Reviewed by Ian Goodwillie (originally posted Nov. 20, 2014)
The old school cliché says “don’t judge a book by its cover.” While the core lesson is correct, anyone who has worked in a bookstore or library knows that people do just that every day. In some cases, the cover is the sole reason someone picks up a book by an unknown author. An intriguing title definitely can have the same effect.
And, if nothing else, Gina French is Not a Waste of Roofies is one heck of an intriguing title.
This thriller, verging on horror territory, primarily follows Gina French, a woman who works as a guard at a prison with a male population. The beginning of the book finds her in rather dire straits, recovering from an attempted sexual assault perpetrated by some of the prisoners during a riot. From there, Gina takes off after one of the escapees in an attempt to cash in on the reward. It’s a book filled with tense scenes that could honestly go either in the favour of the hero or the villain, depending on who appears to fit under which label at the moment. And for a book with surprisingly little dialogue, there’s next to no dry exposition. The tension of the core scenes and the internal monologue, primarily by French, quite handily carries the reader through the story.
Unfortunately, there are more than a few roadblocks to clearly enjoying what could be an engaging narrative. There are consistent grammatical and spelling mistakes, sometimes a few in a rather short span. Page 151 is missing half the text in the printed version though it is there in the electronic version. Scene changes are occasionally clunky and unclear. And there’s one place in the book where Gina French appears to think that thunder comes before lightning.
Similar issues crop up in any book but they appear en masse in Gina French. Each time you run across one, it drags you out of the story and utterly smashes the fourth wall. You read the passage on page 78 where it seems that thunder is preceding lightning, stop to think about it, Google it to make sure you’re right, and then settle back into the story. Instead of reading for five minutes, you just spent five minutes questioning your own understanding of weather or, at the very least, your understanding of that passage. This is only one of several glitches that definitely make it difficult to get lost in the tale, although a reprint due this fall apparently will correct some of these issues.
Beyond that, many of the scenes simply drag on too long. There are moments when characters are locked in highly tense standoffs which are gripping to say the least. But these scenes often run on, the tension slowly bleeding out and leaving the reader wanting the story to just move forward.
Ultimately, the issues with this book are less about the writing and more about the editing. A thorough editor would have cleaned up more of the grammatical errors and picked up on the possible thunder/lightning reversal. That same editor would have cut the longer scenes back by several pages, giving the rest of the story an opportunity to breath. Reading this book gives the impression that the person with the red pen challenging the author’s choices was either inexperienced or unwilling to make hard choices of their own. And when you’re working with a first time author, tight reins are needed.
Back to the overtly salacious title. It’s eye-catching to say the least, but frankly has little to do with the actual story. Its implementation is loosely justified by an early anecdote that feels shoehorned in simply as an excuse for the title.
She examined the mug she chose at random; the thick black words “Gina French is NOT a Waste of Roofies” jumped out from the shiny white finish. It took her back to an evening when foreign beer was cheap and this particular catchphrase owned the night as Gina and her girlfriends kept dancing long after the music had stopped and the ugly light had been raised. The phrase had started as a playful dig, after a round of shots promising no men, no drama tonight, a stranger had asked Hannah about her friend, to which she replied, “Who her? Oh, Gina – she’s is a waste of roofies.” [sic]
After the anecdote is complete, the phrase only comes up one more time later in the book. Again, it’s a scene that feels like it exists primarily to rationalize the title choice. The title and its use in this scene did have the potential to be more important to the overall narrative.
The author actually takes a big swing with how that narrative is structured, telling the story in four parts from the perspective of four different characters involved. In many ways, the style is comparable to Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus! It’s a deceptively complicated way to tell a story that works well in the hands of an experienced author like Coupland. Considering that Anderson is a first time author, he does use the technique rather well, though the story could have been as effectively told solely from the perspective of Gina French, a highly engaging, morally ambiguous character.
The reality is that there is a good story in this book even with its issues. Anderson has obvious talent as a writer, and that shines through in his prose–which is more than a little reminiscent of pulp fiction–and in his ability to maintain unique internal voices for each of the four characters the story focuses on.
Kraken| 304 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-9197972574
‘Gina French is Not a Waste of Roofies’ by C.J. Anderson
Book Reviews
The old school cliché says “don’t judge a book by its cover.” While the core lesson is correct, anyone who has worked in a bookstore or library knows that people do just that every day. In some cases, the cover is the sole reason someone picks up a book by an unknown author. An intriguing title definitely can have the same effect.
And, if nothing else, Gina French is Not a Waste of Roofies is one heck of an intriguing title.
This thriller, verging on horror territory, primarily follows Gina French, a woman who works as a guard at a prison with a male population. The beginning of the book finds her in rather dire straits, recovering from an attempted sexual assault perpetrated by some of the prisoners during a riot. From there, Gina takes off after one of the escapees in an attempt to cash in on the reward. It’s a book filled with tense scenes that could honestly go either in the favour of the hero or the villain, depending on who appears to fit under which label at the moment. And for a book with surprisingly little dialogue, there’s next to no dry exposition. The tension of the core scenes and the internal monologue, primarily by French, quite handily carries the reader through the story.
Unfortunately, there are more than a few roadblocks to clearly enjoying what could be an engaging narrative. There are consistent grammatical and spelling mistakes, sometimes a few in a rather short span. Page 151 is missing half the text in the printed version though it is there in the electronic version. Scene changes are occasionally clunky and unclear. And there’s one place in the book where Gina French appears to think that thunder comes before lightning.
Similar issues crop up in any book but they appear en masse in Gina French. Each time you run across one, it drags you out of the story and utterly smashes the fourth wall. You read the passage on page 78 where it seems that thunder is preceding lightning, stop to think about it, Google it to make sure you’re right, and then settle back into the story. Instead of reading for five minutes, you just spent five minutes questioning your own understanding of weather or, at the very least, your understanding of that passage. This is only one of several glitches that definitely make it difficult to get lost in the tale, although a reprint due this fall apparently will correct some of these issues.
Beyond that, many of the scenes simply drag on too long. There are moments when characters are locked in highly tense standoffs which are gripping to say the least. But these scenes often run on, the tension slowly bleeding out and leaving the reader wanting the story to just move forward.
Ultimately, the issues with this book are less about the writing and more about the editing. A thorough editor would have cleaned up more of the grammatical errors and picked up on the possible thunder/lightning reversal. That same editor would have cut the longer scenes back by several pages, giving the rest of the story an opportunity to breath. Reading this book gives the impression that the person with the red pen challenging the author’s choices was either inexperienced or unwilling to make hard choices of their own. And when you’re working with a first time author, tight reins are needed.
Back to the overtly salacious title. It’s eye-catching to say the least, but frankly has little to do with the actual story. Its implementation is loosely justified by an early anecdote that feels shoehorned in simply as an excuse for the title.
She examined the mug she chose at random; the thick black words “Gina French is NOT a Waste of Roofies” jumped out from the shiny white finish. It took her back to an evening when foreign beer was cheap and this particular catchphrase owned the night as Gina and her girlfriends kept dancing long after the music had stopped and the ugly light had been raised. The phrase had started as a playful dig, after a round of shots promising no men, no drama tonight, a stranger had asked Hannah about her friend, to which she replied, “Who her? Oh, Gina – she’s is a waste of roofies.” [sic]
After the anecdote is complete, the phrase only comes up one more time later in the book. Again, it’s a scene that feels like it exists primarily to rationalize the title choice. The title and its use in this scene did have the potential to be more important to the overall narrative.
The author actually takes a big swing with how that narrative is structured, telling the story in four parts from the perspective of four different characters involved. In many ways, the style is comparable to Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus! It’s a deceptively complicated way to tell a story that works well in the hands of an experienced author like Coupland. Considering that Anderson is a first time author, he does use the technique rather well, though the story could have been as effectively told solely from the perspective of Gina French, a highly engaging, morally ambiguous character.
The reality is that there is a good story in this book even with its issues. Anderson has obvious talent as a writer, and that shines through in his prose–which is more than a little reminiscent of pulp fiction–and in his ability to maintain unique internal voices for each of the four characters the story focuses on.
Kraken| 304 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-9197972574