Review: Alcohol and ass. And fashion.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 06 10, 2013
Alcohol and ass. That describes John Forrester's vision for his novel, Vogel House.  It's the story of Clarise Chambers, the daughter of a businessman and his fashionista wife. Life is filled with designer clothes, ridiculous house parties, absent parents, sex, and drugs. At least until the father of Clarise's crush, Keary, takes it upon himself to ruin the Chambers family, even Vogel House itself.The premise for Vogel House is promising, but the book itself disappoints. It's a quick read, with a spunky heroine, but the plot is pretty unbelievable, as is Keary's "enormous erection," a phrase that occurs every time said appendage enters stage left. Without even considering the plausibility of a sixteen-year-old girl hiring the Russian Mafia or stabbing someone, the worst threat to the believability of this book is the writing. The already heavy-handed plot is most definitely not helped along by the author's gross overuse of adverbs and similes, which occur in virtually every paragraph of the book. The dialogue, especially between the teenagers and the adults, doesn't come across as even reasonably realistic, nor were the characters' motivations particularly believable.This book began with a promising proposition, entering a world of privilege, alcohol, sex, and revenge, but the story doesn't measure up to the standards of good writing. The author made some very off-putting choices in the telling of this story, including but not limited to the description of Keary's enormous cock, the overuse of the word "erotic," misplaced and poorly constructed anger and violence in the protagonist, and Keary's easy acceptance of Clarise's role in his father's violent end. Vogel House is a display of bad writing, poor characters, and lazy construction with an extremely unrealistic take on plot. This author might have been better served to remove the disturbingly badly written sex scenes, or tone them down, and market this novel to young adults. After removing every word that ends in -ly, or phrase that begins with "like."