D
Title: Paramour
Author: Margaret Ethridge
Publication Info: Turquoise Morning Press 2011
ISBN: 9781935817383
Genre: Paranormal
This book came to my attention based on a reader recommendation. I’ve been trying to figure out how to approach this review since I finished the book this weekend and immediately said out loud and on Twitter, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
When I look at a small press book, I think about whether I’d buy another book from them, if the book I read is indicative of the quality of the books the press plans to produce in the future. Based upon this book, I am not impressed with the quality of the editing or the press itself. But the story and the concept were enough to keep me reading, and I wanted to finish it because I wanted to know how it ended – I cared enough to want to see the resolution, in other words. But when I got to the ending, I was far from satisfied, and am not impressed with the author or the decision to end the book in this manner.
The opening of the story focuses on the painful death of Frank, whose ghost is attempting to touch or reach his mother in the first scene. The description of Frank’s pain and desperation was enough to make me want to download and read the book.
Plot summary ahoy!
Camilla, better known as “Cam,” returns to her childhood home because of the sudden and somewhat untimely death of her father from a heart attack. When she arrives, a neighbor thrusts a tuna noodle casserole into her hands, and Cam stumbles numbly into her father’s house, confused and grieving. Tuna noodle hits the floor, she leaves the mess on the kitchen tile, and heads upstairs to bed where she turns on the light fixture on the wall above her pillow and POOF! Out pops Frank, the ghost who has haunted that light fixture since his own death several years before.
Cam and Frank grew up together, somewhat. There is some indication that Cam controls Frank’s age, or the age he appears to be. In flashbacks to Cam’s childhood told from Frank’s point of view, he’s startled to see how young he is. Later, Frank portrays his age and appearance from the night he died. Frank can also physically touch Cam, and most objects in the room, but he doesn’t feel anything when he does. He can turn his own light fixture house on and off, thereby controlling his own apparition – but if he tries to get to second base with Cam, he can’t feel a thing.
Cam is fixated on Frank – and asks him to be her first kiss (he refuses, setting of the first of a few periods of time where they don’t speak) and her first sexual experience (same result – with a longer time of not speaking) – but when she returns home to grieve and pack up her father’s house, Frank isn’t the only person she’s ready to bang.
Cue triangle!
Brad, her former neighbor from across the street, bought his parents’ house when they put it on the market, so he lives in the house he grew up in. Brad has nursed a childhood crush on Cam since high school. When he sees her car and hears the news from tuna noodle neighbor that Cam’s dad died, he decides that it’s time he spoke up about how he feels about her. And when Cam sees the now hot-and-tan-and-sexy-and-dedicated-to-yard-work Brad, who mows many lawns in the neighborhood including her own, she’s equally attracted and ready to act on that attraction faster than Brad can rip the pull cord on his mower. The rest of the story focuses on the tension between Frank and Cam, and Cam and Brad in a somewhat-ghostly and very confusing tangle.
Before I get to my reaction to the story, there were a number of things that distracted the hell out of me that I blame squarely on the editing. Things like repeated phrases and words.
“Her brain clicked into gear when she spotted the familiar blue flowers of a vintage Corning Ware casserole dish. She reached for the door handle and began to unfold herself from the driver’s seat.”
A few lines later:
“A wide strip of masking tape with “KELLY” written in neat block letters stuck to the bottom of the dish. Something in her brain clicked, and she paused to question the wisdom of putting masking tape into a three hundred and fifty degree oven for thirty minutes.”
Is the main character secretly a robot? And does a brain clicking sound like my furnace’s burner ignition?
Another example: if any character at any time is holding a beer, they will scrape or pick at the edge of the label with their thumbnail. Count on it. In fact, drink beer when it happens. It’ll dull the confusion of what happens later. Further, Cam has this nervous habit that’s remarked upon repeatedly: she rubs the edge of her thumbnail over the pad of her index finger, and nearly identical phrases are used to describe it multiple times. It’s distracting and repetitive and so bothersome.
Furthermore, I had a TON of consistency-based questions, both about the world building or mythology of Frank’s haunting, and about Cam’s character. For example, Frank can touch just about anything in Cam’s bedroom (which long ago used to be his bedroom) but he can’t touch the journals and diaries where Cam records details of their conversations ostensibly so she won’t forget anything he’s said. He can’t touch those books as much as he’d like to, and there’s no sufficient explanation for that, or any exploration of why he’s haunting a light fixture to begin with. It’s just an accepted feature of the house: for sale, 3br, 2.1 bath bungalow, lily garden of exceptional quality, EIK, W/D, new roof, ghost in bedroom light fixture. There’s no questioning of WHY Frank is there, or whether Cam or Frank would like him to no longer haunt a wall sconce. She’s very unalarmed by the presence of a ghost on her bed, both as a child or as an adult, and even after long periods of not speaking to him, she’s still trying to jump his ghostly bones.
Sometimes in the course of the story, Cam seems not to be able to recall Frank in the least. She bounces out of bed one morning, chases after hot lawnmowing Brad in her yard, despite trying to get on base with Frank the night before. Yet it’s never explained how that connection of memory works, and the ending makes that even more confusing. I think I’m meant to understand that Cam thinks her interactions with Frank are a dream, but in flashbacks she dresses seductively for him on more than one occasion – indicating that some degree of conscious preparation was involved before she turned on the light. She had to get the sexy nightgown from somewhere, presumably shopping with him in mind – but that’s never explained. She has very emotional scenes with Frank, begging him to kiss her, begging him divest her of her pesky virginity, and yet despite tears and serious feelings of rejection she doesn’t really seem to remember him unless she’s in bed, and possibly horny.
Then comes a scene that had me twitching.
By the time Cam finally convinced Brad to take her upstairs and get funky in her room, Cam has gone back and forth between Brad and Frank trying to get someone to do her already. Really. It’s unappealing, to say the least. But then Cam and Brad get busy on Cam’s bed, and I’m thinking Oh, no, please don’t turn on the light. Oh, no. And of course Brad turns on the light, and POOF! Out pops Frank to watch them do it, providing color commentary and remarking on the entire event while Cam can hear him and see him standing over her while Brad does the deed. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. Ghostly voyeur menage, I have read some. That was more than enough for me.
Then there’s the ending. I try very hard not to reveal the ending of a story, but in this case it is so off the wall that I can’t not talk about it, especially since it affected my overall grade of the book. Hence, hear ye, there be spoilers. Highlight the text if you want to read them.
At the end of the story, Cam has packed up her father’s home for sale, and moved in with Brad across the street. They’re now engaged. Frank has somehow erased himself from Cam’s memory. But on the day of the open house, she walks through the house with a screwdriver, and turns on the light so ghosty Frank can pop out. He does. She tells him she is engaged, then indicates she’s planning to unscrew the light fixture from the wall, saying, “Don’t you want to come with us?” thereby ensuring that Frank can watch them screw for his eternity.
ETA: I owe y’all a big apology. I’m sorry. The spoiler tag was miscued so the above paragraph was visible. I apologize profusely. Totally my error.
There are some moments of clever writing strength within the story. The author attempted to focus on the concept of the heart, with physical and emotional elements present through each character, mirroring their losses in ways that all focus on the human heart. Frank was shot in the heart, and his ghost has a dark hole in his chest that bothers him at varying moments, depending on his sexual or emotional proximity to Cam. Brad also is affected physically and emotionally by his own heart, the details of which are revealed later in the story. Cam is grieving for her father and feels that pain in her own chest. Well, sort of – she’s easily distracted from her grief by her own hornypants, and not in a sex-affirms-life type of way. Cam is easily distracted most of the time. In just about every damn scene, in fact. I can’t figure out if Cam is selfish or just ridiculous with the short term memory of a goldfish.
Ultimately the men in the story are much better developed, and they both deserved better than Cam. There are some clever scenes with Brad and his older sister, and with Brad and Cam nervously talking over one another (though the dialogue tags are overly frequent and make these scenes confusing) on their first dates. There was great potential in the premise and in the opening pages. But by the end, I thought this book was a hot mess. It could have been a much stronger story had there not been distracting repeated words, some truly bizarre moments of bad prose, and inconsistencies in the mythology of the story. But because of the giant WTF of the ending, I was more pissed off than curious, and that ultimately affected my grade of this book.
Paramour is available in print from Amazon as well as for the Kindle, for the nook at BN.com, and in print as well. It is also available at AllRomance.
So if Frank is haunting the lightbulb, what happens when it burns out? If it’s thrown out, does he haunt the garbage pail it was thrown in? Or the landfill it winds up in? Not the most ideal final resting place…
@DiscoDollyDeb
Never heard of Kiss Me Goodbye before. And I’d never thought of “ghost lover” as a regularly occuring trope in romantic movies, but I guess now I have to consider it. Let’s see, there’s also (obviously) Ghost, and Truly, Madly, Deeply (that’s a good one), and Somewhere Tomorrow (starring a very young Sarah Jessica Parker)…(more?)
Oops. Forgot The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which is an old but still very watchable black-and-white starring Rex Harrison.
Although this is slightly off topic, anyone who is curious just HOW MUCH repetition there is in Twilight should check out the catalogue: http://otahyoni.livejournal.com/130432.html
Edward’s beauty is described 165 times, and really, even taking into account slightly different descriptions, well. That’s a hell of a lot. At some point, you really just want to shake the author. Something like that is like being slapped in the face every few minutes while i’m reading. It tells me the author doesn’t think I really get the point, and am therefore impossibly stupid. Or that the mental picture I would come up with is wrong.
@AmberG
That link was most amusing:)
The thing I really don’t get about Twilight: the ALA chose it as one of their 2006 Best Books for Young Adults.
And there’s Love Can Be Murder – early ‘90’s made for tv movie starring Jaclyn Smith. She’s a private detective who discovers the ghost of a former PI haunting her new office – she helps him solve his last case, and they fall in love (and I think they have sex?!), and somehow there’s a happy ending that involves him moving on to the next life, and her meeting his nephew or something at his grave. It sounds crazy, but I remember enjoying it when I watched it some 20 years ago (obviously it made an impression – I had to look up the title but I remembered the plot all by myself). Who knew there were so many ghost romances?
@ bookstorecat
I keep thinking of more ghost lover movies – there’s Always starring Holly Hunter, who’s also haunted by her dead boyfriend as she starts a new relationship. It’s a remake of A Guy Named Joe, which I haven’t seen. I thought Always was fun, but not as good as Madly, Truly, Deeply.
How did I forget about Casper: The Movie? And for a less romantic, more rapey spin on the whole “ghost*-meets-girl,” there’s always The Entity (a film which, I am embarrassed to admit, truly terrified me when I watched it alone in my dorm room late one night).
*sorry, “libidinous invisible presence”-meets-girl
@bookstorecat: Don’t forget “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” was also adapted for TV show in the 1960s. I think Hope Lange played Mrs. Muir and Charles Nelson Reilly played someone (not the ghost). There’s also Noel Coward’s “Blythe Spirit” (made into a movie in the 1940s) where a man’s dead first wife returns to try to prevent his marriage to another woman.
The list goes on…
Sorry, that should be “Blithe Spirit,” and Rex Harrison was also in that one.
So true, Joy. In Dona Flor, the presence of the ghost has an explanation that suits the fantastic atmosphere, and the whole story has immense vitality and charm. I laughed as hard as the ghost did when he was watching the new husband make love to his wife. It’s all the in execution.
I won’t be reading Paramour, but I’ve just added Dona Flor my Netflix queue. And I may dig out the novel and read while I listen to some Stan Getz and Astrid Gilberto.
As for fun ghost movies, has anyone mentioned Topper with Cary Grant and Constance Bennett (the “fur-bearing blonde”) as ghosts who help the hilarious Roland Young to find romance in a very unexpected place?
Speaking as an obsessive-compulsive and an English major, I’d say you just sound like someone who likes good writing.
I’m disappointed by how horrible this book sounds, because I love the ghost-human romance trope. It’s probably the most difficult to pull off—worse than, say, time-travel.
One of my favorite YA series, as a teenager, was Meg Cabot’s Mediator series. I haven’t reread it in a few years, but I remember if being very good. Cabot manged to give a fairly believable (in context of the series mythology) happy ending to her human-ghost romance.
IIRC, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was based on a novel by R. A. Dick (alias Josephine Leslie). Elswyth Thane’s Tryst, written several years before The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, is also a romance with a ghost. Alas, I haven’t found a copy yet….
I’m going to have to see if Topper and Blithe Spirit are available from the library (or somewhere) because I like Cary Grant and Rex Harrison (both of whom are now actual ghosts, if they’re still hanging around).
They whole girl-meets-ghost trope doesn’t really appeal to me w/o the movie stars, though. Which may be strange considering that I was potentially primed to seek them out by a childhood reading books like The Ghost Wore Gray (“What a Hunk! Too bad he’s dead…”*—from the back cover).
*ewwww. Even if he looked like Cary Grant, that’s still gross.
It annoys me no end when I read books by the same author and these completely unrelated characters use the same phrases or display similar mannerisms.
I love Jennifer Crusie, but if I never read the words “came my/her brains out” again in this life time, I’d be quite happy. I know this is supposed to convey that the character just had themselves a mind blowing orgasm, but my brain can’t help but picture the character lying there with bits of blood and brain matter either oozing out of their ears and nostrils or splattered about their head in a spray of gore. Not so sexy for me.
That’s the problem with paranormal. I potentially like paranormal, but it just seems harder than other types of romance to get right. And quite obviously, too. There’s the basic consistency aspect, but there’s also the whole question of… where do you stand in a world with such widely different meanings and implications?
I remember reading an amateur short story in which the hero was an angel. The plot wasn’t bad as such, but I just couldn’t get past the idea of feathered wings… yuck. >.< Maybe I am just secretly phobic of birds, LOL
The blog by Dan Bergstein (where each entry recaps a chapter in all of the Twilight books) might be the funniest thing I’ve read. Ever. About anything. He is a genius, and S. Meyers should throw him some money for being the King of Awesome. And, like the other commentor said, he keeps score of the mutters and murmurs at the end of each chapter. There are about a million.
http://community.sparknotes.com/2011/03/10/blogging-breaking-dawn
This is a little OT (ok, a lot), but here’s my favorite Twilight re-cap, in comic form – http://lucylou.livejournal.com/566295.html
This makes me think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer glaring at a zombie and saying, “Yeah, I’ve dated dead guys, but they were hot.”
Even though I am so bloody sick of effing vampires, I am now enjoying the Dan Bergstein blog about Twilight. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I needed a laugh.
Speaking as an avid recycler- I know you can recycle bulbs which contain mercury, but plasma? (In case I ever get busy with a lamp-haunting ghost.)
Quite. But in a hierarchy of grossness as sex partners or voyeurs, I should have thought that vampires are way up there with zombies, while mere common-or-garden ghosts are positively homely by comparison.
I am mystified by the fact that so many readers are apparently not revolted by the idea of a vampire, an ancient, undying bloodsucking predator. I find that fantasy deeply disgusting.
I find the idea of consuming blood to be disgusting myself, but I am vegan and have been for some time. The Maasai used to consider cattle blood a staple of their diet, and there’s uses for blood in Western cuisine as well (blood pudding, blood sausage, etc). And anyone who eats meat is consuming some blood, I imagine. And of couse, plenty of animals like the mosquito, the leech, and the vampire bat consume blood by sucking it out of a body, and all carnivores consume blood when they eat raw flesh. I particularly remember a vivid description of the man-eating lions in The Ghost in the Darkness, where the lions are described as rasping the skin off their victims with their rough tongues in order to lap up the blood. My point is just that bloodsucking & blood-eating are pretty common, and thinking about it that way, it seems a lot less disgusting, even to me.
@AgTigress – with you on the vampire thing, but I think that it’s a problem with a lot of fantasies that originally were INTENDED to be cause an “ewww” reaction, and then were revisited and revised for whatever reason, and now have two competing visions. My favorite of these is the Don Juan legend…in the 16th century version Don Juan is not a seducer. He is a serial rapist and murderer, who cheerfully rapes his best friend’s fiancee, frames said best friend for murder, and then escapes to another country to continue injuring more people. When he finally is sentenced to hell everyone breathes a sigh of relief, because he’s downright creepy. Somewhere in the 19th century he becomes a passionate lover, who is saved by the love of a good woman. Ditto Faust. Ditto John Gardner’s Grendel, or the Bertha of Wide Sargasso Sea, or Elphaba in Wicked. I think vampires were originally meant to be purely scary and then someone said, “hey, wait a minute, there’s a potential other side to this story” and then the “other side” sort of took over, without quite getting rid of the creepy.
As far as being with a ghost….I think it’s more pathetic than gross. Think of Orpheus and Eurydice, or “The Man’s Wife” or all the stories about losing someone you love, and clinging to them. Ultimately unsatisfying maybe. But “deserving pity, not punishment.”
When Brad spots Cam knows she is the one for him.But, can he persuade her to take the plunge?
romantic korean movies