Cold Bath Lane

DNF @ 6%

I got this book as a Kindle freebie back in 2020, and I'm very glad no money was wasted on it. Not only is this the final book in a trilogy I haven't read - something I must have overlooked - but it's not particularly well written and it ticked me off just enough to make me decide I want nothing to do with it anymore.

To start, we have an entire chapter dedicated to 90% just narrating children sitting around playing together. Yawn! Strewn throughout that, we have body shaming descriptions of a pregnant woman's girth. Aside from some vague stories told to the children by their father about a morbid fire rescue at work, nothing of any interest happens in that first chapter.

Then we have the second chapter. In it, we find out that somehow the girl who sits beside the narrating character in class magically drapes her hair on the girl's table and as revenge the girl elbows her... but also we're supposed to feel sorry for the escalating little brat because the teacher dislikes her. (I suspect perhaps he's onto something when saying she's a troublemaker!) Mixed in with this, we get some weirdness about how the teacher gives harder homework to the MC than the other girl, which leaves some really disgusting implications... that get washed away when it's revealed the teacher has a gay lover.

Except it's not just revealed, no. See, the MC talks to her father about the mistreatment she feels from the teacher, so he casually loads her up in the car to go stalk the teacher at night. (Yes, seriously!) And when he finds out the teacher went into a club, he takes photos with what's described as a Polaroid camera... except the MC “clicks through” them. Polaroid. The camera that instantly spat out premade photos. This takes place in the 1980s, before anyone - much less poor folk as these are described to be - could have a digital camera. But she “clicked through.” Oh, also? The photos were of the teacher and his boyfriend. So, yeah, two chapters in, we have a teacher who was slightly rude to a problematic student getting blackmailed to leave his job with the threat of being outed as gay.

Fuck this shit, I'm out. I get it, it's probably a story about terrible people, but I have no room in my life for this inconsistent and grating narrative about the kind of people I want to punch in the throat for being despicable pieces of crap.