The Sting of the Scorpio by Monique Domovitch

Back in September last year, I won a copy of Monique Domovitch’s novel, Scorpio Rising. Once I started it, I couldn’t put it down and I’d finished it in a day. I really enjoyed the book, the to-the-point style, the characters’ quirks and the way they battled through the tough hand life dealt them. I can’t say that I read all that many indie books last year as I was reading on my PC at the time and it would kill my eyes for a day or two afterwards, but Scorpio Rising was my favourite. It just really spoke to me.

So when Monique gifted me the second book, I was over the moon! I was really excited to find out just how life would treat Alex and Brigitte as they embarked on their life together in the States. Let’s just say that it was nothing like what I expected.

Presentation: E-book. First one I read on my darling boyfriend’s X-mas gift of a Kindle!

Story: Alex and Brigitte, newlyweds, have moved to New York to start their life together. Alex is determined to be the sole provider for his new family - despite current difficulties in the field of architecture - and when his wife - through a chance meeting with a former Hollywood actress - is graced with a potential lucrative career as an artist, he is far from impressed.

Alex, always striving for the next, bigger, goal, is ruthless in his quest to become one of the biggest names in architecture, not caring who he tramples over on the way. What’s more, it isn’t long before he starts to view his marriage as a trap while Brigitte is ready to drop everything if only it will make Alex love her.

Thoughts and impressions: Before I start with the actual review, I’m going to point out one very important thing about me: I view fidelity in marriage as being of utmost importance. I do not tolerate infidelity and if you read my recent review of Secrets by Freya North, you’ll be aware that this affects my enjoyment of books as well. Now, I’m not religious, so this isn’t something I take from any religious text, it is simply part of my moral code. I could ramble on about how we, as humans, are not really meant to enter such long-term monogamous relationships scientifically speaking, but that’s neither here nor there right now. What is important is that a character incapable of fidelity never sits well with me.

Coming back to the book, I’ve mentioned this because Alex is simply incapable of keeping his dick in his pants. He resents being trapped by marriage, which is ironic as he’s the one who so doggedly pursued Brigitte in the first place, insisting that they marry. This leads to him having a string of affairs, which he doesn’t even bother to hide very well, while treating Brigitte like she’s below him. Scumbag. This extends to his treatment of her in all aspects of their life together, often speaking down to her.

Brigitte, meanwhile, does all she can to make Alex happy. She bends over backwards for this guy and it’s never enough. I kept hoping that she’d grow a backbone and stand up for herself. In the long run, that would probably have been more effective; it certainly worked the first time around in Paris! But she just put up with his antics, even when they spread to the treatment of her son.

Speaking of David, though he is mentioned fairly frequently, he doesn’t actually appear in the story until a third of the way in. I missed him during this time and would have liked to have watched him growing up and adapting to life in the USA.

There’s that old fable of the scorpion and the frog. I forget who supposedly told it, but the story goes along the lines of: the frog agrees to carry the scorpion across the water if the scorpion agrees not to sting him. The scorpion promises that he won’t but half way across, he stings the frog anyway. When asked why he did it, he says that he couldn’t help himself, it’s just in his nature.

Really, I suppose I could have guessed this from the title of the book. I think I was expecting Alex and Brigitte to work as a team against whoever was trying to ‘sabotage’ Alex’s work, and that would be the sting, but I was far off the mark. Kudos to the author for weaving this retelling of the tale, though!

Alex, a Scorpio, is the scorpion and Brigitte, a Frenchie, is the frog. At least, that’s how I saw it. I’m not actually sure whether Brigitte’s nationality was chosen on purpose, but I’m tempted to say it was. The whole thing was ingenious, anyway! Alex, as such, cannot help himself and stings everyone that he comes into contact with. Whereas in the first book, Alex was driven but still a relatable character that the reader could root for, in this book I steadily slipped further and further into a state of hatred for him. I’m fairly sure that I was meant to feel this way too, as Alex does not present any redeeming or sympathetic qualities. He destroys everything of importance that he touches and I was torn because as the reader, I no longer knew what I wanted for either of the characters. Alex had gone from being the hero to being the villain and I wasn’t sure how to readapt my focus on the character.

In less deft hands, I believe that this story would have repulsed me, but as it is, Monique Domovitch instilled a sort of morbid fascination in me. Even though I was repulsed by the events in the story, I was also so caught up in them that I had to know what would come next.

The one other thing that really surprised me was that Anne, who swore revenge on Alex at the end of Scorpio Rising, waited decades before actually acting on her promise. It was good reading when she did, though!

(N.B. Time moves quickly in this novel: months, even years, can pass in the jump of a paragraph.)

Style: Monique Domovitch has a strong, blunt voice that really appeals to me. She’s not afraid to tell things as they are. The one part of the style that didn’t work for me was the incorporation of one or two scenes from the first book in the first chapter. I didn’t feel that they were necessary.

Final verdict: I loved the story of two young people trying to survive in a dog eat dog world that was Scorpio Rising. Despite Alex becoming the bad guy (easy to see how his character would evolve in that direction, mind), this book was still a very good portrayal of how greed and the drive to always reach new heights will only hurt everyone else around you if that is the only thing that you put your time and energy into. That said, my dislike of Alex tampered with my like of the book: while I enjoyed it, I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first one. 4 stars

Extra notes: Aimed at adult readers. Sex and infidelity present.

Find the author!

Site: http://moniquedomovitch.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Moniquedomovitc

Truth or Dare by Celia Rees

With its broken spine and yellowed, sometimes fragile, pages, this book has seen a lot of love from me. It was first released in 2000 and I know that I read it at least once before we moved to France so I suspect that I read it for the first time when I was 11 or 12 years old. It underwent multiple subsequent re-readings, which was not something I did very often even at that age, so it must have struck a chord with me.

During my most recent shelf clean up session, I found Truth or Dare tucked away behind some other books. This surprised me as I’d thought it was still in France. After so many years I couldn’t remember very much about the plot and so, for reasons I won’t pretend to understand, I decided to revisit my childhood.

Presentation: Average-sized YA paperback with large, well-spaced type. My copy has 227 pages broken down into 27 chapters, but I believe that more recent editions have 30 or 40 pages fewer than mine.

Story: Joshua’s gran has just had a second stroke. Rather than putting her in a nursing home, his mother, Joanna, decides to go and live with her to take care of her. Josh is given no choice but to join her. Far from impressed with this situation, Josh retreats to his Uncle Patrick’s old room in the attic. There he finds a box of items that connect his interest in space and UFOs to Patrick’s interest in these same things. But Patrick is a taboo subject in this household. Gran, no longer quite fully there, drop some hints that maybe there’s more to Patrick’s story than Josh knows and Joanna finds herself revisiting the last year of Patrick’s life, the last year of her childhood.

Thoughts and impressions: The problem with revisiting books from your childhood more than ten years later is that they no longer hold that sense of awe that your memory insists was present all those years ago. It took me about fifty pages to remember what the “shocking twist” at the end was and after that it was all just refreshing my memory.

One of the problems was that, though I may have liked Josh ten years ago (maybe even sympathised with him), this time around his behaviour was at times irritating and voyeuristic (spying on the girl next door sunbathing using your dead uncle’s star gazing binoculars? Just no.) And what was with Katherine’s sudden change of heart? She rightly shows him up at the party but then she apologises for her actions and becomes a permanent fixture in the second half of the book. I didn’t buy that. There were better ways that that could have been handled.

The best bit by far was Joanna’s story of the events of the summer of space madness. This story was more engaging than Joshua’s and gave an interesting look at autism in a time before it was really understood. Any readers of this book should pay attention to the sometimes very subtle parallels between Patrick’s behaviour and his father’s. The grandfather is never portrayed as a sympathetic character but he does have layers that are sometimes only hinted at but expertly portrayed to show a link between him and Patrick.

And finally, the game. It comes in so far into the story that explaining it would mean delving into a whole bunch of spoilers so I’m not going to do that. But it is worth mentioning because at times I just could not follow what was supposed to be happening on the computer screen!

Style: Relatively simple but appropriate for the target audience. The narrative weaves between mostly Josh in the present day but sometimes also Joanna and Joanna in the past. This works well and neither story ever fails to be engaging.

Final verdict: So apparently this book appeals more to the younger reader in my experience. I still enjoyed the read but not as much as I remember having enjoyed it in the past. 3 stars

Extra notes: Aimed at and appropriate for a younger audience.

Scorpio Rising by Monique Domovitch

The first book in a planned series by indie author Monique Domovitch, I won this title in a giveaway in August. I know how hard it can be for indie authors to get their work out there and recognised, so as soon as I found the energy to spend a day reading from my PC screen, I got to it.

I would like to point out that all opinions are my own and I have not glossed this review for the sake of the author.

Presentation: E-book. My copy was 335 pages long with 21 chapters. Some of the chapters are long (30+ pages) others very short (the shortest was only 2 pages long).

Story: Alexander dreams of escaping his life - the dingy little flat where he lives with his mother who has to sell her body to make ends meet – and making it to Manhattan to become a big name in architecture. He pushes himself, never allowing himself to connect with another too much in case they get in the way of his dreams becoming reality.

Brigitte is thrown out of her home with nowhere to turn to when her jealous mother catches her stepfather in the act of raping her. She finds herself with a benefactor looking after her every need, but when she learns that not only is she pregnant with her rapist’s child but also her benefactor’s motives go beyond wanting to help a girl in need, she runs away and starts a new life for herself, determined to make ends meet with her art.

Thoughts and impressions: Right as of the first chapter, this book hit me with its blunt approach to events and sex in particular. This actually worked really well in the story’s favour. It was refreshing to see a blunt and rather detached view of sex rather than flowery “love’s milk” or treading lightly around the subject. One quote in particular really got to me: ‘“This will be our little secret,” Lucien told her when she opened her eyes. “If you even think of telling anyone, I’ll kill you.” Then he raped her.’  (chap 2) The simplicity with which this horrible action is portrayed really worked for me. I think it’s very hard to portray rape with words because there’s so much in the action that goes beyond mere words. I commend Monique Domovitch for not trying to even go into the character’s thoughts about how she is treated, but hinting at what consequences it has on her life, thus allowing the reader to supply those thoughts for Brigitte in whatever manner works for them personally.

I was expecting a love story in this story. I expected the characters to meet and form some form of relationship and then make their way through at least some good portion of the story together working out their differences.  In actual fact, they don’t meet until very close to the end of this book. I would have liked to have seen more relationship growth between them: once they do finally meet it does seem a bit rushed. I would also have liked to have seen more consequences to certain plot points that were brought up closer to the end, but as naming them would lead to spoilers I will refrain from doing so and simply state my hope that they will be addressed in the sequel.

This said, the characters not meeting until closer to the end does not have any negative effect on the story itself beyond how rushed their relationship felt. The story is about the growth of both of these people from disillusioned youths to adults who have fought tooth and nail for what little they have. The story occasionally slips into a side character’s head for a bit – my favourite of these was Anne. She’s one of those characters that you love to hate. You can understand her actions, even her motives, but you still condemn her for them (which she deserves) but this just served to make her a more interesting antagonist. I can already see her causing all sorts of problems for Alex in the sequel!

There are some really precious gem scenes in this novel. One in particular involves Alex and a certain unexpected surprise when he accompanies a Moulin Rouge dancer home. I had to stop reading to laugh! The somewhat detached bluntness of the narrative just increased the humour to be found in this scene.  Loved it!

Style: As mentioned, detached and blunt. I don’t often like this style but in this case it really worked well with the story.

Final verdict: I really enjoyed this one. It was an honest look at the brutality of the dog-eat-dog world that these characters inhabit. 5 stars.

Extra notes: Infrequent language; references to sex, act itself is never described in detail but you know it is taking place.

It took me a little while to figure out the era but this is set shortly after WW2. I'm not entirely sure how to classify the book so for now I'm going to go with drama.






Find the author!
Site: http://moniquedomovitch.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Moniquedomovitc