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Journalism of Courage
Scandalous by Tillie Bagshawe HarperCollins,Rs 250 is Les Diaboliques for trash-talking dummies. In prose so lowbrow its prognathous,it tells the tale of two ladies joining forces to get back at the priapic parody of a lothario who betrayed them. Thatd be Theo Dexter,one-time Cambridge professor of astronomy,who stole the theory of his dreams from Sasha Miller,his star student who he seduced. He then gets famous on TV as a sort of Steve Irwin for nerds,and acquires a movie star lover,Dita Andreas an affair his wife Theresa literally stumbles on in their bedroom. While he spends most of the book groaning or growling at Andreas,demanding she disrobe,Sasha gets fantastically rich on Wall Street,and Theresa manages to juggle a Cambridge professorship and a torrid affair with one of her students until the two meet,and plot revenge. The book is pure aspirational fantasy,with breathless references to Serrano ham and LWren Scott sheath dresses,and self-consciously odd character names,which either sound like they ought to belong to dogs which fit nicely in handbags Lottie,Mitzi,Milo or were ransacked from the Complete Works of Shakespeare Horatio,Lysander.
The characters of My Soul to Take by Rachel Vincent Penguin,Rs 299,meanwhile,appear to be extras who broke loose from the sets of Twilight. The book,part of a series,follows the template of the wildly popular tween fantasy series,having a painfully under-confident teenage girl singled out for seduction by the Hottest Guy in School,and putting them in melodramatic scenes straight out of soaring emo anguish ballad videos. In an inversion of the Girl Meets Mysterious Boy who turns out to be a vampire/ werewolf,in this one,its the girl whos special: she can sense when people are about to die. So,the book is filled with descriptions of souls,translucent,or with lucent shadows,besides self-disparaging declarations,like: The Hottest Boy with hypnotic hazel eyes is talking to me. I look down to the floor,since hell had surely frozen over.
