Unbreakable

by Emma Scott

February 23, 2015 · Trillian

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C+

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Unbreakable was a book that had a lot of unexpected swerves. It was sort of strange tonally, but it won me over. It has a terrible beginning and an ending which is a little too happy (which is saying a lot for a romance novel) but it does a good job of showing character progression, and the romance itself is very strong.

Full disclosure – Emma Scott and I are Facebook friends, which was definitely a motivation for me to read this particular book (I read some contemporary, but not tons of it). So I had bias going in. I really wanted to like it.

Bias or no bias, I almost quit reading this book after the first chapter, which is a parade of expensive brand names. I don’t mind a specific brand name now and then. If you picture your characters meeting at a Starbucks, you might as well say so, instead of saying that they meet in a popular chain coffee shop. But brand names need to be used sparingly, or it’s like reading a catalog instead of a story, and by the end of the first chapter I was ready to run our Armani-clad heroine, Alex, over with her own black Mini Cooper.

At the start of the story, Alex believes that she has the perfect life. She’s beautiful, rich, and successful in her legal career, with a handsome, rich, successful fiancé. She’s incredibly smug, although she never forgets to be generous with both credit and free lunches to her assistants. She lunches weekly with a horrible, horrible group of friends who gossip relentlessly about others. Like Wolverine of The X-Men, Alex is good at what she does, but what she does isn’t very nice. She’s poised to make partner based on her work for a shady corporate asshole.

Everything changes when Alex is held hostage for several days, along with several other people, during a bank robbery. During the time that she is held hostage, she realizes that she does not think much about Drew, her fiancé (and it later develops that while he was concerned about her, he continued his own daily life as though nothing was happening). Instead, she forms a bond with fellow hostage Cory.

Cory couldn’t be more different from Drew. Where Drew is white-collar, uninterested in physical contact (more on this later), practical, focused on his career, and unemotional, Cory is a construction worker who dreams of having his own company. Cory is devoted to his daughter (he’s divorced, in mid-custody battle) and he is an emotional, physical person. Alex and Cory talk, they sleep propped up on each other, Cory defends Alex at the risk of his own life, and eventually in a “we are totally about to die” moment they have sex.

When the hostage situation is over, Alex tries to return to her own life, but she has a raging, undiagnosed case of PTSD. Her fiancé is mildly concerned but not warmly supportive. Her friends are curious in the way sharks are curious about a decomposing whale. Her bosses put her on leave because she set a trial back by appearing on the news (inadvertently and completely beyond her control). She can’t sleep – except in the hospital room where she visits Cory, who was wounded trying to protect the other hostages. Alex and Cory both endure their lives unraveling, albeit in different ways, and they discover that they are the only people who can help each other.

One thing I liked about the book was that it refused to demonize Alex’s fiancé and Cory’s ex-wife. For much of the book, we’re trying to figure out what the deal is with Drew – is he withholding sex because he doesn’t care about Alex? Is he having an affair?

Meanwhile, Cody’s ex does enormous harm to their daughter by abandoning her (although this is awfully convenient for the narrative) but she is also discussed with compassion. By far the most lovely scene in the book is one in which Alex tells Cody’s daughter a bedtime story in which she tries to make since of the mother’s actions in a way that is compassionate towards both the mother and the child.

There are some potentially triggery, and certainly frustrating, things in this story. The robbers threaten to rape Alex, repeatedly. While I don’t always object to the depiction of rape or rape threats in fiction, I felt that this added an unnecessary level of fear to a situation that had plenty of peril already. We don’t need “rape as drama” to know that Alex is afraid, because we also see people being hit and threatened with death. It’s perilous, we get that.

Alex also has an emotional affair with Cory that becomes a physical affair. While this is handled plausibly and understandably, I realize that for some readers, infidelity is a no-go.

Then there’s the epilogue, in my two least favorite tropes appear: 1. Career woman decides not to pursue her ambitions after all (she says she still wants to practice law but we never see her doing it, and she wants to cut back on hours) 2. Woman who spends her entire life up to the epilogue of the book insisting that she doesn’t want babies decides that she totally wants babies.

Finally, Alex goes to therapy once, but decides she doesn’t need it. I found that disappointing, because this would have been such a good opportunity to show someone working through problems with a therapist’s help – and because I think that the “love conquers all” message is potentially dangerous. In fairness, it’s quite clear that the fault here lies in Alex’s denial, not the therapist’s competence, but I would have liked to have seen part of her journey being revisiting therapy at some point.

Having a happy ending is vital to a romance, but in this story the threads are tied up a bit too conveniently (including Alex suddenly deciding that she wants to have babies after all, which is possibly my least favorite trope of all time). Alex’s life changes feel earned, and the romance feel earned, but the details thrown into the ending do not.

It seems as though it would have been pretty easy to make those changes feel earned. For instance, in the epilogue, either Cory of Alex could have commented that the transition from single career woman to working mother overnight had been difficult, but they were starting to get a handle on it. Instead, we never hear about Alex working after she quits the evil law practice (although she tells her father that she still plans to work) and the transition to motherhood is portrayed as effortless.

It’s true that at the end of a romance there shouldn’t be big gaping wounds, but it’s pretty contrived that once we get to the end of the story HEY PRESTO all these perfect things all happen! All at once! The parade of instant bliss is just too syrupy and convenient and false.

Ultimately this book drove me crazy and yet it kept sucking me in. Once I got past the first chapter, I liked Alex. Perhaps I took some satisfaction in seeing her humbled, but I took more in seeing her grow. I liked the romance between her and Cody, although I was uncomfortable with the deceptions Alex practiced on both Cody and Drew. I enjoyed how much they respected each other, and how attentive they were to each other’s feelings in a world in which feelings were so de-valued by everyone else. Even when they have their worst fight, they can still count on each other for help. Once the parade of brand names slows down, the writing is fluid.

Above all, whether I was annoyed by the book or delighted by the book, I wanted to know what happened next – which is a powerful thing. This is definitely a book which will annoy some people and enchant others, and it annoyed me and enchanted me pretty much equally. I’m giving it a C+ to average my response out.