Revenge

AUTHOR: Sharon Osborne (Yes, wife of Ozzy Sharon Osborne)
PUBLISHED: 2010
GENRE: Fiction.  Dirty, dirty fiction.

This was a strange one.

The story is fairly interesting: Half-sisters Chelsea and Amber have always been in competition with each other, whether they knew if or not.  It's largely due to mother Margaret, who sees her older daughter as a constant reminder of a mistake-ridden youth and her younger one as the path to fulfilling Margaret’s own dreams of stardom.  Chelsea, constantly berated by a distant mother, has success early but flames out in a sea of drugs and alcohol.  Amber, who would never think of, well, thinking for herself, passively stands back as her mother builds for Amber the acting career Margaret never had.  It’s not long before each begins to see the other as the one that did her wrong.  What follows is boyfriend-stealing, role-stealing, daddy-stealing madness.

There are two big issues with this book.  The first is language.  There’s lots of dirty language in this book, and I don’t mean curse words.  This book very often dissolves into literary pornography.  The heroine and her lover don’t close the door coyly behind them to end the chapter.  No, Osborne – if you’ll excuse the inexcusable pun – gets all up in that.  Repeatedly.  Messily.  Out of nowhere.  It’s not that I’m proposing censorship here.  If she wants to write it, good on her.  I can’t even argue that the library should classify it differently (unless the library opens a porn section, which I cannot see it doing).  And yet there was something wrong about it.  I finally realized what my real problem was: the cover.  Pink and black and sparkly, it looks for all the world like a young adult novel.  It was this feeling that the book was being marketed towards a younger audience that really gave me the creeps.  I doubt Osborne really meant this for a teen audience, but it’s Joe Camal selling cigarettes all over again: you can’t tell me you didn’t mean it for teens when it looks just like a Gossip Girl book.

The other big issue in this story is the character of Margaret.  The story is ostensibly about her girls, but the specter of Mommie Dearest lurks always in the background.  Her daughters hate each other because of how Margaret raised them.  But when Chelsea and Amber start to implode, she disappears into the guest house.  She goes from micromanaging Amber’s every move to missing in action.  Even worse, in the end (spoiler alert!) Margaret finds happiness with an old love and moves back to London, suddenly pleased to live the quiet, domestic life.  It’s a complete about-face for a woman who has been obsessed with appearances for 350 pages, and supremely unsatisfying for the reader who has witnessed her bully her daughters into misery. 

Amber has found love in the quiet life too, and mother and daughter, relationship renewed, chat happily over the phone.  But Chelsea – unloved Chelsea, who from her moment of birth was despised by her own mother – has fallen down a dark hole.  It’s life, maybe, but to reward Margaret while punishing the daughter she rejected makes for a real crap ending.  Never once is Margaret held responsible for the way she has treated her daughter – either daughter, really.  In that way, she gets the best revenge.  Unfortunately, it’s on a daughter who never had a chance to defend herself. 

LENGTH: 371 pages

MAINSTREAM OR NOT: The Sharon Osborne train is coming to a stop and she’s trying to get the engine started again, lest she have to go home and hang out with Ozzy.

SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: No.  It’s terribly unsatisfying.  And I didn’t even mention the writing, which is bulky and awkward.