounts. The frame tale (the story of Elizabeth telling the story to her lover, his statements of interest and whim, and his tormenting of her) gives tension to the story Elizabeth is telling, positions it differently for the reader than one might be inclined to understand it otherwise. The lover becomes, through the telling, a needling voice, disbelieving the point of view or recasting the events through a different eye, calling into question the sole authority--or even primacy--of the narrator.
The author herself (whom I recently met at a book conference) hands out business cards that read “I write erotica for smart people,” which translates to this novel being gentler, more emotionally complex, more subtle and less flatly pornographic than what passes for “erotica” in most fiction/film (there's no, "Pizza? I didn't order any pizza"-level doing-it here). It is more about who feels what because of whom than it is about who puts what where. (It is, perhaps, more in keeping with the root of that word, “eros,” which refers either to the god of love, according to the ancient Greeks (Eros, who is like the Roman god Cupid), or to, in Freud’s terms, the “life instinct.” In those terms, yes, it’s erotica for sure.)
In fact, I’d call this “feminist erotica” (and here I can’t remember if Colette refers to her work as such, but I certainly would), in that it does not rely on dehumanizing the participants for its effects. In fact, the narrator and the women with whom she deals are allowed to be relentlessly human: confused, inarticulate about their feelings at times, proud, sometimes in the wrong, sometimes behaving badly, but still stubbornly doing it, complex, sympathetic, smart-and-stupid, real women. Plus, they’re too old and their bodies too lived-in to be porn vixens. Zia, the ex-wife who comes closest to being a villain in this story, is given the same attention and intelligence in her portrayal: the reader understands her more as a complex, angry, hurt, relatively powerless woman trying the only avenues she knows to get what she needs, rather than as a villain. I think of her more as the narrator’s antagonist; she’s the fly in the ointment, sure, but a sympathetic fly.
In fact, the only characters here who even skirt—excuse the pun—the edges of being stock are the story’s two most relevant men (the narrator’s ex-husband and her current lover), a turnabout kind of condition that could feel quite Ha-Ha-Now-YOU-be-a-substanceless-trope-for-a-change-satisfying though not necessarily right (in the way that audiences are supposed to cheer when the Scooby-Doo villain gets a bucket of paint dumped on his head), but the novel avoids this trap, stays feminist, and fleshes these guys out, too. They’re not the simple villains we’re inclined to make of them, there’s no just desserts here, or grand ironies, or, for that matter, paint buckets; there’s just real, complex people getting by in the ways they know how.
These characters, in other words, are not paper dolls—one always has the feeling, when reading, of having stumbled on a secret, of being let in to spy on something real and fraught and difficult that will go on whether or not one’s watching.
But you can’t, in the end, help but watch anyway.
In her story, which occurs before she takes up with her current lover, she begins an affair with a professor whose marriage to another woman, Zia, has crumbled. Into the empty space steps Elizabeth, only to discover that, once she is the wife and no longer the lover, she is put in Zia’s place as her husband takes newer, younger lovers on the side. Zia angrily haunts their relationship—in no small part because she has a daughter with the professor, a daughter who is shuttled between Zia’s and her father’s homes; also in the mix is the angry, pansexual, pierced and tattooed daughter-in-rebellion Sasha, the narrator’s blood daughter Alexandra, and Sasha’s godmother, Zia’s and Elizabeth’s friend Annie.
It’s a tenuous trembling thing, this web of people pulled together into a knot of relationships, all painful, all vital, but all the push-pull kind of hate-love. Elizabeth is strung between them all, hero and aggressor and victim in one, more naturally reactive, struggling to become active on her own. She is, in other words, extremely human.
The story is told through Elizabeth’s voice, cut through with conversations between Elizabeth and her current lover, who controls and tortures her (only as much as she agrees to and enjoys) as she recounts. The frame tale (the story of Elizabeth telling the story to her lover, his statements of interest and whim, and his tormenting of her) gives tension to the story Elizabeth is telling, positions it differently for the reader than one might be inclined to understand it otherwise. The lover becomes, through the telling, a needling voice, disbelieving the point of view or recasting the events through a different eye, calling into question the sole authority--or even primacy--of the narrator.
The author herself (whom I recently met at a book conference) hands out business cards that read “I write erotica for smart people,” which translates to this novel being gentler, more emotionally complex, more subtle and less flatly pornographic than what passes for “erotica” in most fiction/film (there's no, "Pizza? I didn't order any pizza"-level doing-it here). It is more about who feels what because of whom than it is about who puts what where. (It is, perhaps, more in keeping with the root of that word, “eros,” which refers either to the god of love, according to the ancient Greeks (Eros, who is like the Roman god Cupid), or to, in Freud’s terms, the “life instinct.” In those terms, yes, it’s erotica for sure.)
In fact, I’d call this “feminist erotica” (and here I can’t remember if Colette refers to her work as such, but I certainly would), in that it does not rely on dehumanizing the participants for its effects. In fact, the narrator and the women with whom she deals are allowed to be relentlessly human: confused, inarticulate about their feelings at times, proud, sometimes in the wrong, sometimes behaving badly, but still stubbornly doing it, complex, sympathetic, smart-and-stupid, real women. Plus, they’re too old and their bodies too lived-in to be porn vixens. Zia, the ex-wife who comes closest to being a villain in this story, is given the same attention and intelligence in her portrayal: the reader understands her more as a complex, angry, hurt, relatively powerless woman trying the only avenues she knows to get what she needs, rather than as a villain. I think of her more as the narrator’s antagonist; she’s the fly in the ointment, sure, but a sympathetic fly.
In fact, the only characters here who even skirt—excuse the pun—the edges of being stock are the story’s two most relevant men (the narrator’s ex-husband and her current lover), a turnabout kind of condition that could feel quite Ha-Ha-Now-YOU-be-a-substanceless-trope-for-a-change-satisfying though not necessarily right (in the way that audiences are supposed to cheer when the Scooby-Doo villain gets a bucket of paint dumped on his head), but the novel avoids this trap, stays feminist, and fleshes these guys out, too. They’re not the simple villains we’re inclined to make of them, there’s no just desserts here, or grand ironies, or, for that matter, paint buckets; there’s just real, complex people getting by in the ways they know how.
These characters, in other words, are not paper dolls—one always has the feeling, when reading, of having stumbled on a secret, of being let in to spy on something real and fraught and difficult that will go on whether or not one’s watching.
But you can’t, in the end, help but watch anyway.
August 18, 2019
This is an amazing book! The way it is written and how the story of Elizabeth is told through her lover’s sexy interruptions is just brilliant. Together with Elizabeth’s lover of the moment, the reader is invited to make predictions, assumptions and psycho analyze Elizabeth as she slowly reveals what really happened in the past 15 years of her life. I also loved the ending.
May 7, 2017
Loved this book. I've read it a few times and it holds it appeal every time. A lovely exploration of love in many guises.
January 31, 2019
My lovely friend wrote this book. she is a bright, talented and willing to take risks.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews