You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
aisforawkward 's review for:
Fearless
by Lauren Gilley
I am not entirely sure how I feel about this book, but I am going to ramble about it anyway. I am tentatively putting it in my unratable shelf, because any stars I give it will be very conflicted stars.
While there were things that I did like about this book, I am mostly going to talk about all the things I didn't, or at least was conflicted about, since they are what kept me from giving this a good rating, or a rating at all. While the problems in this book were many, complex, and varied, I think they can be summed up as technical problems, believability issues, ethics & morals inconsistencies, and poor character development.
First on the technical side of things, this book had a structural problem primarily with flashbacks throughout, but also with fragmented alternating scenes during what was supposed to be the climax of the story. More specifically the backstory was shown with flashbacks, where the book has periodic flashbacks early on, then a multiple chapter flashback arc, and then a few more scattered in the second half of the book. The multiple chapter “5 years ago” arc worked overall pretty well, with only minor transition issues. The rest of the flashbacks were for the most part intrusive, annoying, and poorly transitioned, even where an obviously important part of the overall narrative. I want to be clear that this was mostly just a problem on the structural side, not on the writing side itself. The scenes were consistent with the rest of the writing, so the problem is more editing than anything. The climax structural issue was more or less the same type of issue, but where alternating perspectives between the main characters and side characters simply didn't work given the way it was broken up into small brief alternating scene fragments, presumably to help increase overall tension and make it more suspenseful. I probably still would have dropped a star for these structural issues if it had been the only problem with the book, because it is as I say an editing problem, not per-se a writing one, but it definitely affected my overall ability to stay immersed in the story which compounded my believability issues as well.
Second! Believability. This one is complicated, so I am going to focus on the biggest believability issue I had: the MC itself. The MC alternated between being shown as a protective if screwed up family, and a violent amoral gang. In some ways it felt like a communal based society, like with scottish clan, where it was both one big “clan” family and multiple individual household families, having rules and leadership, and enemies fought, but also caring for the peoples around them. Unfortunately the illegal aspect of the club alternated between being grey area underground illegal dealings, and actual problematic things like the fact they had an on-staff murderer, and an on-staff torturer, and their first reaction to anything seemed to deploy them. Have an image problem? Don’t go to the police and work the system to your advantage, no torture and kill someone! I mean this entire aspect of the book simply didn’t work for me. It kept breaking believability, because in the real world, even with complicated morality, a culture that has kept itself around, and even part of a town’s fabric, for 80 years (or whatever), doesn’t do so by ignoring the law completely. It might abuse the law, it might make use of it when it works in their favor, and then work outside the law when it doesn’t. But that isn’t what happened in this book.
Instead at every single point, even when the law would have been good for MC image and inline with their goals they avoided it, they even actively worked against it. This aspect felt less like a rebellious side-culture and more like a violent anarchist mob. The first cares about public perception, and has rules and regulations. The second doesn’t care about public perception, or rules, or regulations. So culturally speaking the MC was a jumbled mess of inconsistent ideals, that in the real world don’t fit together. I think that even the torture and murder aspect would have worked better here had at several points in the story the characters not gone against their own self-interest just to bypass the law, because then it only would have come into play the times the law wouldn’t have worked in their favor which would have fit the complicated themes the author seemed to be trying to explore. Having some underground links didn’t bother me. Even the occasional gang like violence didn’t entirely bother me since they weren’t the ones instigating, and didn’t retaliate publicly in kind. But having on staff murderers and torturers and bypassing the law even when the law was on their side, just because that is just the way things are? Felt very unrealistically forced to me. And also at times undermined the believability of the whole “we are the good guys and just rebels at heart” the author kept trying to sell me.
Third! Ethics and morality. Okay to try and backtrack on this. This aspect of the story is at times pretty nuanced, because the author intentionally tries to show and play with the inconsistent ideals people can hold, such as the fact the main characters hook up at 17 and 30, and everyone except her mother but including her father (who hooked up at 16 and 27 themselves? I think.) seem revolted by it and actively break up their relationship. The fact this can squick people out makes sense to me. It didn’t actually bother me in this book, but other such cases I have come across definitely have in the past so I am inconsistent here too and know it. And of course the story is a MC with ganglike tendencies and mafia sensibilities etc, so morals in general are suspect. But what really really got to me was more mainstream aka the cheating storyline, because while there are all sorts of questionable morals in this book, and lots of iffy ethics on the part of the MC, the one thing that the author tried for was self-consistency. Except when it came to the boyfriend.
The entire boyfriend storyline was a huge issue for me from beginning to end, on multiple different levels, but the biggest being that ultimately she cheated on him and it doesn’t matter why, or that she has this big huge lifelong love with lots of history, because none of it makes it okay. She had been with her boyfriend for a year when she cheated, and yes she even felt bad for it… Until it was all “okay”. But here is the thing, the entire boyfriend storyline would have worked better if it had been a purely cheating storyline, and if she yes, owned up to it. Because if cheating is a question of morals (and for the main character it was, even though she is the one who did it), then it remains an issue regardless of the outcome. Instead the author acted like it didn’t really matter because the boyfriend wasn’t who she thought. Of course not. Because apparently so long as the one cheated on is secretly a horrible person that justifies the cheating. No. Just no. Cheating can’t be justified after the fact by new information that wasn’t known beforehand, because at the time she actually cheated, she had no way of knowing. This kind of attitude is what leads to serial cheating who always find new reasons to justify their cheating.
So yeah this whole part of the storyline was excessive, brushed off where it mattered, and undermined by this pointless sub-plot (that made for serious believability issues), and for no reason I could see except so she could get away with the cheating in the long run.
That leads me to the last major problem I had which was with the character development (and lack thereof) of the majority of the characters, but especially the antagonists. For example one of the big antagonist was a flat 2d evil troll type character from the time he was 8 when he calls the heroine a whore, and he doesn’t change in the slightest as he grows up. There was no depth to his antagonism, he was just a horrible person. This made that part of the book feel very cartoonish and flat, and undermined the overall conflict of the story. The second big reveal antagonist was more of a cypher and doesn’t make sense as a real person either:
I think the big problem with characterization here stems from the author’s attempt to use perspective shifts to make the villainous protagonists (the law breaking money laundering murderous motorcycle gang and family) the “heroes” of the story. A real nuanced character development of the antagonists of the story might have made them too sympathetic, undermining
I guess that sort of covers everything that led to my not giving it a rating (and it took me several days and 2 rewrites to make my thoughts as coherent as this), and not loving it. But to be clear, I did enjoy the way the author tried (even if she failed at times) to explore the positive side of this kind of storyline, and dove into more complicated issues such as the underage adult/teen relationship, the murder/torture as protecting family aspect and even such things as how the wives might be in the club for the sake of their husbands, not for the sake of the club, and when it came down to it, the wives would pick the husbands over the club. I also liked the specifics of the relationship development in the story, as well as the way her mother considered herself a "terrible mother" because she actually didn't have the same problems she was "supposed to" when it came to the 13 year age gap etc.
Anyway, hopefully that longwinded rambling/ranting made sense! (And to think this is after I cut it down from almost 3K really incoherent words)
I think I would still recommend to fans of MC romances, who enjoy the second chance romance, and don't mind cheating storylines and May/December adult/teen romances.