But first, a
1. One of my problems with the book is that of personal preference. I don't like insta-love books, where the protagonists see each other across a crowded room and immediately know they're meant for each other forever. It's a valid story type, a lot of people like it, I'm just not one of them. I prefer stories where the protags have to work for their relationship and their happy ever after.
2. I don't like stories where the protagonists are (for a given value) perfect, and all the story's conflict comes from the cruel, uncaring world outside. I don't think all relationship conflict in the story needs to come from internal conflict, but I want a balance of internal growth with external drama.
3. (And this one should be obvious, but I'm gonna say it anyway) This is all just how I felt about this book and is, obviously, predicated on those above two issues. So take this review how you will.
Truth be told, I feel like Conquest failed me on two fronts: technically, the writing itself wasn't very good (I'll get into more detail about that in a second) and the story itself was both uninteresting and contrived (more on that, too).
Okay. So we're going to skip over the fairy-tale set up of how the band of the title, Conquest, goes from being a nowhere bar band to being the financial rival of the top names in the business in under a year, okay? Just…handwave all that, because…whatever. Just handwave it, all right?
First of all, it's incredibly exposition heavy. Long, tedious paragraphs where Frost describes every point of her protagonists' appearance, everything that's in the room around them, every movement and gesture that they make.
I have a modest example. This is while the protagonist Jesse looks at himself in the mirror:
At five foot seven, he was lithe and fit, his biceps firm with sinewy strength, his abdomen lined in muscle, his smooth chest well-defined. He ran the backs of his index and middle fingers along his slender jaw, then lathered his face and took his razor carefully over his flawless skin. His black hair toweled and styled to accentuate the sharp, jagged angles around his face, with enough length in back to fall just to the top of his neck. Long enough to get a messy look, but able to style neatly when he wanted. Dressed in jeans faded on the thighs and a black V-neck shirt that clung to his lean frame, she slid three small silver hoop earrings into his left earlobe and a fourth up in the cartilage, then two more in his right earlobe. Around his neck, he fastened a choker of two thin black leather cords with a gold pendant of a sixteen-rayed sun that rested in the hollow of his throat.
Similarly, it's not enough for Frost to say that Jesse and his brother Brandon go from the car to Brandon's apartment, she writes them climbing out, closing the door, going up the steps of the stoop, opening the building door, going up the inside stairs, walking across to the door of Brandon's apartment, unlocking the door, and then going inside…where she proceeds to describe every stick of furniture in Brandon's apartment and its relative placement to all the rest of the furniture and to Jesse. She drops the brand names of everything every character uses like she's doing movie product placement and gets an Amazon kick-back for each mention. At times, it reads like she pulled the description straight from the promotional material. It's excruciatingly detailed and she leaves absolutely nothing to the reader's intellect or imagination.
The dialogue is equally clunky and stilted and what should be relaxed, amusing banter generally reads as trying too hard. The POV is all over the place, switching mid-scene with no real transition and introduces random, unneccessary one-use POVs in the last third of the book. Worse, (omg, so much worse), the book's premise is of love between two musicians and the book is bogged down in several places by the inclusion of song lyrics.
And I have two things to say about that: first of all, they're just painful and ludicrous and over the top emo lyrics that made me roll my eyes and snicker (and occasionally inflict them on The Husband, who took to putting a pillow over his head); secondly—and this goes hand in hand with the nitpicky, uber-detail of the rest of the book—sometimes it's better for your story to leave some things to the imagination. A certain amount of name dropping, for example, be it a place (the book is set in Chicago, and don't even get me started about how Frost got THAT all wrong!) or a brand name or a celebrity of the time, grounds your story in the real world and can give it a level of verisimilitude that helps sell your story. But, taken over the top, it just ends up looking amateurish and dates your material badly. More than that, if you want me to actually believe that your two musicians are these uber-amazing virtuosos, giving me bad emo poetry as song lyrics is not helping me buy your story. It's actually just the opposite.
Which brings me to my next point: the rampant Mary-sue-ism. Jesse is perfect; he's handsome as an angel, he's fit, he's charismatic, he can play any instrument he lays his hands on and sing like the angel he appears to be, on top of it. Evan, his other half, is no different, light to Jesse's dark. Jesse's worst "flaw" is that he's impulsive and doesn't know how not to love with his whole heart. Evan's worst "flaw" is some minor self-esteem issues that have no bearing on the actual story arc, and gets resolved after a good talk, a good cry and a tearful fuck. They can look at each other and know what the other is thinking, from their first moments together.
More than that, Brandon, Jesse's brother, is "the best actor Chicago has ever seen", Jesse's BFF, Kenny, is a guitar god to rival Stevie Ray Vaughn and so is Evan's guy-pal and guitarist, JJ. In fact, the only imperfect people seem to be the women. There are basically three women mentioned in Conquest. There's Kenny's girlfriend, a clingy, shrieky gold-digger, there's Evan's mom, a shrewish harpy who begrudged every penny spent on Evan's musical education and who couldn't be bothered to take care of her cancer-ridden husband before his death, and there's Trish, Conquest's drummer, who, while supposedly awesome, still isn't good enough to keep up with Jesse, Kenny, or Julian, the Julliard trained pianist, who flirts with everything with a dick, including Jesse from the moment she meets him, who pitches a tearful tantrum when she can't get the song right (with requisite 'take some Midol!' references) and who falls in love with Jesse and tries to make a move on him while he's drunk and passed out. Yeah, the woman-hating is thick in this one. And intensely repellent.
There's also a thin scrim of "all heteros are homophobic" subtext that threads through the book but is never really addressed. Kenny, who is supposedly very laid-back and accepting, nonetheless demonstrates a lot of discomfort with even discussion about Jesse's gayness and damn near flips his lid when Jesse brings Evan home (though this is later kind of handwaved by the idea that Kenny was only thrown for a loop because it's EVAN ARDEN, rock god). Tim, the cartoonish (and requisitely fat, sweaty and dumb) "villain" of the piece, is unprofessional, bigoted and harasses both Jesse and Evan when he finds out they're queer and together. Greg, the owner of Phoenix Records, is shown to be superficially tolerant, but he leans on both Jesse and Evan to hide both their queerness and their relationship 'for business' and is also depicted, like Kenny to be frequently uncomfortable with public displays of affection. Trish, as mentioned, frequently and volubly pouts about the fact that "all the good ones are gay" and throws herself at Jesse at every opportunity, while giving Evan the cold shoulder. In fact, all of the straight people shown are kind of assholes.
Which… I probably could have dealt with that kind of one-dimensional characterization if Frost had actually made something of it, but the book has no real singular conflict arc that carries through the whole book; it's only a series of minor scuffles that's quickly resolved with a minimum of fuss. Kenny's resentment is laid to rest after a talk with Jesse. Tim gets the snot beat out of him by Evan and then is fired, his threats to out Jesse and Evan pure bluster that comes to nothing. Greg "wins" in the sense that Jesse and Evan are still closeted and keeping their relationship under wraps (for the moment), but there's no real sense of threat there, either. And Trish fades back to being a nonentity.
On the one hand, homophobia—aversive and active—is unquestionably a problem in the real world. That's not my nitpick. But the fact that Frost raises its specter, flirts around the edges of it, and then actually does nothing to address the homophobia she's invoked and flirted around in any meaningful way is both a wasted opportunity and poor writing. The fact that she chooses to invoke it in the most over the top, cartoonish ways is also poor writing. I would have been far more interested and engrossed in the story of how homophobia was affecting Jesse and Evan at the professional and personal level. Instead, she chose to show it more as schoolyard bullies picking on the golden boys and that, frankly, was overwrought and boring.
And then lastly… Okay, look. If you spend the whole book showing how supernaturally, psychically, bordering on soul-bonded these two characters are, to know each other without a word being exchanged and then hinge the denouement on a contrived fight created by Evan to shove Jesse away "for his own good" and "to protect him from himself" and have Jesse fall for it, when the relationship has ben entirely rock-solid and unquestionable to that point....you have just undermined the whole premise you spent two hundred pages setting up.
More than that, Frost then drags it out for another fifty or so pages, while Jesse and Evan pine after each other in the most transparent, pathetically obvious way. This is especially ludicrous because she's also spent those two hundred preceding pages making them gab to each other about every little problem they've suffered under the sun, they suddenly clam up and lose the ability to talk to each other with the emotionally naked honesty that they've given to each other from the first moments of their meeting. She creates a sudden doubt between them where NONE existed before that moment and…it's just shoddy. There's no other word for it. Wait. No. Contrived. It is so obviously, pathetically contrived, plucked from every bad rom-com template out there. The fact that they can't actually stay apart through their supposed separation takes the absurdity up another level and it's actually an anticlimax (which takes a special skill, I think, to muff that up) when they get back together for their "happy for now" ending.
S.J. Frost is part of the online book group I belong to, and she seems like a nice person (though I find it a little conversation stifling and creepy, the way she's personally responded to every comment someone made on the Conquest discussion thread). In the discussion thread, I saw that she mentioned that, for her, books are a form of escapism. And that's a valid viewpoint.
On the other hand, I think that once an author has gone through as much trouble to ground her story in the real world as Frost has, with her constant name-dropping, the willing suspension of disbelief can only be maintained by upholding that real world connection. Once you take an urban, real world setting, and then try to make your characters act in a fantastical way, you lose your audience. And if you want fantasy, then you need to establish up front that you are writing in a fantasy world.
So, for me, Conquest ultimately fails because Frost failed to establish the rules of her own game.
Haha so you didn't like this book I take it?
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