I have to be honest, here... I really wasn't expecting much when I bought The Milestone Tapes.
How wrong I was.
I write science fiction with aliens and explosions so that's the kind of thing I'm drawn to when I read. However, while I'm more than happy to explore outside my genre, reading chick-lit is definitely right down the bottom of the list of weekend activities I enjoy... the experience hovering somewhere between being waterboarded and stung to death by millions of tiny scorpions. Further, the Milestone Tapes is also a writer's debut novel and I know from experience that, regrettably, so often a young writer's debut novel just isn't their best work.
So when I saw that Ashley was a new author to the Kindleboards, and she mentioned in a thread that she hadn't had any sales of her debut novel yet... I had my reservations, but against my instinct I decided to help her out. Her cover was beautiful, her book was cheap and she conducted herself professionally in the threads she posted in so I thought, hey, why not... I'll buy a copy, read the first bit of it, say how it wasn't my thing, give the book a short three star review and be done with it. I went into this work feeling like I was just going through the motions; I thought reading this was going to be a chore, feeling only slightly mollified by the knowledge that I only had to force my way through enough of it to write a review and then I could walk away.
All that went out the window when, at about 2:40am on a week night, I suddenly realized what time it was and just how deeply I'd been sucked into the world of the Chamberlands.
First of all, the book is quite long given the premise, and this surprised me. I read a few pages then procrastinated for about a week and a half, casting my eyes longingly towards that scorpion pit in lieu of reading, before deciding I should just get it over with... but when I did I couldn't put it down.
This 'all at once' thing might not work for everyone. The book's not a light read, especially the first part; Ashley pulls no punches emotionally and The Milestone Tapes details clinically, precisely and elegantly the subject matter, and does so with a quiet grace that echoes the events it is portraying... made all the more tragic by the fact you *know* what's coming. I'm a bitter and jaded cynic hardened by years on the Internet, twisted and emotionless to my blackened and empty core, and yet... I found the quiet grace of Jenna's extremely well researched, tragically believable journey towards the untimely end of her life haunting and intensely emotional, especially the end of book one.
The Milestone Tapes is subtle in the way it handles things; there's no fate of the world at stake here... no dramatic hijinks and just-in-the-nick-of-time rescues, just painful and humiliating death slowly creeping up on one woman's life for the first half, then the blossoming life of her daughter in the second. This works to the novel's advantage, giving it a grounding in the real world and sometimes -- just sometimes -- make you wonder if the writer isn't writing this as a therapy novel, working from painful experience. I don't know the answer to that and the fact that the book inspires such thoughts is to its benefit.
I used the highlight function to draw attention to lines I really enjoyed... and there were a lot more of those than I originally thought possible in a work like this. I can't share them directly, but when enough people highlight a section that part will show up at the bottom of the book's page on Amazon... so *eventually* she'll see what I liked.
The prose is elegant, tight and descriptive -- flowery in places, and sometimes slightly melodramatic to my eyes, but in such an emotionally driven piece this really isn't to be unexpected. Some things that stood out:
- The descriptions of the results of the mastectomy were quite chilling.
- Ending to book one. Yeah... that was to be expected. I didn't cry, stop looking at me like that. I didn't!
- Book two, February. I laughed, then smiled.
- The epilogue was great.
That said... there *are* flaws and when you're reviewing you're a critic, and the role of a critic is to be critical. I found a scattering of typos; nothing too distracting, nothing that would be caught by a spellchecker, but I did notice the occasional missing word or missing piece of punctuation (period or space usually), or other mistakes that slipped through the review process (a bowl of 'icy' instead of 'ice', for example). There were also a few awkwardly phrased sentences where I thought an additional proofread would be the last little bit of spit-polish that the story needed. It seems a shame to have crafted this wonderful, engaging tale without ironing out the bugs; in a lesser story I would have just ignored them, but The Milestone Tapes is good so my tolerance for avoidable, simple errors was reduced.
Fortunately the areas needing just a little more polish seemed concentrated in clumps, though, which suggested that the section I was reading was added in when the book was nearly complete so was just missed in the review process. These occurrences were fairly uncommon and almost to be expected in a work of this length, so they didn't distract me from the flow of the narrative... but I did notice them.
I felt the story lingered too long on the first half. The story was, of course, about the titular tapes... but they didn't show up for a while and some of the scenes, such as finding the float on the beach, were cool but unnecessary. I tend to be brutal with my editing, so if I had my way... honestly I would have cut some scenes, or even compressed the first half of the book into the prologue, leaving the entire work about Mia's life, using the tapes as a device to look back at Jenna's experiences through Mia's eyes. As it stood I was dreading the the half-way change in protagonist for a number of reasons but it's handled smoothly (and with manly, manly tears).
I did think Gabe was "too perfect", as was Bryan, Mia's teenage love interest. I know, I know... it's chick-lit. Unrealistically perfect male romantic interests are par for the course, almost a required feature, but still. As a male reader, I found his character to be sometimes hard to relate to. He was obviously wealthy, worked in an interesting field and was very good at what he did, was a perfectly loyal husband, was loving towards Jenna and their child to the bitter end and never did anything wrong the entire book... and was very handsome to boot.
While I'm sure that person exists somewhere, for us mere mortals the strain of watching your beloved wife wither and die as you sacrificed everything you'd spent your life working to achieve would probably drive us to do at least one stupid thing during that time... or at least drink a lot more. I find stories of ordinary, flawed people doing extraordinary things despite it all more engaging than reading about perfect people always doing the right thing, so I would have liked to see the strain of what was happening effect him a little more than it did... to show the effects his grief were having on his life aside from a little tiredness and job changes, but the story is not really about him. It's about Jenna and her daughter.
I thought it was a bit odd that the cost of Jenna's multiple treatments and hospitalizations didn't get mentioned, and in my mind this represents the loss of a potentially engaging story element. The Chamberlands had money, clearly, but they are also both freelancers and self employed; it's assumed they had health insurance, I suppose, but... Jenna's decline seems to be a journey without external stress, where Gabe stoically stand by her, her sister finds time to reconcile with her despite her own troubles, and her child goes largely unaware of what's happening. I hinted to this above, but I feel there needed to be more external stress in this story... and a mountain of crippling hospital bills could very well have been that little extra 'thing'.
Expanding on this slightly, I think this story could have been more tragic if, while the disease destroyed Jenna's body, it also ravaged Gabe's personality; he could have gone from successful, clean cut, perfect husband to a bankrupt and bitter loner buried in debts accrued trying to save someone he loved but ultimately died, and I think that would have shown that when someone suffers as Jenna does, that darkness can begin to creep out of the person and drag others down with them. It's a missed opportunity, but the story works as-is and, again, it's chick-lit, so the way Ashley chose to write this tale is absolutely forgiveable... even for soul-less misanthropes like myself.
I felt the decision to make the protagonist for the first half of the book a writer to be a dangerous choice... but one that ultimately paid off. Writers writing about writing in fiction is a minefield; it can become self-indulgent and whiny, where the "self-inserted-author-avatar" struggles with writer's block and procrastinates by writing reviews instead of working on their own looming deadlines (uhh...), etc etc. Fortunately Ashley navigates this minefield with the same grace seen in the rest of the novel and nothing like this happens at all. Never once did I get the impression that Jenna's profession as a writer was merely a way for her to say "Look! Look! I'm a writer too!" and undue time is not spent on what she writes and why; instead, Jenna's profession added to her character and to the work as a whole so I'm storing that one under 'dodged a bullet there'.
Some tapes were not read "on screen" or even mentioned; three of them in fact, out of ten.
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