Review: Imperfect Chemistry by Mary Frame

4.5 stars

Imperfect Chemistry was the most enjoyable New Adult romance I've read in a long while (not that I read masses of them), and I loved it. Somehow, it managed to strike a near-perfect balance between light-hearted romantic comedy and serious NA issues like consent, parental approval and emotional dependency. It also provided several genuine surprises  along the way that were really delightful and brought the story away from cliche genius-girl-and-hot-boy territory. 

Having started university at the age of thirteen, Lucy is in the unique position of being a 20 year old with a PhD in microbiology. She's received a research grant to study emotion as a pathogen, but she's having trouble coming up with a hypothesis and methodology. After a disastrous stint in the university's counselling clinic leaves her no closer to an answer, she decides that maybe her neighbour, the mysterious Jensen, can help. The gossip on campus is that he's gone through a bad break-up, and done some serious rebounding, and Lucy thinks he can move her project forward in two ways. Firstly, she can ask him about these experiences, and then, since she seems to find him attractive, maybe he could help her experience some more personal emotions. 

Lucy's voice was very distinct, straightforward and scientific like the character herself. However, it changed over the course of the novel, as Lucy becomes less clinical and more accustomed to interacting with others. Throughout, the light relief that Lucy's friend Freya, Jensen and, increasingly, Lucy herself, provided was essential to counterbalancing the cerebral nature of Lucy's commentary. 

This leads to the not-entirely-positive thing I have to say about Imperfect Chemistry. The whole thing occurred in Lucy's POV, but the conflict in the romance arc comes from Jensen's side. Because of this, the conflict seems to come about very abruptly, and I felt some foreshadowing or set-up to this would have been well served. Quite apart from that, Jensen was just a very sweet hero, and I would have liked to have more insight into his thought processes and feelings about Lucy. The second book, about Freya, is dual-POV, and I have to say I did appreciate that. (I'm not going to write a review for Imperfectly Criminal, because it would be much in the same vein, also being a really good NA read with quirky characters). 

Usually, I read other books between instalments in the same series, because I find I engage less if I read one in a series straight off the back of another, but this is one case where I just had to keep going. So I read the second in the series, then I read one other book (which was a disappointment) and now I'm going to move on the third for another hit of funny-and-feelgood-but-not-fluffy. 

Frame has worked some serious magic so far in this series, and I find myself wishing she had more books in print. She must know she's going to get the reader hooked as well, because Imperfect Chemistry is free on Amazon (I repeat: FREE), and then the other two in the series...aren't (although they're still very reasonably priced). But even if it weren't free, I'd still recommend you pick it up. 

Review: Level Up by Cathy Yardley

5 stars

Level Up is a self-proclaimed "Geek Romance". The hero and heroine are flatmates and colleagues at a company that develops video games, but Adam is in the cadre of game engineers while Tessa's stuck in a dead-end audio job. They aren't close, but Tessa needs Adam's help to code a project for some potential friends of hers, and to crack her work's bloke-y culture so she's considered for an upcoming promotion. 

When I stumbled across Level Up, the reviews were remarkably consistent: words like fun, light-hearted and cute popped up again and again. All of those adjectives are applicable, but they seem like lukewarm praise, and they certainly don't accurately cover the depth of my feeling for this book. It's a delight on so many levels.

First, there's Tessa and her struggles with the sexist structures at her workplace, which will resonate with any woman who has ever come up against an Old Boys' Club. But, in Tessa, Yardley has also created a compassionate and masterful portrait of introversion and social anxiety; it's not just Tessa's gender that's holding her back, it's also that she keeps to herself.

Adam is an excellent hero, striving to find a balance between sticking up for Tessa, and respecting her desire to fight her own battles. He doesn't always get it right, but he's thoughtful and has a growing awareness of precisely what it is his female colleagues are up against.

The secondary characters were also great, and I really appreciated the portrayal of the game engineers who were Adam's friends but Tessa's adversaries. Despite their latent sexism, they weren't misogynistic trolls who bore women conscious ill-will. They were just guys who hadn't really challenged their worldviews, and had quasi-rational justifications for why they weren't sexist, and why Tessa's problem wasn't their problem. To me, their nuances really reinforced how insidious this stuff is: with the horrifying open aggression of Gamergate still fresh in people's minds, it's sometimes hard to remember that the fight can be sometimes be against something as a benign as a lack of awareness.

I was a tad worried that I'd be put off by constant pop culture references, because while I know my Doctor Who as much as the next gal, I'm not into all the fandoms. But such references were skilfully managed so that they never alienated someone who didn't understand them, or took away from the story at large.

  

I've focused on gender throughout this review, but it's not pushed as strongly as I've probably implied. As Adam and Tessa's romance heats up, it fades into the background, and that brings me to my last (and most important) point: the sexual tension between the two of them was off the charts! Sometimes, when characters use the "oh, but we work together so we shouldn't sleep together" thing, I find it a bit contrived, but here it worked. Oh boy, did it work!

Reflection: Thoughts on the Socially Awkward Heroine

A few days ago, I finished Addition by Toni Jordan, in which the protagonist, Grace, compulsively counts everything she comes across.  It got me thinking about other chick-lit or romance novels where the heroine is socially awkward, has OCD and/or displays an obsession with numbers or useless trivia.  I could name 8 or 9 off the top of my head and, when I brought it up with a friend, she added several more to the list.  Which begs the question: why is this trope so popular and what does it say about us as a society?

First of all, I’m yet to read a romance or chick-lit novel where the central male character exhibits these tendencies.  This could simply be put down to the fact that few of us would argue that neuroticism is a desirable trait in a man, and that these genres are usually trying make the male lead attractive to the reader.  

But, on a deeper level, I think it can also been seen as a result of the way Western societies have constructed gender.  The characterisation of women as inherently neurotic goes back over two thousand years, when Hippocrates declared hysteria to be a feminine malady that had its source in a woman’s womb.  In fact, the English word hysteria derives from the Greek hysterikos, meaning ‘of the womb’, the same root as hysterectomy and other modern medical procedures of the uterus.  One only has to look at the madwomen of Gothic novels to see that the association has remained.  The literature on hysteria as a Victorian illness is legion, as is that on Freud.  And while the clinical association between the two was abandoned in the twentieth century, it still lives on in popular thinking.  Women are still widely portrayed as being biologically programmed to be more emotional than men, even though studies have proved there is no significant difference. 

However, literature itself is highly gendered, and this too might play a role into the extent to which socially awkward heroine trope appears in so-called ‘chick-lit’ novels.  The feminist academic and writer Joanna Russ argued that stories centring on male characters were presented as universal to the human condition, while those about with female protagonists were not.  She also classified a number of strategies used to belittle books written by women, including its denigration as ‘populist’.  Although she was writing in the 1970s, her observations are still relevant today.  For the most part, novels with female authors and protagonists are marketed as lightweight reads, with gendered covers. Author Kate Hart highlighted the extent of this when she counted and classified the covers of all the YA novels published in a year:

 Source: 'Uncovering YA Covers: Rose-Coloured Glasses' by Kate Hart

Right now, you’re probably going “What about Gone Girl?  Or [insert other serious and well-regarded female-based novel here]?” but this is one of Russ’ points: that a novel written by a woman and featuring a female protagonist may well-received by critics and gain prominence accordingly, but these are exceptions, and are vetted by a series of literary gatekeepers before they are allowed into the realm of ‘serious’ fiction.  Novels such as Gone Girl can also be seen to be a backlash against the chick-lit-isation (that's totally a word) of women’s writing.  In order to be taken seriously and avoid the death knell of a gendered cover and blurb, female authors purposely write ‘misery lit’.  For an excellent deconstruction of this - and the gendered nature of literature in general - have a look at 'The Way We Talk About "Women's Lit" is Sexist' by Courtney Young.

There are undoubtedly many books out there featuring male protagonists with the traits I’ve mentioned, but they’re marketed according to their content, so I’d never read them.  

(EDIT: 1/8/17 - I have since read some neurodivergent heroes, mainly in m/m, and I could speculate on the reasons for that until the cows come home, but I won't. For good examples of neurodivergent heroes, see K J Charles' The Unseen Attraction or Cat Sebastian's The Lawrence Browne Affair. It is interesting to note that male characters are much more commonly labelled neurodivergent than female ones, who remain 'quirky'. As a further aside, this post, which was one of my earliest, is very heteronormative and uses different language than I would choose if I wrote it today, but I am leaving it as-is for posterity's sake.)

Had Addition, the book I’ve just finished, had a synopsis that mentioned the character’s “internal struggle” instead of focussing on her relationship with her boyfriend, I probably wouldn’t have read it either.  Don’t get me wrong, it was good, but a little too poignant for me.  And, in researching this post, I found a book entitled OCD Love Story on goodreads, which had several reviews to the tune of “Don’t believe the title and pink hearts on the cover, this is some serious stuff”.  If I'm not alone in this, then perhaps the incidence of the socially awkward heroine in chick-lit and romance could simply be a result of marketing that assumes that a book about a woman has its sole market in women. 

Just like anything, the socially awkward heroine can be seen in different ways.  Although I've focused on her as a potential vehicle of oppression, she can also be seen in a feminist light. Perhaps her quirks prove that women are as human as the 'universal' represented by a male character.  Maybe she proves that women don't have to be perfect, or live up to societal expectations that expect both too much and too little of them. 

Overall, I don't think we can place parameters on the socially awkward heroine in as being one thing or other - each writer, and each reader will construct her differently.  And hopefully, one day, the marketing surrounding her will reflect this as well.  In the meanwhile, here are some of my favourite examples of the trope:

Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie

Playing Grace by Hazel Osmond

The Duality Principle by Rebecca Grace Allen

Neanderthal Seeks Human by Penny Reid

Nobody’s Baby But Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips