A review by b_reads15
Deceptive Calm by Patricia Skipper

medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

0.0

Update to review: Author went out of her way to have my paid review disqualified because she didn’t like it, so I didn’t get paid. Lower my rating from 0.5 to 0.  Book is garbage; don’t read. 

Deceptive Calm is the worst book I have read in years. I disliked everything about this book. I only finished it because I was being paid to review it, and if I did not finish the book, I would not be able to review it per the review agreement, so I pushed through just so that I could review it.  This book needed to be reviewed so that others know how terrible it really is so they don’t waste their time. It took me two months to get through it because the writing was a struggle to read.  
 
It is a book about a white-passing Black female’s life experience in the US in the 1960s through the 1980s, written by a white female boomer. The author uses the N-word needlessly in the story, in what felt like a way to just be able to use the word.  Patricia Skipper wrote the main character in her voice rather than the voice of a  Black female. Vanessa lacked depth in her character development; you don’t get much sense about any internal struggles she experiences living through the situations she lives through. Trisha, the supporting character, and Vanessa’s best friend, had more character depth than the main character. 
 
The book is so poorly written and poorly edited. It has random time jumps with jarring transitions, if any transitions at all, inconsistencies, and holes in the storyline. The way things happen in the story are haphazard which makes it difficult to read. The dialogue was confusing at points because of the author’s use of  very few character identifiers. I had to reread several sections to clearly understand what character was speaking. The author was gratuitously crass, and the sex scenes were all rape scenes written gratuitously explicit. 
 
There was so much history about the Civil War, but little about the current times Vanessa was living through (60s-80s). The main character was living through some tumultuous times for race relations in the US and little is mentioned about that. Yet probably 1/3 of the book was random US Civil War facts that seem superfluous; it felt like the author was cozy with Wikipedia while she wrote this. 
 
The book ends with no closure to the story, which was a disappointment after struggling to complete it.  
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