Danger! Disaster! Call the BBC! Escape from Paradise has resulted in – Shock! Horror! – diverging opinions. Yes, friends, Michael and I had hugely different reactions to this one and, believe me, that doesn’t happen very often. We’re talking wild extremes: for him, this was a 4/5 star read; for me, it was a DNF (Did Not Finish). Where, pray tell, did we part company?
MICHAEL’S TAKE
I guess it was sort of inevitable if we did this long enough.
A lot of people are comparing this to Captive in the Dark. I can see why. And I can certainly make the case for comparing them. A young woman is kidnapped. Mexico. International human trafficking. An anti-hero with a troubled past. But there comes a point when this has to sink or swim on its own merits. That is where Jane and I disagree.
Probably the biggest difference is Marco. He is a little hard to describe. He’s a monster, right? The evil human trafficker who forces his captives to do his bidding to further his criminal empire. Simple. Only at least some of his slaves delight in serving him, happy that he rescued them from a life of poverty and despair. In fact, at least one is desperately in love with him. And he could have killed our young heroine right at the beginning instead of taking her into his home. And he certainly could have taken her anal virginity … because … well, the reason he didn’t I didn’t quite get. In fact, I found that entire subplot a little odd.
Douglas. Colin Douglas. That doesn’t actually appear in the novel and Colin never got assigned a designation starting with a couple of zeros but the whole MI-6 thing was an interesting choice. But it was such a minor issue that aside from adding some unintended humour it didn’t make much difference.
Angela’s character was obviously inspired by Natalee Holloway. In fact, when Jane suggested this book, I deliberately just started reading without knowing anything about it. So I had no idea what was about to happen although perhaps I should have seen it.
Ultimately it came down to whether I liked Angela and Colin. And I did. They weren’t Livvie and Caleb but they had their own strengths and weaknesses. I was really hoping things would work out for them. And they did – although not without a few twists right up the very end.
I’m sorry this didn’t measure up for Jane but there is always next time.
JANE’S TAKE
I live in the U.K. Granted, I wasn’t born here but I’ve spent the last decade of my life residing and working in Britain and, over time, have become reasonably familiar with all the dialects therein. Although I will never get the hang of Cockney rhyming slang (the first time someone asked me if I ‘fancied a butchers’ I had all sorts of bizarre images going through my head – we were going to some sort of butcher appreciation event? Some sort of sausage festival? Seemed a rather unlikely turn of events given the nature of the conference call we were having …). My point is that I have a semi-reasonable handle on regional accents these days.
I’ve worked with a few Scotsmen. One of my neighbours is from Edinburgh. And I can tell you right now that NONE of them sound remotely like Colin, the Scottish dude in this story. If ‘C’, said neighbour, started talking to me the way Colin does at certain points in Escape from Paradise, I’d probably think she’d been drinking a lot of Glenfiddich. In short, I could count on one hand the times I’ve heard ‘och’, ‘lass’, ‘lassie’, and ‘ken’ come up in conversation with Scottish people my age.
Reading the blurb for Escape from Paradise, I was excited – in fact, this was my reading choice rather than Michael’s. I like dark erotica, non-con in particular, and I thought this was going to be in the vein of C.J. Roberts’ Captive in the Dark, which I adored. Unfortunately, I fell rather heavily from the wagon within the first quarter of the book and just couldn’t get back on it again.
It wasn’t just the dialogue that flipped the off switch for me, but the rather erratic characterisation of both Colin and Marco, neither of which felt believable. The first does a dramatic personality one-eighty in the space of a few paragraphs, albeit due to a major life event (narcissistic party boy to avenging angel) and the latter is, well, just off somehow. (I was incredibly surprised that he didn’t kill Angela at the very beginning. I realise that would have stopped the story dead but, ultimately, that reaction from him to the circumstances would have been far more true to type.) Oh, and the way the police show up and deal with the crime involving Colin’s younger brother at the very beginning of this story? Er. No. It just wouldn’t happen that way here.
“I’m sorry to tell you this,” one of them said softly. “But we must work quickly. Your parents have been murdered and your brother’s gone missing. We’re taking you into custody for your own protection.”
Maybe this book works better for non-U.K. readers? Looking at this review I can see a lot of my gripes are to do with context and setting. For a comparison, it would be like me trying to write in a caricature American accent.
‘Howdy, Michael. Are you swell today? Because, dude, I totally I am. I am a total hot mess. My checking account is full of cooties and there’s a stick shift stuck in my drywall.’
Eh, something went wrong for me, that’s for sure. I wanted another Caleb, another Livvie – and I didn’t get either. Although looking at all the positive reviews Escape from Paradise is getting, it would seem I’m in the disliking minority.
Tickle your fancy? Click on the following links to purchase a copy:
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
