Review: Feeling Extremely Conflicted About This Book
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 26, 2014
An author has every right to create a story as they see it.  It's THEIR story.  My comments here aren't about whether or not I liked the author's writing, or whether or not I liked her characters.  My comments are solely based on how I perceived what happened in the story, and how I felt after I finished the book.  My experience of the story is just that - mine.Perhaps feeling so torn and conflicted about this latest book in the Signal Bend series is exactly what the author hoped for, but there's "conflicted" ... and then there's sick at heart.  I've read every book in the series because the author's writing and her skill in telling a story about less-then-perfect characters is amazing.  In the first book, I thought she had great balance for teetering between the whole redeemable and non-redeemable aspects of her characters, as well as the price the individuals paid for living in their world.  Obviously, this totally drove me to read each subsequent book.  However, as we progressed in each story and the violence and collateral damage increased, I began to feel that the characters had moved more into blind and foolish in terms of their ability to navigate their own dark world and its inhabitants.  Reading "Show The Fire", the latest in this series, left me incredibly sad because I didn't think the cost was worth what happiness was found in the end by a few - all I could think about was how so much of the suffering and death could have been avoided with better leadership and strategy, more experienced advisers, more complete intelligence, better alliances, better timing - the absolute cornerstone for any successful group of people who live by navigating dangerous and risky waters.  It's simple - if you can't do that, you shouldn't be in the game.  It is, for me, beyond belief that more was not done to ensure that whatever plan was eventually chosen, there would have been much more achieved, with much less unnecessary painful suffering and death, especially given how powerful and long-run the opposition.  I felt that this story left Issac, who I loved in the first book, looking less than the leader he started out as.  And yes, we read about how he struggles with that as well - but we're not talking about a small business owner whose company went global and had to work through growing-pains, we're talking about lives in the balance.  His role was to first protect his club brothers and their family; he failed at that abysmally, and repeatedly.  I still can't comprehend how a leader of an MC, with all his years of experience along with others in his group would not have conceived of the potential risks and price that might be paid, and that's what I mean by it made them look foolish and naive in navigating their own dark world.  Granted the club was not at the level of their adversaries, but please, how could you not have considered the possibility of such outcomes - especially in a world that is seeped in degradation and pain?  How could you not have run every possible risk scenario to decide whether the cost was worth the risk?  That's basic risk assessment.  Failing to do that is beyond naive - it's just plain stupid.  And because of that, I think that's the biggest reason I struggled with this book.  It took characters I liked, in spite of their shady-less-than-mainstream-correctness and made them look incredibly stupid - Key-Stone Cops stupid.  I find that unforgivable.  Because the devastating trauma and waste of life could in no way ever be balanced back to anything remotely worthy. And because of that, this story left me having a lot less respect for characters I had truly come to care about.  I didn't like that.  Probably with time, I'll go back again to re-read this story when I don't feel so raw, so that perhaps I can see more than I saw and felt in the first reading.  I'm definitely going to re-read the first book to feel better than I do right now.  It's my understanding that there's one more book to be published in this series, and I intend to purchase and read it, but I don't feel confident that, however spectacular the ending might be, that I'll be able to recapture the positive feelings or pleasure I felt when I first started this series.