Sunday, April 15, 2012

The Candidate (2008) - Tracy Richardson

Jane cursed a blue streak, but only in her head. Five more minutes alone with Alex the other night, and the rumors might have been true. What had she been thinking? Had she really been willing to throw her future away over a sudden impulse?

Potential Democratic nominee Jane Kincaid has just spent a night of almost-passion with her bodyguard Alex Warner - a result of drunken antics at her mother's palatial island estate after Jane receives a super serious death threat that functions almost exclusively as an excuse to get them drunk and alone on an island. Where they start sharing their feelings, as ladies do, and wrestling (or "wrasslin'," as Alex might say, because she's Southern, y'all, and we know that because she says things like "dawg" and "darlin'"). Anyway, so they wrassle atop a bed and it's super confusing for Jane because she's straight.

But anyway. This passage is one of the things that annoyed me the most about this novel. Firstly, I think, because totally contrived events kept happening that seemed to exist for no other purpose in the novel other than forcing the two leads to admit their burning desire for each other. When, you know, they could have been used to develop character, or give Alex a chance to show off her supercop skillzors, which we are told about but never actually see.

This tendency to tell rather than show is a problem with the development of their relationship as well - we're told that it's special and magical and soul-bonding, but we don't get to know either character especially well, so it's hard to imagine what they see in each other (except Alex's "glacier-melting green eyes," as those are mentioned quite frequently). Like the many threats Jane faces in this novel, their relationship isn't particularly believable.

Credibility, then, was one of the biggest problems of the book for me - Alex isn't credible as a bodyguard, nor is Jane particularly credible as a politician (at one point, she says, "Carter, I need some background on Islamic religion ... I don't know a lot about it, but I'm sure Islam no more condones murder than Christianity," and this as a statement from an American politician post-9/11 was incredibly silly to me). (Her speeches are also pretty lulzy).

The book also participates in the worrying trend of lesbian instamarriage - something that never ceases to terrify me with its implausibility. In the novel, they kiss, and it's like all the rumors circulating about Jane's sexuality are suddenly true. But this is because as soon as they kiss, these rumors are true - in this world, kissing a woman means having soul-bonding sex with her means insta-marriage.

Also, as a final pet peeve, they call each other by their full names ALL THE TIME. ("Kiss me, Alex Warner." "God I love you Jane Kincaid"). Even while making sweet sweet love. Seriously, who does this?

Rating: two out of five fleas on a dawg, y'all.

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