It’s awful. it’s just awful.
Does that sum it up enough? No? You want me to relive the story details for you, to put my brain through the egg beater one more time? I’m already mour stupidur for having read this stinker of a book. But fine.
About two or three weeks ago, anonymous packages started showing up on my porch every few days. Inside each one was a Cassie Edwards novel. Due to this absurdly generous person, I am now the proud owner of Savage Moon, Savage Hope and a few other savage titles that I’m not even going to get up out of this chair to go verify. There are five Savages currently living in my bookshelf. I have them isolated. No telling what contagion they might pass on to the other books.
I mentioned the arrival of these packages of poop in book form to Candy, who, if it were possible to do so over IM, snickered and professed innocence to any idea that Cassie Edwards might need to find a home on my poor bookshelf. Despite the fact that each book bears a sales tag from Powell’s, which last I checked was in OREGON, the same state as presently houses CANDY (and also LILITH so do not THINK you are off the hook, ma’am), I have no concrete proof as to who set me up the bomb.
Then Candy, evil wench that she is, publicly challenged me to a duel of sorts: read a horrid book, write a review. I, of course, was conveniently gifted with a shit buffet of Edwards oeuvre, so why shouldn’t I put myself through the agony of reading one of these savage monstrosities?
Trouble was, I had to pick one. So I picked Savage Moon since the title was funny enough that perhaps laughing at it could give me a small soothing balm of comfort while I poisoned my brain. Alas, the Moon did little to help me. Thus book sucked donkey balls. There isn’t an F low enough to throw at it. I might have to modify our grading schedule and give it a Z except that the poor letter Z did nothing to deserve being permanently stuck on a Cassie Edwards novel.
Let me give you a brief plot summary: Misshi Bradley, who is really named Mitzi but her older brother has a monster of a lisp and can’t say her name so Misshi she is, thereby damning me to think of Misha Baryshnikov, is on a wagon at age 10 heading west. Her parents are dead, her siblings are dead, and the only family member left is her older brother, Dale. As expected, their wagon train is attacked by a renegade band of Shoshone Indians, lead by Chief Bear, who grabs Misshi with her wild red hair, throws her over his saddle, and rides away. Dale manages to get off one shot, which lodges in Chief Bear’s head, completely scrambling his brains, though he does manage to hold onto a squirming 10 year old tossed across his saddle.
Misshi is brought to Chief Bear’s camp but makes her escape in the fuss the others make over Chief Bear’s incapacitated state. Moments before Chief Bear and his comatose self are brought into the camp, however, Chief Bear’s wife helps their only son, Soaring Hawk, escape to form a camp of his own, because he does not approve of his fathers renegade ways. Trust me, he doesn’t approve. He says it about six time in one page.
Ten years later, when Misshi is conveniently 18 years of age, the book reveals that she’s been miraculously adopted by a neighboring Shoshone tribe and made the adopted daughter of the chief. How this was accomplished, no one knows, least of all me because the book didn’t tell me, but Misshi is a happy, dimwitted dipshit of a heroine in the Edwards mold, and has dyed her hair black with some random but powerful weed so she can blend in better with the other Shoshone.
Her adopted father turns out to be something of a mentor to Soaring Hawk, who is now a chief in his own right, and his little band of not-so-renegade-but-yet-renegade dudes has grown and remained safe and happy in their secret location. Soaring Hawk meets Misshi, their respective nether parts burst in to flame, and the obstacles they have to overcome to find their happy ending revolve around the fact that she’s white with red hair. Misshi realizes her appearance as a Shoshone is only skin deep, and she must struggle to find emotional and cultural balance between her old life, her yearning to be reunited with her brother, and her new potential life as a chief’s white wife, even IF the other members of his group accept her.
HA! I’m kidding. Honest appraisal of cultural difference? You are barking up the wrong shit tree. Not here, my friend. The obstacles facing Misshi and Soarking Hawk’s happiness stem from her brother Dale’s having gone batshit crazy while serving in the military. Vowing revenge for the kidnapping of his sister, he dresses as an Indian and attacks Indian camps and wagon trains, scalping and killing everyone in site, and saving the scalps as tribute to his lost sister. As soon as he finds Chief Bear, whom he doesn’t know has had his chiefly brains turned into a cerebral scramble, he plans on quitting his life of bloody crime and going off to St. Louis to be an opera singer.
No really. I’m not making that up.
Since I had to go through the experience of not only reading this tripe but reading it PUBLIC where people on the bus could SEE that I was reading this tripe, I figured, what better way to share my journey through the Cassie circle of hell than to excerpt my very favorite parts of the book and footnote them with my reaction. Hold your mouse over the hypertext and a small window should appear. Let me know if it doesn’t work in your browser.
Journey with me now. But take some Pepto first.
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Wrath? No. Rhage? No. Zsadist? WTF no. Butch? Um, sorta close, actually. Damn. V? Smoking hot RR, but no. Phury? HAHAHAHAHAHA. Gasp. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
And props to Melissandre for mentioning that editing together a Brotherhood clip to a Pink song…
*Sigh* Once more, with feeling.
I suck.
I was trying to figure out who the actor playing Butch was, but then the writing told me it was Colin Farrell. Thanks! And, wha?
My skillz at teh interwebs sucks. Hope this works instead:
I can literally hear the Brothers bitching that anyone would dare put their stories in a trailer with a Pink song. That sums up the fail of that clip right there. Meanwhile, I’m sorry Hugh, but this guy is Wrath:
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