Review: Fifth Grave Past The Light by Darynda Jones

I'm as surprised as y'all that I read book five of this series. Truly. I'm even more surprised I was given an ARC.

Fifth Grave repairs a lot of what was going wrong with the Charley Davidson series before magnifying new flaws. I find Jones so frustrating as an author. There is a great series here, with a strong point of view and a compelling frame, but it doesn't quite hit the page. She constantly uses one pound of story for a five pound bag. The Charley Davidson series is part Charlaine Harris, part Jenny Lawson, part Janet Evonavich. This should be an adorable cracktastic thrill ride, not a misaligned wooden coaster.

When we meet Charley this time her PTSD has died down and so have the abuse dynamics of her relationship with Reyes. He still tries to kill those close to her but Charley finds it endearing instead of traumatic. He's working on his communication skills while still keeping Charley in the dark as often as possible. (No, that wasn't a play on words.) His position of manipulation is absolute. He knows the answers to all of Charley's questions but refuses to tell them. He insists she make choices without being fully informed of the outcomes. Jones moves Reyes out of the Bad Boy mold and into the Benevolent Billionaire a little more in this chapter. Reyes is still the guy all the girls want, who only wants Charley. He is a trophy mate with a taste for terror.

Also disturbing me is an uptick in ghost children. Charley is attracting dead children who don't want to leave. Her assistant, Angel, has shadowed his mother for longer than he was alive. Her (special needs?) assistant Rocket lives in an abandoned building with his traumatized sister Blue and the somewhat disturbed sister of a living cop. In book four a formerly possessed living deaf boy was added and in this volume we meet a murdered elementary school girl. I find a child ghost far less charming than Charley does. There is a horror in early death. There is a horror in children trying to comfort parents who cannot see or respond to them. It it no mystery that most of Charley's young ghosts are disturbed, they are trapped in a cycle of perpetual neglect. It is an interesting choice, this army of dead children, but it's not necessarily a good one.

The weight of the mythology this series wants to hold is pushing the Ghosts Du Jour to the side. With deliberate ADD pacing, action pinballs from terrorized female ghosts to a new therapist, to her sister's side story, to Reyes sister's side story, to Garrett, and so on. At this point Jones needs to drop the mythology or the crime of the day and get serious about one of them. (She also might want to ease up some on the whimsical humor. It's reading like a lack of ideas instead of a style choice.)  I've got that 50 volume series feeling happening and there isn't enough at stake to hang in that long. Add in Surprise Bondage plus Pointless Heroine Assault and you've got why I wasn't going to buy Fifth Grave. I'd probably read Sixth Grave if it was free, but I can't promise I'd finish it.

Sudden Bondage Doesn't Mean I Love You

Lately I'm seeing a lot of Sudden Bondage. Nothing makes me lose my investment in a story faster than the use of childhood abuse as a substitute for real conflict resolution. If you're not familiar with the concept, Sudden Bondage is the scene where the heroine (or hero, but more often the heroine) ties the partner up with little or no warning (and certainly not fully informed consent) as a demonstration that they are trustworthy. The tied partner usually has a history of abuse, often with PTSD symptoms attached. The dominant partner wants to tie being bound with pleasure instead of having it be bound with pain.

Leaving aside the issues of personal sexual preference and the importance of consent between non-damaged partners, let me explain why Sudden Bondage is so problematic to me in mainstream romance. I get that bondage is trendy right now, but I don't read romance for the sexy-times-rawr, I read romance for the character conflicts. If you take someone who has trust issues, who has an abuse history with control needs and you bind them without consent you don't get the gentling-the-wild-horse fetish that ends up on the author page. You are far more likely to get violence, panic, racing heartbeats, more distrust and an end to your relationship. This person is not going to be thinking "Wow, so hot after all" they are going to be thinking "Oh my god, please stop, don't touch me, I have to get away." You are also unlikely to get the kind of casual we-will-see-what-happens agreement that some characters in romance offer. Your character is wondering why their lover isn't respecting their boundaries. You character is wondering why their lover thinks they have to be cured rather than appreciated. Sudden Bondage tells me you don't understand abuse issues. You don't understand anything about this character point you've decided to use and I will hate your story proactively from that moment forward.

Like any group of people, abused children are not all the same. Some like double dark chocolate, some like vanilla, some like spumoni, some eschew ice cream entirely. Being one myself and having known a considerable number as well, I will say the adult abuse survivor of romanceland generally resembles an actual adult abuse survivor about as closely as a manatee does a mermaid. (Yes, I meant to make the fictional version the manatee. Manatees float dumbly along in the ocean occasionally eating their own waste while mermaids have complex and varied lives. There was a documentary and everything.) In my experience, adult survivors of abuse have many challenges. We don't think like the other kids. We don't have the same needs as the other kids. Our emotional triggers are not theirs. We are also endlessly resourceful. We seek and appreciate fun. We value the human ties and freedoms that we've attained. Respect and consent are not abstract concepts to us. We do not believe in doing things for someone's own good. Put me in a room of people and I go to the ones laughing the most, smiling the most and making the best jokes. Someone beat the crap out of them and then it stopped. It's time to live. It's time to appreciate life.

In fiction the adult survivor is shuttered down into themselves. They cannot form attachments. They do not trust their own instincts. They are trapped in the mental prison their parents built for them, broken until the fictional lover gently leads them into the light. I dunno, man. Maybe this is true of some I haven't meant. Maybe it's true of adults who were in abusive relationships. After years of exposure to some of the most fucked up family situations to walk the planet, I can tell you it doesn't line up with what I've been or seen from kids who grew up and got the hell out. My old man dies and leaves me a vast estate? I'm not gonna cry in my pillow about upholding his mantle. I'm gonna throw a party that makes Puff Daddy look like a cheapskate. My lover thinks they know what I need more than I do? I'm getting a new lover yesterday.

It's obvious to me when a writer approaches abuse from a place of pity instead of a place of experience. Some writers do a great job with abuse from their research and intuition. Nora Roberts is pretty much perfect in her handling of male and female abuse survivors. Courtney Milan does a nice job as well. (No WAY Mark lives in that house, I am still saying.) It's totally possible. But like Brenda Joyce's historical black friends your abuse adult is a stereotype with little rooting in plausible reality. You might want to get that looked at.

DNF Review: When You Give a Duke a Diamond by Shana Galen

I've been doing a lot of DNF reading lately. Sometimes I set a book aside and try again. Sometimes I soldier on, carried aloft by the wave of hate reading. It's pretty rare that I hit a book two, three, four times and just say forget it. (2013 has not been a good year for me.) Lord & Lady Spy was the first Galen I abandoned. When You Give a Duke a Diamond is the second.

Meet Juliette. She's famous for being famous. She plays men off each other, collecting their offerings of wealth. She has a scandalous protector who is actually, um, something that gets revealed in the part of the book I didn't read. In the first half he's off the page. Apparently she and two other women are pretending to be his lover. He sets them up with the cash and the flash and they're going to find aristocratic husbands. Because that is the natural outcome of life at the high end of the sex trade. (If the Hermetically Sealed Heroine had a cousin, she'd be the Secretly Chaste Courtesan.) Juliette is divorced yet oddly eager to reenter the matrimonial state. Given that Juliette's ex husband is a scary abusive creep I would've expected her to have some reluctance. Perhaps, with her gift for social climbing, she might have considered actually becoming a courtesan. In that life she would have an escape hatch. But this is a tale where abuse issues are excuses for bonding. Or bondage. We'll get to that.

Juliette meets William in a series of nonsensical events. They aren't just tedious to follow, they don't pass the logic test. William leaves his fiancee on the balcony. When he returns she is missing. Juliette claims the woman has been murdered. There is a bullet in the wall and no sign of dead fiancee. Since dead fiancee has been having extramarital sex (unlike Juliette) no one but her parents worry much about this. William wavers between believing Juliette and repudiating her. They engage in some public scenes where neither of them are terribly lucid. Juliette runs to William (whom she barely knows) for protection from a known threat rather than the men she already has on the string. Once forced into his life, she challenges him at every step with such stunningly tone deaf antisocial behavior that my sympathy began shifting to her ex husband. Juliette wears entitlement like a perfume. Bravado or not, it's shocking when William begins craving her company. Of course, William is a Duke. And Juliette is known as The Duchess, one of the Three Diamonds who are the alleged lovers of the Earl of Sin.

I just typed that. With my fingers. I could insert a lecture on the mine cut diamonds of the pre-1900 era and the frequency of foil backing as a method to improve their appearance, but I will just bow to the De Beers machine and move on.

William has OCD from his abusive father's questionable parenting methods. Rather than act like almost every formerly abused child I've ever known (and I've known plenty) William acts like the Abused Child of Fiction. He cannot be free. He lives his life, despite unimaginable access to power and resources, in the narrow constraints his father dictated. He upholds the order bequeathed to him without question. Having been unloved, he does not form attachments. He is a stern and rigid man. He and Juliette bond over tales of - what is the word for dog murder? Is there such a word? Canineicide? Anyway, they had a puppy and then they didn't and it was their fault for being such bad, bad boys and girls. (Take a moment here to wonder why William didn't buy a litter of puppies to piss on his father's grave daily.) Dead dogs mean I love you. Or something. Soon Juliette is introducing Surprise Bondage to their lives and trying my nerves in new and inventive ways. Someone attempts to rape her. Is it the guy who killed William's forgotten fiancee? Is it Juliette's ex husband? (She not only dismisses that possibility she fails to share  the thought.) I suddenly realized I didn't care. I was more interested in the dead fiancee than either of the people pretending to look for her.