Chasing Love [Paperback]

Adrian Edwards is a hunter, not of wild game though, of women. She seeks them out everywhere and goes and has one `one night stand' after another. Tamara is her long suffering best friend and she's just found the love of her life, Harriet and is ready to settle down. Adrian realizes her life isn't going the way she wants it to anymore. She has to take a step back and evaluate her life and what she really wants. She decides she wants what Tamara has, love. Adrian meets Morresay at an art class she attends. She is drawn to her, but thinks that Morresay is out of bounds as she is straight, or is she?
What a book. Lots of humor, sex and telling of the harsh realities of coming to terms with actually liking who you are to be able to move on with your life in the direction you want it to go. A truly satisfying, engrossing book.

This book was phenominal! I held on to every word and felt every emotion. The characters were perfect. I loved this story!!! Ronica Black is powerful in her storytelling. And once again...WOW!!!! Emotions went wild.

RATING

Amazon tells me that 4 stars means "I Like It." And I do like Ronica Black's CHASING LOVE, and have read it two or three times now. So, it gets 4 stars as a work of fiction that is enjoyable and well-executed.

However, as a Romance novel, it should only get 2 stars. The central love relationship is given extremely short shrift in favor of a coterie of alarmingly unsuitable women with whom the protagonist becomes entangled. I recommend you lower your expectations of this novel as a Romance by telling yourself going in that it's "a lesbian novel" and not a romance novel.

PLOT

Main character seems driven to seek out sex with woman after woman while deep down craving emotional intimacy. She nurses a crush on her evening art class teacher, but the latter is Straight (right?). Protagonist spends most of her time/the action of the novel sexually pursuing inappropriate women and then running away from them after she realizes they are not quite "relationship material."

GENRE

When I bought this e-book, it was being marketed on the publisher's website as a Romance Novel. Recall the definition, set forth by literary critics, of Romance novels as books that (1) FOCUS on the monogamous love development and/or relationship between two people, and (2) END with the promise of long-term happiness for the couple, i.e. the Happily Ever After. I am a great lover and defender of genre fiction and take seriously the craft of genre and its conventions; as such, this book's deviation from prong #1 of the Romance formula was a disappointment in a novel marketed as a Romance. To wit, according to my Kindle's progress meter, I saw that Collateral Sex Partner #1 took up the first 1/3 of the novel, Collateral Sex Partner #2 the second third of the novel, and that the main love interest isn't even properly introduced until after that (oh, and there are more collateral sex partners. :).

A better category might be "lesbian chick-lit;" like its mainstream chick-lit sisters, CHASING LOVE follows a female protagonist through her often humorous, sometimes poignant dating and career mishaps. Whatever you decide to label this book, I think you'll enjoy it more if you mold your expectations from the outset, expecting general "lesbian fiction" instead of a romance novel.

WRITING STYLE & VOICE

This is the only book by Ronica Black I've read. It is competently written in the quick-paced, un-embellished third person voice of popular fiction. Black successfully avoids several pitfalls of many popular writers; for instance, she does not overuse and abuse adverbs ("she said cheerfully") and dialog tags ("she hissed"). The best thing I can say about the writing is that it does not draw attention to itself nor get in the way of the story...and if you've experienced writing that does those things, you'll recognize that this is high praise.

CHARACTERIZATION

Adrian, our heroine, is a "seeker," albeit a stunted one. She has a restless heart but succumbs to inertia; the result is someone who is always searching for something better but cannot bring herself to enact the changes she needs to in order to get to "better."

Black is to be congratulated for creating a protagonist who behaves in inscrutable and often exasperating ways, who makes "the wrong" choices over and over again, and who is emotionally stunted, yet who is still likeable and whom we as readers still want to see succeed. Adrian behaves like a stereotypical womanizer, a tomcat, play-the-fielder---the type of person who is often dismissed as lacking in good character or basic decency. But she is surprisingly decent because Black shows us her thought processes and internal monologues, the loneliness and self-loathing that drive her to lie down with every woman-who-loves-women who crosses her path.

I thought it was interesting that although Black describes in detail the appearance of most of the major characters---often expending a paragraph or two on a woman's ensemble and how it reflects her personality---we are given next to nothing about Adrian's appearance, stature, ethnicity, etc. Towards the end of the novel, we are told the color of her eyes and that her hair is due for a cut, but that's about it. Unlike Adrian's best friend Tamara who is characterized as a "muscular" blue collar type, or Adrian's main love interest, who is described in very feminine terms (long blonde hair, flowing artsy wardrobe), we are given no indication of Adrian's gender presentation or self-identification. I presume all this is to better make her an Everywoman or EveryLesbian. And I suppose that works. But I think a positive side effect of this move is that because we see all the other characters in our mind's eye save for Adrian, we step into Adrian's mind and see through her eyes. This might be one of the reasons we don't throw the book down with disgust the third or fourth time Adrian makes a foolish choice; the reader stands shoulder to shoulder with her as she looks out at the strange and funny world of the women she encounters.

SEXUAL CONTENT

This deserves note because Romance readers all have varying tastes in sexual content and want to know if a novel fits those tastes. You should know three things: (1) there is a whole lot of sex in this novel; (2) relative to other romance novels, it is reasonably creative, graphic and sometimes surprising sex (one BDSM scene, for example, would never be found in a Radclyffe novel); and (3) the majority of that sex is with women other than the central love interest. In fact, in my opinion, the blandest and least interesting sex occurred between the protagonist and her lover. Oh, well.

RECOMMENDATION

I couldn't bring myself to rate this three stars on account of its shortcomings as a romance novel proper. It is still an enjoyable read if you can restrain yourself from throwing the book at the wall every time Adrian does something ill-advised. (You want to scream, "Don't go home with her!" and "Remember what happened last time?") Overall, I liked the characterization and writing well enough to be receptive to reading other works by Ronica Black. I recommend CHASING LOVE to open-minded and patient lovers of lesbian romance who are willing to stretch their boundaries a little.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 3 reviews  4.7 out of 5 stars