Review: Literary readers, Romance fans will love it
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 3, 2014
Grief is a problematic topic for big houses that want to sell to everybody. Too often, they refuse to publish novels that focus on the process of grieving. Real life grief in a novel can make people uncomfortable in a way they choose not to experience--by not buying books about the aftermath of tragedy and loss. Books about bombed buildings and downed airliners sell, of course. Readers shell out money for action. But will they stick around for the long, agonizing process of picking up the pieces and learning how to move on?I know of a woman whose daughter was killed in an automobile accident. She found fiction irrelevant after that catastrophic event, but one self-published novel about a grieving mother whose son was murdered did touch her in a positive way. And that is what the author had hoped her novel would do--ultimately uplift.Sad, that Big Publishers would pass over a romantic lead like Ainslie Paton's Aiden, frozen in his grief-- not to mention a heroine who waddles like a penguin when pain from an injury flares up--but they're depriving millions of readers of catharsis and the satisfaction of realizing, "Yes! That's it, exactly! Someone else knows how I feel."No  book appeals to all, and the best authors don't write in order to appeal to mass readership. That's counter to big publishers' goals, which is to sell as many books to as many people as possible and make loads of money.That said, I have one little complaint about White Balance: the synopsis said Aiden's world was so gray and blea, even the cat moved out (moved on) -- and that was the #1 hook that got me to read this novel--even though I have a gazillion other books in my Kindle and authors begging me for feedback, reviews and promotions. I'd never heard of Ainslie Paton, nor had she heard of me or asked me to read her novel. THE CAT got me. Imagine, in the midst of grieving for the loss of wife and child, and even a mere CAT gives up on you.But Chauncey the cat was there to stay. If he ever walked out on Aiden, I somehow missed that page. By the time I figured out I'd been misled, I was hooked on the story and turning pages into the wee hours of the night.I do have a second complaint: many, many others mention books and movies in their novels. Usually I can "put up and shut up" about that little pet peeve. But this novel mentions "Despicable Me" (a marvelous movie, to be sure) a few times too many.The ending was also way too full of treacle for me. I hope this isn't a plot spoiler. I hope the kind of reader who loves treacle will not have that word in their every-day vocabulary. Recently, an author I beta-read didn't know what "maudlin" means. He did intuit, though, that I wasn't singing his praises when a certain scene verged on being maudlin.In all, WHITE BALANCE is a clever, engaging, witty, profound and relevant novel, authentic, believable, but a little bit maddening, in that it relies on certain tropes of the romance genre, namely, that business of "If only this bit of information had not been withheld, then all the pages of suffering that followed would have been so easily avoided." But all the how-to-write-fiction teachers insist that we must torture the protagonists, and one of the simplest ways to do that is to have the character rush to judgment, make wrong conclusions, and suffer misinformation or be denied information that would have made all the difference.The prose is so lovely, the characters so memorable, I overlooked the things that peeve me, and I heartily recommend this novel to literary readers as well as romance addicts.Next time you promise treachery from a cat, though, you'd better deliver! ;-)