Book Review: The Actor and the Housewife

The Actor and the Housewife
by Shannon Hale
Published by Bloomsbury USA

I feel like I just got jerked around in an extremely passive-aggressive manner by a narcissistic fuckwad.

I can’t tell you how pissed off I am at this moment.

No review. No more crit. You can see previous entries here and here. It’s completely irrelevant.

Tell you what. I’ll read Stephenie Meyer again before I’ll read anything else this author’s ever written. I can’t imagine Breaking Dawn is a worse betrayal by an author than this.

ETA:

I’ve gotten a bunch of emails about what actually happened, so here you go. Spoiler warning.

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Okay, here was the deal:

All the way through this book, Felix is in love with Becky. Almost painfully so. Obviously so (which is its own irritation that nobody picks up on this). He’s a very nice guy and fairly fleshed out and he’s only an ass for maybe 5 pages of the whole book.

Okay.

Her husband dies at the 2/3 mark. So, for 2/3 of the book she’s all about Felix when her husband’s around. Then, for the last 1/3, she’s all mourning her husband for two years, and Felix is there, wanting to marry her, tells her he’s been in love with her (and oh, this comes as a complete shock to her, right? Pfffttt), and now she’s all about her husband. So for pages and pages and pages and pages she’s all, “NO I’M STILL MARRIED TO MIKE!!!” (this is after 2 years of widowhood, remember) and breaking Felix’s heart, then she finally decides, yeah, okay, I can marry him. He’s my best friend after all. I’m 45 and my kids are way grown (youngest is 13 or something and oldest 2 are gone) and Felix and I can grow old together, so yeah, I think maybe I’ll think about marrying him after all.

And then they go away for a while so they can kiss uninterrupted. So they do.

And it is (I quote), “a belly-flop” of a kiss. No passion. So that’s it. They go their separate ways, I guess still being best pals on the phone or whatever.

Cuz they aren’t made for each other after all.

Because they didn’t get horny when they kissed for the first time.

Happy happy joy joy.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? AFTER ALL THAT FUCKING ANGST? HOW DO YOU NOT GET HORNY ABOUT THE PERSON YOU’VE BEEN IN LOVE WITH FOR ELEVEN YEARS???

She spends the first 2/3 thirds of the book w/her husband being all about Felix and the last 1/3 with Felix being all about her husband.

I have no way to reconcile any of this to any reality, writerly or Mormonly or humanly. None. It makes no sense on any level.

26 thoughts on “Book Review: The Actor and the Housewife

  • July 18, 2009 at 5:51 pm
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    No no no no no. You just can’t leave us all hanging like this. Spill the beans!

    Did she leave her eejit infantilized chocolate milk-drinking floor-sitting husband to run off with Harrison Ford or what?!

    Reply
  • July 18, 2009 at 6:02 pm
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    The thing is, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that, and I don’t mean story-wise.

    The husband is a cardboard cutout. I didn’t have any reason to care about him. BUT what the author did with him was . . . well, okay, it was kind of logical but couldn’t get into the angst because he was a cardboard cutout.

    It was what she did after the husband issue was no longer an issue that pissed me off. It was the most illogical, idiot thing ever.

    The heroine was, indeed, too stupid to live. In fact, she didn’t deserve the cardboard husband, either.

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  • July 18, 2009 at 7:44 pm
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    It’s so not. I could’ve lived with that as well as about half a dozen other permutations.

    Just not the one that was.

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  • July 18, 2009 at 11:32 pm
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    Well, it’s a piece of work, all right. 🙁

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  • July 19, 2009 at 12:05 am
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    Was it the Scooby Doo ending?

    “I woulda got away with it, too, if it wasn’t for that cardboard husband and those pesky kids!”

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  • July 19, 2009 at 12:07 am
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    No, no. It wasn’t even THAT well written.

    Let me tell you. If I felt like doing sheetrock this evening, I would’ve pitched it through the wall, I was so pissed.

    I’m still pissed.

    Reply
  • July 19, 2009 at 10:59 am
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    So … wait. Did she marry her original husband based on one kiss then?

    And this kiss with Felix, was it like the one in Back to the Future where the girl who is MJ Fox’s mom as a teen kisses him? Did they do bloodlines in the book? Maybe they’re cousins?

    Hm. No. I don’t see any way of saving it at all.

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  • July 19, 2009 at 11:08 am
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    So … wait. Did she marry her original husband based on one kiss then?

    Yes.

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  • July 19, 2009 at 11:46 am
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    Thanks for sharing so that others don’t have to go through the pain of reading it. Blech!!

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  • July 19, 2009 at 6:47 pm
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    Grrr. You’re welcome. It would’ve been worth it if the author had done any one of six different things she could’ve done.

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  • July 20, 2009 at 10:58 am
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    Dig down into the soft Freudian mud and I believe that what we’ll find there is a curious new Christian lit genre masquerading as romance.

    Although Mormons (and Protestants in general) don’t preach divorce as a mortal sin, they do see it as a moral failing. Thus the only way to narratively justify it is to posit that the man in question is a cold fish and a jerk of galactic proportions.

    But that brings into question the character and judgment of a woman who would marry a cold fish and a jerk of galactic proportions. The solution: dead husband, new start on life.

    The attentions of the “other man” should not be confused with those of an actual romantic lead. His job is to affirm that she was indeed the wronged party all along by confirming her continued desirability after her years in the desert. Not to do anything about it.

    Reply
  • July 20, 2009 at 11:07 am
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    By your criteria, this book failed on all fronts. What you describe could have been done, but it wasn’t. It would have taken better writing to keep Felix from being the romantic lead, but yes, he definitely was.

    In the very first pages, we see Felix want to kiss Becky by moonlight. They almost do, BUT WAIT! I’M MARRIED! She brushes it off as silly. Then there’s a scene where she’s doing a movie with him and has to kiss him. Hijinks ensue to make sure the kiss isn’t, you know, All That.

    However, if these near misses were meant to make me believe that Becky didn’t want him, they failed. Thus, the last scene where they kiss for real and don’t feel anything completely betrayed every word that had been written before.

    In short, she screwed over both dudes. Royally.

    And the reader.

    Reply
  • July 20, 2009 at 1:14 pm
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    So she’s been pursued for years by a guy who gives up after the equivalent of one bad date? I’d think he’d at least try to bed her to justify some of those sunk costs. What’s he been doing in the meantime?

    Reply
  • July 20, 2009 at 1:24 pm
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    So she’s been pursued for years by a guy who gives up after the equivalent of one bad date?

    Yes.

    I’d think he’d at least try to bed her to justify some of those sunk costs.

    I would really have liked to see that, but you know, this being rated G and all that.

    What’s he been doing in the meantime?

    Celibate. Three years. Waiting for her.

    Wouldn’t be hard, considering she’s spent 12 years emasculating him.

    Reply
  • July 25, 2009 at 7:08 pm
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    WOW. I don’t even know how you made it through the whole book. I’d have had it soaking in the fish tank by the third chapter.

    I wonder though…maybe it still does work for a woman of faith.

    [Disclosure: I was raised in an ultra-conservative Southern evangelical Christian home. I’m no longer part of a congregation, but my upbringing is still very much a part of me today. While LDS and my denomination differ greatly in specific theology, many of the attitudes and practices are historically similar.]

    Maybe it’s deeper than you think. I obviously haven’t read the book and now I never will, but I think deep down it does carry a very old, very deeply ingrained message of punishment for sins. Not punishment for the man, mind you (they never get punished, you know), but a very profound punishment for the woman. She did cheat on her husband emotionally. She did carry a torch for another man while her husband needed her.

    So the lack of sparks and connection with the new guy is a direct result of her SKANKY BAD GIRL WHORING (!!!!!!!) when her husband was alive.

    And the woman shall forever live in shame and misery because she dared to humiliate a man. The end.

    Reply
  • July 25, 2009 at 7:20 pm
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    Awww BUGGER. I like Shannon Hale. I got a big kick out of her book Austenland and I like her YA fantasies too.

    Damn damn damn. But this sounds beyond the pale.

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  • September 8, 2009 at 9:32 pm
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    Just finished this earlier in the evening. Here’s the thing: if you could take some of the angst and down-note ending of this novel and graft it on to Austenland, you’d have a pretty good, interesting, subversive novel. The problem with Austenland is that the heroine in the end gets Darcy and succumbs to his weak sauce pleas (and in a chase to the airport scene). If we’d taken elements to the Felix/Becky ending and used it there instead, then Austenland would have been a devastating take down of Romance Mormon Style or rather that whole thing so many Mormon women seem to have with Jane Austen. Instead, we get the happy ending where the heroine never really has to give up her hope of The Perfect Man. Not really.

    On the other hand, as you’ve documented, The Actor and the Housewife is rife with problems (one of the major ones being that the Actor gets all the best lines and the husband gets non-explicit, vaguely asserted sex — if there was ever the time for a bit more explicitness, it’s with this novel where you could balance the Hawt Husband vs. the Witty Brit) and so the ending is just about as weird and anticlimactic as you can get and anticlimactic would have been good if the had been more depth to the characters.

    Also: wow is the Mormonism glossed over.

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  • September 8, 2009 at 9:43 pm
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    Also: wow is the Mormonism glossed over.

    I thought it was barely adequate, but served the book, such as it was. As you know, I want to see our culture and jargon out there for public consumption and familiarity/comfort (a la Catholic/Jewish vocabulary and most customs). This wasn’t the book that’d do that, for sure.

    I sent my copy to Th., although I’m not sure he’s that eager to delve into it.

    I haven’t read Austenland. I’m not a fangirl, for one thing, and genre romance bloglandia is lousy with Austen and has been for the last two years. I’m sick of her and I’ve only ever read Pride and Prejudice. Once. Believe me, this isn’t just a Mormon-woman thing. Alas.

    where you could balance the Hawt Husband vs. the Witty Brit

    Exactly. There were about 6 different things she could’ve done to make it a wonderful novel, and she didn’t do ANY of them.

    down-note ending of this novel

    Thing is, it came across to me as a happy-happy-joy-joy two-hour Youth Conference fast-and-testimony meeting, all that religious ecstasy and orgasmic righteousness.

    Romance Mormon Style

    *sobs*

    And besides, “subversive” is frowned upon. Muchly. It’s that “how close to the edge/the farther back from the edge the better” pseudodoctrine.

    Reply
  • September 8, 2009 at 11:10 pm
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    The more I think about the “edges” in Angel Falling Softly vs. Twilight and The Actor and the Housewife, the more confused I get.

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  • September 8, 2009 at 11:12 pm
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    Three words: “hot chocolate table”

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  • September 26, 2009 at 11:30 pm
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    .

    If only my book were in print and Wm could possibly decipher that cryptic comment….

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  • September 27, 2009 at 2:28 pm
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    I don’t think you had to have read Byuck to get it. I heard it just a couple of years ago, used in Relief Society by a woman who had issues with “coffee cake,” too. It could just be complete and total immersion into Mormon culture, but maybe going to BYU is a component.

    Wm., did you get “hot chocolate table”?

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  • September 28, 2009 at 8:47 am
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    Yep. I prefer the term Postum table, though. That’s what we use in our house. 😉

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  • September 28, 2009 at 8:48 am
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    Heathen.

    Reply

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