Atticus by Leslie Fear
My rating: 3/5 cats
this book is a solid three “liked it” stars cats coming from someone with this attitude towards romance:
but to paranormal romance fans—come read this!
i may not be a fan of romance novels in general, but i am a fan of ms. leslie fear, who co-authored two books i would never have read on my own, but she’s such a delightfully effervescent and genuine person (on the internet, anyway. she may drown baby koalas IRL for all i know), that i took a chance and read both Villere House and Bayou Grise: Sins of Sanite, and while they may not have been within my typical reading-sphere, i enjoyed them both so of course i was gonna read this new book that she wrote all by herself!
i’m not sure of this book is intended for a YA audience, but it is certainly suitable for one, unless cussin’ is something you find too distressing to put before the vulnerable eyeballs of teenagers, who would never ever themselves use profanity. but the characters are high-school age, and there is zero smut or even a whisper of adult situations. just some good clean fun and one vengeful, homicidal ghost.
first let me tell you everything i don’t like about romance novels, and the ways in which this book avoids them.
1: i hate it when two people fall in love/lust just by virtue of proximity—where you are told these characters are attracted to each other without the author supplying any rationale for their supposed chemistry.
this one has a pretty typical meet-cute moment, where candice, on her first day in a new school (just one first day in a steady succession of first days at new schools), bumps into a cute guy and her stuff flies everywhere, resulting in casually cruel teenage mockery by the hallway rabble, which mockery cute boy diffuses.
which is a little damsel in distress, but she’s no damsel, and she isn’t instantly smitten with her rescuer, brad. in fact, she’s reluctantly grateful, with a little resentment smeared in, since her only plan right now is to kill time until graduation, forming as few attachments as possible.
I learned my lesson a long time ago to keep a low profile. I can’t allow anyone to get too close or find out my life is a complete disaster. I just want to graduate as soon as humanly possible. I’m not going to fall for the first guy who’s nice to me.
which leads to “romance novel convention dislikes 2 and 3”:
2: sole focus on the female character’s internal monologues which tend to idealize the love interest into a mythologized version of a human being without nuance.
this book is told from both candice and brad’s perspective, so it’s not a case of the woman throwing herself at some faceless monolithic archetype—they are both fully formed characters whose attraction seems genuine according to their personalities.
brad’s version of their meeting and candice’s frosty reception of his assistance, in which he appreciates the unexpectedness of her reaction; almost charmed by her rudeness:
I offered my help when the bell rang because I was pretty sure she didn’t know where her next class was, either, but she turned me down. I couldn’t help but laugh, even though she was a complete stranger to me; she was trying to be tough and do everything on her own.
3: i do not like the obstacles that prevent two people from being together—they are usually either trivial situations blown up for dramatic purpose or so farfetched that they have no resonance within the reader; no way in through their personal life experiences.
here we have two obstacles, where one falls into the second part of my complaint, but it’s permissible THIS TIME. for the first, we have a girl who has built walls around her emotional self because of the difficulties of her home life: she lives with her abusive alcoholic mother who has difficulty holding a job, money is tight and they move frequently, so candice has trained herself not to form what are bound to be fleeting attachments. additionally, her mother’s romantic life hasn’t exactly set up healthy expectations for candice, so she’s not looking to perpetuate that cycle.
obstacle #2—there’s a ghost who is claiming candice as his own, so that’s kind of awkward.
let’s put the ghost aside for now and focus on candice’s fraught relationship with her mother, because it’s the most interesting aspect of the book, to me, being the romance-resistor that i am.
candice is stubborn, proud, and secretive. she’s embarrassed by her home life and her mother’s drunken rages, and she’s taken steps to prevent herself from the complications a relationship would add to her already full emotional plate, even in minor matters:
My only focus is to find my next class before I have to ask for help. I don’t want favors and I don’t want charity because nothing in my world is free. Everything is conditional. I thought by now I’d be used to the way we live but what I really do is fake it. Just like my mom. Most of the time I feel like I’m on autopilot, trudging through life with no direction, only hers.
so in that hallway interaction, she regards brad with skepticism: I’m not used to sincerity, not even a little bit.
she doesn’t see the point of starting a romantic relationship doomed to fail: I’ve never had roots and I sure as hell don’t think we’ll stick around here long enough for them to grow.
however, candice is not some fragile creature scared of intimacy; if anything she’s more pissed than fearful about the way her mother’s behaviors have influenced her own choices.
I would love to tell her that she’s destroyed my life and to go straight to hell. But I can’t. I have no doubt she would slap the shit out of me if I did. So I go off on her in my mind instead. I’ve done it countless times.
no matter how justifiably angry she is at her mother, candice isn’t without sympathy for her, and she genuinely loves her mother, regardless of how hard she makes it to do so.
Sometimes I think I’m a bad person for hating her, but the truth is, I actually don’t hate her at all. I hate what she’s become.
despite candice’s resolve to remain unattached through her final year of school before she can start over at a college far away from her mother’s emotional baggage, despite the instability she’s come to expect, I pretty much stay in a perpetual state of uneasiness thanks to the unpredictable world I live in, through a steady stream of good-natured teasing, chivalrous acts, and well, being dreamy (it IS a romance novel, after all), brad manages to win over the reluctant candice and they begin to enter into a cautious relationship.
which brings us to 4: sex scenes. oh, lordy, the sex scenes in romance novels are terrible. the euphemisms, the contortions—they mostly just make me laugh with how hot they are not making me. i know i read a lot of monsterporn, which are nothing but sex scenes, but i read those for entertainment purpose only—because they are SO over-the-top that it can’t help but cause the helpless giggles. this book circumvents that issue entirely, and it is a true romance novel, about people falling for each other who never actually hook up on the page.
and what could easily have turned into some wholesomely generic story of white teenagers falling in gum commercial love in the hands of a different author goes off in another direction entirely when candice finds herself repeatedly drawn to an abandoned house with its own dark secrets, inhabited by the ghost of a man who sees in candice the echoes of a woman he has been longing for for over a hundred years. because of candice’s shaky background no matter where we end up, no place ever feels like home, when she enters the abandoned decay of the emory house, she feels intoxicated. not “safe” so much as “devoured” by lassitude and calm, not unlike the effects of the venom some predators release into their prey.
from there it goes straight to spooky paranormal horror-romance town.
she gets bonus points for the correct usage of “nauseated” instead of “nauseous”—david foster wallace would be so pleased! that’s a bad habit i still can’t break myself of, so kudos to ms. fear!
again—paranormal romance fans—come read this!
and thank you again for daring to place your baby in front of my romance-resisting eyes!!
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