Publisher: CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform
It
is difficult to accept other reviews of this book when they call it “stunning,”
“well-written” and give it other accolades.
Let’s grant them that they may
have read the paper version and I read the ebook where all of the missing
words, misspelled words and poorly constructed sentences showed up. That doesn’t explain the praises for the plot
though. It contains some of the most
unlikeable characters I’ve come across in some time.
The
central characters are Lucy and Karen.
Lucy is living in seclusion in a cottage with the spirit of her dead
partner, Jake. She can hardly function
because of the guilt she feels over not being able to save Jake in an accident
she didn’t cause and that she barely survived herself. Jake is inconsiderate enough to hang around
giving her sad looks and doing nothing to help her move on with her life. Lucy’s profound state of depression has her
hiding from everyone and trying to escape everything by running every day. On one of her runs she discovers that the
manor house on the property is now inhabited by Karen and her two
children. Karen is recently divorced and
has two of the most opposite children possible.
Her son is goodness and light and her daughter is straight out of “The
Omen” or “The Bad Seed.” Of course Lucy
and Karen become friends and then an attraction develops between them. As their relationship develops, the story
takes a nasty turn as someone tries at least twice to kill Lucy. If the reader doesn’t know immediately who it
is, she just hasn’t been paying attention to the story.
The
story in Pennance is fundamentally fine.
As the title indicates, both of these women feel that they have to atone
for their lives. What isn’t totally
clear is why each one takes so much guilt on herself. Lucy acknowledges that she and Jake didn’t
really love each other and Karen’s husband is certainly contributed to their
problems. The constant harping on how
much each one feels she screwed up becomes irritating after a while. The real mystery in the story however is how
everyone deals with Karen’s daughter, who shows definite signs of being a
psychopath. This child needs serious
professional help, but instead is allowed to get away with the things she does
and receives a type of reward (to her) in the end of the book. There was already plenty of angst in this
book without adding this child to the mix.
Pennance is one of those books that shows a
writer has ability, but needs some help with polishing a book. The author has said that the mistakes were in
earlier copies and have been corrected; however, the copy that I read was
purchased a while after the book was published and I would have presumed the
mistakes would be gone. What Clare
Ashton needs is experience and a good editor.
She’s willing to write a story with an edge, which lesbian fiction
sorely needs. The edge needs to be
smoothed out though, so that it slices instead of hacks at what Ashton is
trying to say.
