C-
Genre: Contemporary Romance, New Adult, Romance
Theme: Dark, Taboo Relationship/Forbidden Romance
Archetype: Criminal/Mafia
Fighting to be Free by Kirsty Moseley is an over-the-top, angsty, dark New Adult novel. I know that all appeals to a lot of readers, but it didn’t work for me. It also features a seventeen-year-old heroine and an eighteen-year-old hero, but it is NOT YA. I repeat, NOT YA. It’s basically a “boy from the wrong side of the tracks meets poor little rich girl” with humping and sadness. The humping is explicit and the sadness is violent and tragic, so I’d recommend Fighting to be Free for an adult or teen audience.
The book opens with Jamie Cole getting out of juvie and telling us, rather ominously, that he killed someone. Jamie wasn’t locked up for murder–no, he’s an expert car thief known as “The Kid.” (Side note: Remember the car theft movie with Nicholas Cage and Angelina Jolie? I thought I’d killed that brain cell off, but this book woke it up again). Jamie is planning on starting over fresh, but The Bad Dude he stole cars for threatens Jamie’s mom if he doesn’t come back into the fold.
One thing that confused me was that Bad Dude vacillated between being a manipulative asshole and a rough-around-the-edges surrogate father for Jamie. I mean, it’s possible to be both things but it felt a little uneven.
Anyway, Jamie has been stealing cars AND participating in illegal underground fighting since he was thirteen (yeah, I know), so it’s hard to figure out how to earn an actual living, especially without any kind of support whatsoever. Jamie is emancipated from his mom–a prostitute–and his dad and sister are dead. His only friends were criminals.
He’s at a nightclub wallowing in loneliness when he meets high school senior, Ellie Pearce. They have a one night stand (her parents think she’s sleeping at a friend’s house) and of course the sex is incredible. Seriously, these kids are like really good at sex. It took me awhile to figure it out. Anyway, when Ellie forgets her phone at the halfway house he’s living in, Jamie uses it to find her.
Enter forbidden romance. Jamie and Ellie fall in love and have lots of sex and she does nice things for him, which no one has ever done before because his life has to be a stereotype of poverty and misery. Ellie is extremely popular, the head cheerleader and well-off. Her parents obviously disapprove of Jamie, especially since Ellie just broke up with her quarterback, and also rich kid, boyfriend, Miles. Ellie’s mom especially wants her back with Miles and is a complete shitbag about it in front of Jamie.
The conflict comes from Jamie trying to escape his criminal livelihood to be with Ellie and from Ellie’s family pulling her away from Jamie. Also Miles wants Ellie back and is willing to be a douche in order to get her away from Jamie.
So, like I said, this book didn’t work for me. A big part of the problem was that the awfulness of Jamie’s life is just relentless and exhausting. His mom is awful. We learn about his sister’s death and it’s awful. The big reveal about Jamie being a murderer is awful.
Basically Ellie is the ONLY good thing to ever happen to Jamie, and her family is awful to him too. He spends a ton of thinking about how Ellie is too good for him and feeling bad about it. It was like the book kept beating me over the head with the TRAGIC LIFE OF JAMIE. I was hoping for a little bit of nuance, not glaring neon lights of sadness.
And I wasn’t particularly invested in the main couple either. Ellie is nice to Jamie, but her character didn’t have much depth. Come to think of it, Jamie didn’t either. They were archetypes, not real people, and aside from the stellar sex, I wasn’t ever sure why they wanted to be together.
Be warned, this book also ends on a cliffhanger, but since I wasn’t invested in the romance or the couple to begin with, I didn’t care too much.
The thing is, this is not the right the book for me and I realize that. I think that the characterization was a little flat, but the things that didn’t work for me may work for another reader. Jamie’s dark criminal life felt overwhelmingly depressing to me, but I know readers who would eat that up like cake. The forbidden teenage love didn’t trip my trigger, but I know readers who dig it. So while I think that there were some issues with the characters and plot (I’m still trying to wrap my brain around a 13 year old in an adult underground fighting ring and not 1. laugh or b. die of sadness), I can acknowledge that I was not the right audience for this book and that the right audience would probably enjoy it.
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It’s kind of interesting in that normally it’s the heroine in stories like this who has the horribad life and the hero saves her from it, but, like Elyse, good gravy I cannot stand it. Some authors just don’t get that piling more tragedy on a story over and over doesn’t make it extra super duper sad, it typically winds up making it comical. It’s like… oh, he comes from the wrong side of the tracks. He drives a car that is constantly on fire to take his little brother to school, then to his job at The Factory, where his boss steals half his earnings. His family is poor and abusive. They make him eat spiders and wood clippings every day, but somehow, he still finds it within himself to love them. Then one day they are mauled to death by a bear.’The bear feels bad and takes him in as its own… but then the bear is eaten by a shark who turns out to be his real father all along.
TOO MUCH.
@Dora …actually I would read that book. You had me at shark eating bear.
The shark is also from a broken home.
@Elyse – of course you’d read that book. You are, after all, the Marine Science Officer.
Not a romance, but if you’d like a story where a boy having a series of bad breaks feels like a real teenager, not a collection of stereotypes, read “Tyrell” by Coe Booth. There’s a fair bit of sex, but it doesn’t solve all his problems nor is it the center of his life. There IS a gradually developing love triangle that ends up being sort of bittersweet. Not an HEA, but more of a “I think I see my way to a HFN” but a good book.
Here’s another one to skip. Thanks for the warning. I’ll tell you something you didn’t mention about this story that really bugs me. In the eyes of the law, an eighteen-year-old is an adult, while a seventeen-year-old is still a child. Which means Jamie is guilty of statutory rape. I wish the author had made them nineteen and eighteen.
@Gloriamarie – actually it depends on the state, I think, (16 is frequently age of consent) but almost ALL states have carve-outs specifying that there is no statutory rape if the parties are within two years of each other in age. If both parties are under sixteen neither can legally consent (though in NY state a girl who becomes pregnant automatically is considered an adult so she can consent to medical treatment), but even fifteen and sixteen involves no crime – thank goodness, or we’d be arresting high school kids all the time!
@Gloriamarie @Rebecca I was going to bring that up, too. They’re typically referred to as “Romeo and Juliet” Laws. They even brought it up in the Transformers movie with Mark Wahlberg, which is literally the only thing I remember about that movie. LOL
Huh. I don’t see the response I posted to Rebecca, thanking her for this information.
@Megan M, Romeo and Juliet laws are new to me. Never heard of them
The stereotype comments sort of pick at me. For some strange reason (I so do NOT want to know why I’m there), I’ve been binge watching Law & Order: SVU. I love the Benson and Stabler team relationship then they messed it up but still love Benson. Anyway, I know they say these stories don’t resemble real folks but the thing is, I’m confident they resemble real lives of folks living in bad places and having had very bad things happen to them. One of the recent ones I watched was with a girl, an orphan, who was pimped out from the age of 13. She lived in the pimp’s house, forced to serve him and his friends then go out make money, had to give up a baby and the abuse never stopped and when they got her out of it, she couldn’t handle the life and ended up back in another situation.
My point in telling you this is that it’s not stereotype for a character to have the kind of life this hero did. Just because we don’t see it, in our good lives find it hard to believe this stuff can really happen, that it’s just what TV does, is not fair to all the folks living to this and to me, when you brush aside his character as stereotype just because he has a lot of bad things going on–that’s just not fair.
If you mean stereotype that this is common as to what authors use, I get that. I think a lot of authors use that because it’s “easy” to write. Easier than bringing in conflict from another way. And bad boy redemption stories are very popular.
I’m sorry. I don’t usually comment but after watching all the SVU, it kind of shook me out of my middle class lifestyle with a well-paying job and easy life so I might be a bit sensitive.