Review: Miriam Yvette, _The Birth_

At Amazon, Miriam Yvette’s The Birth gets the following description:

The Black Wing series is a dark fantasy and sci-fi series with romantic encounters and unexpected turns!

It's the year 2200 - Awaiting the birth of her first child, Lola wants no unwanted attention. She left her hometown in California as she can no longer endure another year with her abusive husband. But choosing a recluse lifestyle in The Ponderosa—a cabin in the Okanogan Forest of Washington State is not as easy as Lola thought it would be. The memories of her ruthless mother and controlling husband haunt her while she reaches her third trimester.

But on a starry night. A meteorite that fell into the forest will change her world. A being with no physical form named Eibohn draws Lola into the untamed lands. There she meets Avalon, a silver-haired woman with sea-foam-colored eyes—who is not as innocent as she may seem, for Avalon is also pregnant.

Carrying the child of the Emperor is treasonous, so Avalon abandoned her home planet Osois in search of a new life. But the toxic elements make Earth not the refuge she sought, now she is out of time, for a warrior of the highest caliber known as the Elite is on the pursuit.

For Avalon to save her daughter, she must convince Lola to offer her unborn child as a haven. Can they reach a compromise, or will both women turn on each other?

The Birth is an ambitious book. The author uses a literary first-person present-tense style to conjure an intensely-focused interiority for her main character, Lola. This narrative mode is unbroken by such devices as the odd chapter (often a Prologue or the like) presenting some radically different perspective: everything is all Lola, all the time.

The first third of the 400-odd page novel (the whole thing is currently free on Amazon, so instead of a sample I read the first 34%, according to the handy-dandy little Kindle counter in the bottom corner) is, once again, all Lola, all the time. Lola is pregnant, and extremely worried. That’s not because she’s afraid of the pregnancy or birthing, reasonable though those concerns would be; rather, she’s concerned that her awful, abusive husband will track her down and find her. She’s escaped from his hideous company in California by moving to a secluded cabin in the Okonagon forest of Washington. Much of the first third is concerned with how she got access to this cabin, and why the husband doesn’t know about it. In short, Lola used to work at an old-folks’ home for very rich people, where she managed to befriend the facility’s ogre, Ms. Clarisse. Turns out Clarisse has monstrous children who never visit her and are basically just waiting for her to die. This makes her depressed and short-tempered, but Lola manages, by means of a combination of timidity and common decency, to break through and become the old lady’s friend and confidante. Eventually Clarisse, who’s been trying to get Lola to leave her abusive husband, dies and leaves her Washington cabin to Lola, along the way also completely disinheriting her dreadful children.

My principal problem with this novel is that this is the substance of the entire first third of the novel. Everything else you see in the description—weird aliens and meteorites and hunters and all that—doesn’t appear. So it reads as a piece of literary fiction about a deeply unhappy pregnant woman. I have no intrinsic problem with that, but considering that there isn’t the faintest hint of foreshadowing (including, as I say, no flash to an Other perspective to warn us that this story isn’t quite what it appears to be), it ends up being extremely slow-moving as a work of scifi-fantasy.

Now there is the bit about its being 2200, not now. But as far as I can tell, the only changes are some sort of complicated laws regarding forest management and the fact that TVs are now called holograms. Awful teenagers still spend their time texting their friends on cell phones, obnoxious business guys still do endless deals on their phones, Lola still drives a pickup truck, the heater in the cabin breaks down the normal way, and so on. If you deleted the word “hologram” nobody would know that this was supposed to be the future.

The other annoying thing is that the prose is marred by constant slight misuses. I am well aware of the run-on sentence as a literary device, something especially common in first-person present-tense literary prose, but in The Birth it happens almost every sentence. The author has a slippery grasp of English pronouns: someone writes on a pen instead of with; someone is angry from an annoying child instead of about, at, or with; and so it goes, example after example. And then there’s the constant strained abuse of verbs: I think the author wants to use descriptive, interesting verbs instead of “it was X,” which is fair enough, but many times these words just don’t mean what she thinks they mean. To tell us that seeing someone brought back a bunch of memories, she says that seeing her “resurfaced” the memories. As a transitive verb, “resurface” is something you do to roads and furniture. I can see that it could mean “return to the surface,” but as it happens, it doesn’t mean that. So every time I run into one of these odd verbs, these run-ons and misused pronouns, I stop dead and have to think, “what is this supposed to mean?”

The prose problems are actually especially annoying because they’re unnecessary. That is to say, if the author would proofread with care, maybe get a friend or two to read her work with a red pen in hand, all of this could be fixed easily. It’s nothing complicated—sort of Proofreading 101. And then actually the whole thing would read rather well, because on the whole the author has a vital, intense, and remarkably consistent literary style. A little cleanup and she’d be all set.

Of course, that wouldn’t solve the problem that I’m 135 pages in and no sign of a plot anywhere, but I wouldn’t actually have a big objection to that. I know everyone thinks fantasy-scifi has to be action-action-action, but it doesn’t. It just has to be written well.

For me, I’m going to be positive and assume that The Birth is a first draft. I’m going to assume that the author is going to proofread thoroughly and re-present the thing in polished form. And I’m going to wonder whether she really wants to write a piece of scifi at all, or whether she wouldn’t rather write a piece of literary fiction about a traumatized woman waiting for her baby to arrive.

If you read all of The Birth, do let me know what you thought, and whether you find my comments on-target at all.