Official Review: A Game of Chance by Lauren Linwood
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Official Review: A Game of Chance by Lauren Linwood
[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "A Game of Chance" by Lauren Linwood.]
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A Game of Chance starts off with an intense prologue that immediately piqued my interest —the husband of a woman dying in the middle of agonizing childbirth casually explains he had tricked her into having a child with him so he could extort money from her father. He takes their newborn son and leaves her alone to die, but then she delivers a second healthy baby boy.
The narration jumps to California in 1870, where a gambler called Jed is thrown into jail for crimes he didn’t commit. It turns out he looks a lot like a notorious gangster. Once escaping jail, Jed decides to find his lookalike and runs away to hide in a whorehouse. Bluntly, a sub-plot is introduced: Jed wants to also get revenge on a man called Simon Morgan. In the whorehouse, Jed meets Lily—the daughter of the owner—pretending to be her mother. While they aren’t sure of each other’s true identities for much of the story, the two eventually fall in love.
Structurally the story is written in an organized way and is easy to follow, but there are several flaws which make it very difficult to enjoy.
The narrative spends too much time focusing on mundane, trivial dialogue or observations that significantly slow down the pace of the book, and not enough time on details that are actually pertinent in setting the scene. An unendurable amount of time is spent on boring details and conversations that don't need to be included, and I still have absolutely no picture in my head what the places mentioned in this story are supposed to look like.
Rather than showing, as the author did in the prologue, the actions of an antagonist, and allowing the reader to feel anger on their own; or describing scenes in which the protagonists prove their worth, so the reader can feel sympathetic or supportive of them, they are pointed to, as if on a blackboard—“this is Simon, he is the ‘bad guy’; this is Jed, he is the good guy. This is Lily--and Jed and Lily fall in love, obviously.”
There is absolutely no depth to the people in the story—and there doesn’t seem to be any logical reason as to why the two main characters fall in love, or frankly, why they think the things they think, given what we know about them. The sinister backdrop of the whorehouse is disturbingly glossed over, and Jed observes that the girls “appear like a family”. When two of the prostitutes fight over a banker, Lily scolds them like a mother would scold her toddlers, and everything is easily sorted out.
Lily’s inner thoughts, when she is not obsessing over a former lover, reveal that she doesn’t want to end up like the girls she pimps out to the community. She appears extremely sheltered and innocent considering the fact that she and her mother run a whorehouse.
If the purpose of the book was simply to be racy, it would have been more successful had the characters been better defined. The author’s ability to produce unique and interesting plot lines would be better served if she were able to add more emotional depth and realistic clarity to the scenes and her characters.
Though structurally and grammatically this book is sound, it is not polished enough for me to recommend to anyone; even members of its target audience--which I'm assuming are adults who read romantic or commercial fiction--and for this reason, I have to give it a 2 out of 4.
***
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The narration jumps to California in 1870, where a gambler called Jed is thrown into jail for crimes he didn’t commit. It turns out he looks a lot like a notorious gangster. Once escaping jail, Jed decides to find his lookalike and runs away to hide in a whorehouse. Bluntly, a sub-plot is introduced: Jed wants to also get revenge on a man called Simon Morgan. In the whorehouse, Jed meets Lily—the daughter of the owner—pretending to be her mother. While they aren’t sure of each other’s true identities for much of the story, the two eventually fall in love.
Structurally the story is written in an organized way and is easy to follow, but there are several flaws which make it very difficult to enjoy.
The narrative spends too much time focusing on mundane, trivial dialogue or observations that significantly slow down the pace of the book, and not enough time on details that are actually pertinent in setting the scene. An unendurable amount of time is spent on boring details and conversations that don't need to be included, and I still have absolutely no picture in my head what the places mentioned in this story are supposed to look like.
Rather than showing, as the author did in the prologue, the actions of an antagonist, and allowing the reader to feel anger on their own; or describing scenes in which the protagonists prove their worth, so the reader can feel sympathetic or supportive of them, they are pointed to, as if on a blackboard—“this is Simon, he is the ‘bad guy’; this is Jed, he is the good guy. This is Lily--and Jed and Lily fall in love, obviously.”
There is absolutely no depth to the people in the story—and there doesn’t seem to be any logical reason as to why the two main characters fall in love, or frankly, why they think the things they think, given what we know about them. The sinister backdrop of the whorehouse is disturbingly glossed over, and Jed observes that the girls “appear like a family”. When two of the prostitutes fight over a banker, Lily scolds them like a mother would scold her toddlers, and everything is easily sorted out.
Lily’s inner thoughts, when she is not obsessing over a former lover, reveal that she doesn’t want to end up like the girls she pimps out to the community. She appears extremely sheltered and innocent considering the fact that she and her mother run a whorehouse.
If the purpose of the book was simply to be racy, it would have been more successful had the characters been better defined. The author’s ability to produce unique and interesting plot lines would be better served if she were able to add more emotional depth and realistic clarity to the scenes and her characters.
Though structurally and grammatically this book is sound, it is not polished enough for me to recommend to anyone; even members of its target audience--which I'm assuming are adults who read romantic or commercial fiction--and for this reason, I have to give it a 2 out of 4.
***
Buy "A Game of Chance" on Amazon
Latest Review: "Travel Instincts" by James C. Jensen
