Review – Before Girl by Kate Canterbary
Link to Goodreads Highlights/Quotes/Notes
Don’t be fooled by the fact that I finished this in a day. I’m pretty sure I read it so fast just so I could get it over with. I would have DNFed, but to be honest I was a little sick of all the books I was picking up quickly and dropping even quicker, so I figured, what the hell, let me finish. It’s not like it’s going to take any great amount of brain cells to get through this, and this way, it will at least count towards my reading challenge.
That sounds harsh, I know, but I get salty over books like this, and they make me go immediately into my dark, inner, angry emo/goth hideout and I eventually come out flinging bad reviews the way Oprah does cars.
Let me be clear – this book is formulaic and trite in every definition of the words. If you enjoy the formula though (smutty insta-love), you won’t have an issue with it. I know what my issue is here. I keep looking for myself in these fluffy romance books the way I do in everything else that I read. If I may wax psychological for a moment, what I seek in book (reassurance) works well for some genres, like fantasy, but not so well for romance.
I think that’s because the romance genre, as much as it tries to do the opposite, is largely incapable of realism. Case in point – this book is about a literal Army Ranger heart surgeon (lol) who falls inexplicably in love with some random woman at first site. They wind up doing the proverbial crash-into-you meet-cute and are (again) literally dry humping in a coffee shop within minutes. He’s biting her ass (literally) within hours. There ensues afterward much mental haranguing over not being deserving of happiness, interspersed with copious sex and dirty talk at such a level that it becomes exhausting. Note to authors: you can have too much of a good thing, and the same way you’re sore after having your vagina murdered (FMC’s words, not mine), so too will your eyeballs be sore after reading yet another instance of the MMC telling the FMC that he’s gonna fuck her raw, or whatever.
FYI, his shtick is basically that he’s a freak in the sheets but a gentleman in the streets, but really I think he comes off a little more on the Ted Bundy side because really, who proposes marriage and talks to a woman the way he does within minutes of meeting her without being a serial killer? I mean, he did bite her ass and we (okay, maybe just my murder show obsessed self) know how Ted Bundy was finally caught because he bit one of his victims.
I know what you’re probably thinking, at least those that actually enjoyed this book, anyway – that it’s fantasy and escapism and just go with it and have a good time, blah blah. That’s all fine and good, for you maybe, but as I’ve said ad nauseam in other reviews escapism doesn’t mean much without a dose of realism alongside it. Reading (and engaging with any form of creative entertainment), even when done as a form of escapism, is still firmly rooted in the real world – you can’t fully immerse yourself in even a fantastical world without being able to understand, and consequently relate to, it on some level. You can depict realistic situations in unrealistc settings (like outer space or Middle Earth). In fact, you kind of have to, because as I’m sure Joseph Campbell would tell you, everything follows the same basic framework, and we can’t help but write what we know.
This is all to say that ultimately, I think we enjoy even unrealistic books because of the hope that we will eventually encounter something like those situations in the real world. That’s not to say I really think I’m gonna go out my door and find Legolas walking down the street, but it would be nice to meet someone similarly loyal and brave. What’s funny here is that I think the ideals and ideas you encounter in fantasy and sci-fi, basically the stuff as far away from reality as you can get, are more real than what I encountered in this here novel (Before Girl, if you’ve made it this far and have lost the thread).
Normally, I’d read a book about a size-14 brunette Italian girl catching the eye of an Army Ranger heart surgeon and having much acrobatic, insane sex and want to think that I could have met my own Army Ranger heart surgeon and lived happily ever after. Maybe I might have, if I waited long enough and did enough searching, who knows. My point is that you read enough of this crap and become convinced that men aren’t worth having unless they’re hot, buff heart surgeons. Relationships aren’t being done right unless you’re being fucked on the kitchen counter and being bent over the back of the couch and brought to orgasm at least ten times before noon every day (10 on weekends).
Look at this way – you don’t think you’re going to walk out your door and go defeat an evil wizard with an elf and a dwarf. Maybe you’ll go to work and finally stand up to your asshole boss though. Distinctions like that are easy to make because they are quite clearly distinct from reality – it’s easier to pick out the allegorical bits when they stick out like a sore thumb. Conversely, it’s easier to get lost and miss the stuff that’s fantasy when you’re reading something that clearly mimics the real world. Trying to find life lessons and hope in a book like Before Girl is like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack though. You might get there eventually, but you could also miss a lot along the way, and waste your life thinking nobody loves you because they’re not an Army Ranger heart surgeon.
What I’m taking a very long time in saying is that these books set horribly unrealistic expectations and do more damage to self-esteem than they think they do. It’s initially empowering to imagine that a size 14 woman (such as I am) would immediately attract the attentions of said heart surgeon, but when that doesn’t happen, where are you then? Probably on your couch sobbing about how stuff like this never happens to you in real life, that’s where. I know I sound cynical and bitter and angry, and that’s because I am. Believe me, I know now that books like Before Girl are as much fantasy, if not more so, than Lord of the Rings. I speak from experience in that I was impressionable and hopeful enough in my younger years that I ate crap like this up with a spoon and wasted way too much time not getting to know people that didn’t fit this mold because I kept getting shown that people like me can be attractive to people like them. Couple that with the fact that men are shown some form of this via channels accessed regularly by men (like Maxim or Sports Illustrated or Fast and Furious movies) that they think women aren’t worth talking to unless they’re in heels and have a 24-inch waist.
In some ways romance can be extremely empowering to women – it’s a great vehicle for taking back power and turning the objectification we’ve suffered at the hands of men since time immemorial and shoving right back in their face. You (the reader) need to be in the right mental state before you dive in and get lost though, because read enough of it and you’re apt to come out being subject to the same prejudices men are when it comes to finding a significant other. It’s so much easier to dismiss the stark unreality of relationships such as they’re depicted in Before Girl when you’re reading about elves and magic. It’s just as easy to get lost in the illusion when the spunky family seems just like yours, and you have friends that act the same way and you too cheer for the Red Sox (I don’t. Go Yankees).
Nobody will ever be good enough, there are very few Army Ranger heart surgeons and 24-inch waisted women out there, and moral of the story is basically everybody winds up sitting at home alone reading junk like this because it makes them feel better about themselves, while sneakily re-enforcing those oppressive ideals that keep us angry and lonely. It’s a completely vicious cycle, and the more you read books like this the more you become aware of it.
I’m not sure why books like this rub “wronger” than something like The Hating Game, for example. I mention that one specifically because it’s a romance novel that I’ve enjoyed immensely. I’m thinking it’s because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and there’s enough comedic moments interspersed throughout to keep jolting you out of that romance fiction-induced stupor. I can identify with a lot of it (Lucy’s weirdness, her smurf obsession) even when it’s just as unrealistic on the surface (physical specimens like Joshua Templeman are few and far between). However, it’s rooted in a slightly more relatable and realistic situation (the world of corporate business assistants as opposed to an Army Ranger heart surgeon and sports publicist coming together…. those circles are much smaller) so it goes down easier for me I think. Also, I’m not smacked in the face with instant love (a massive pet peeve of mine because it’s a lazy fucking plot device) and ass biting in the first ten pages. And before you call me out on it, I know it seems totally antithetical to like one romance over another when both are ostensibly set in the “real world” and I’ve admitted that I can relate to characters in both on at least some level, but I counter with the fact that Before Girl relies on lazy plot devices like insta-love-as-a-shortcut-to-smut, amongst other things. Personally, I’m going to respect you more as a writer if you’re just going to write a book of porn vignettes instead of trying to sell me the fallacy of love at first sight and then send people out into the world believe that shit is real.
I should also mention that this book also leans heavily on the cool girl/not like other girls trope, and while I get the desire to want to feel special and unique, it shouldn’t come at the expense of shoving other women down or making it seem like women have to be a million different things at once (successful, feminine, like sports, curvy in only the right places) in order to be “cool.” We’re all unicorns, ladies, let’s smash the patriarchy instead of each other.
Ultimately, I think, for me at least, it comes down to the fact that I want to enjoy the journey, whether it’s going to result in one smutty encounter or twenty. So, if you want to write lots of smut and just get down to it, you do you, but don’t wrap it up in some package that makes it seem like shit like this happens in real life, because 99% of the time it doesn’t. I can engage in the fantasy that it does when I’m reading about some [insert random animal]-shifter standing downwind and finding his fated mate and him humping her in the next paragraph (still more realistic because stuff like that does happen in the animal kingdom, just saying) but not when a guy I could objectively speaking run into when I walk outside my door. And when that doesn’t happen, I wind up getting pissed and writing 10k words of vitriol on the internet.
Keep It To Your Shelf 