This book opens on a very dark and difficult scenario, that of vicious domestic violence and cruelty. The whys and wherefores of the situation are left unexplained, as are the strange acquiescence of the protagonist in her abuse. I felt this was a flaw in the work; it seemed to me unrealistic that anyone, absent severe pre-existing emotional damage, would succumb so immediately to a major domestic violence situation as is depicted in Bloom. The addition of some backstory to account for this, possibly in a prologue, would to my mind have made a great improvement. The violence itself was portrayed with stark and shocking realism, and was very well done.
The abuser is soon enough removed, in a rather deus-ex-machina way, and the main part of the book deals with the developing relationship between his wife and the man she has met. This follows a fairly steady course, and the remainder of the book develops at a slow, calm pace, with few surprises. I found it, again, somewhat unbelievable that a person who had survived years of the very severest physical and emotional abuse could apparently bounce back from it with few, if any, lasting effects. To make the whole scenario work well, I felt, Phoenix needed to have been damaged almost beyond recovery. As well as being far more believable, this would also have given the book some of the dramatic tension that I felt it rather lacked.
Aside from the believability issues I have mentioned, Bloom is a very pleasant book, about nice people who find a happy ending together. Like so many independently published books, it would have benefitted from tighter editing and proofreading.
The abuser is soon enough removed, in a rather deus-ex-machina way, and the main part of the book deals with the developing relationship between his wife and the man she has met. This follows a fairly steady course, and the remainder of the book develops at a slow, calm pace, with few surprises. I found it, again, somewhat unbelievable that a person who had survived years of the very severest physical and emotional abuse could apparently bounce back from it with few, if any, lasting effects. To make the whole scenario work well, I felt, Phoenix needed to have been damaged almost beyond recovery. As well as being far more believable, this would also have given the book some of the dramatic tension that I felt it rather lacked.
Aside from the believability issues I have mentioned, Bloom is a very pleasant book, about nice people who find a happy ending together. Like so many independently published books, it would have benefitted from tighter editing and proofreading.
Bloom is available from AMAZON and SMASHWORDS.
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