24 October 2005

Blood and Roses: A Jayne Taylor Novel by Ann Tonsor Zeddie
Phobos Impact, November 2005
Reviewed by Charlotte Veazie

Charlotte Veazie is an avid reader of many genres. She has been a lawyer, a waitress, an activist, a gamer, a geek and a fan.

Blood and Roses is a fun, fast-paced adventure featuring a sci-fi Nick and Nora on the trail of a mystery that takes them on cliff-hanging adventures halfway around the world.

The book opens with Jayne Taylor, an American civilian volunteer in World War I, running supplies and dodging bad guys behind the French lines. When the war is over, she returns to her home in the Pennsylvania countryside with a gaggle of French war orphans in tow. She's a little shell-shocked, but her moxie and her wits are intact; so, when faced with the difficulty of earning enough money to care for her charges in a pre-EEOC labor market, Jayne comes up with an ingenious solution: capitalizing on the skills she gained during the war, she teams up with a thug with the improbable name of Rocco Smith to become a rumrunner. All too soon, one of their runs goes badly awry and Jayne and Rocco find themselves embroiled in alien plots, atomic near-disasters, and Japanese imperial politics.

Jayne is an engaging heroine: tough and clever, but not masculinized; pragmatic and independent, but not anachronistic. Seasoned by the struggle to survive the war, she represents nothing so cheesy as "girl-power;" she is a strong, assertive woman. However, there is nothing in her character that says "maternal" to me. For me, the weakest part of the story was her adoption of five French war orphans and their fate. While Jayne is compassionate, and saving children from a war-ravaged country is certainly admirable, I don't see her finding fulfillment by taking care of a group of shell-shocked children. The burden of caring for the children largely seems to be an excuse for Jayne to go into a life of crime (or at least bootlegging) without seeming too immoral.

But would bootlegging have really challenged her morality? Breaking the rules has been key to her survival before and has become something of a habit: she is not averse to enjoying the occasional teacup of booze herself, and it would only be a matter of time before the inequities of the job market and boredom with the jobs for which she would be "suitable" would rouse her temper, even without the burden of the children. I can't see her being conflicted about slipping a little further down the slope of immorality to help "the average working man [have] a beer or two at the end of the day" ...and pull in a nice paycheck while she's at it.

Zeddies keeps the story moving at a fast clip with crisp, lean writing. The book has a third person point of view closely tied to Jayne. Looking over her shoulder, we catch quick glimpses of the places, people and things Jayne encounters that create distinctive settings and deepen Jayne's character without foisting paragraphs of exposition on the reader. For example, Jayne's observations in Philadelphia's Italian Market give us an insight into the self-confident, attractive image she presents to others as well as her enjoyment of life and all her senses:

Jayne coolly stared past the shirt-sleeved men who gave her the once-over as she entered the restaurant. Some of them weren't bad-looking at all, she noticed. Their light summer clothing highlighted well-muscled arms and shoulders. The place smelled of rich tomato sauce and sharp cheese. She'd never known there was so much to savor in the heart of Philadelphia.

Blood and Roses combines the witty repartee, gleeful horror and unlikely (but darn handy) coincidences of an old-fashioned pulp with a dash of romance and enough modern sensibility to be fun, but not tawdry. The book manages to carry off a difficult balance between showing pulpish horror for entertainment and the true horrors of war and violence. The opening scene, set in a bombed out convent with the bodies of dead nuns strewn about, is a far more disturbing and lasting image than any number of alien zombies or giant cockroaches. This is a modern take on the pulp style, where man's inhumanity to man is not diminished or made cartoonish by the pulp elements.