When I started reading this novel yesterday, I was skeptical that it would be as abjectly terrible as Handbook for Mortals. Like, I didn’t doubt that it would suck, and handle its racial elements horrendously, but I thought it would probably be a paint-by-the-numbers forbidden love thing, and that would ultimately cobble together some kind of social-jusice-y “racism is bad!” moral. Thankfully, I was wrong. This one is so much worse.
While Handbook for Mortals is amateurishly written and certainly has a lot of problematic elements, there’s an unselfconscious earnestness about it that is, in retrospect, almost endearing. It’s a beautiful mess in the way that The Room or Birdemic: Shock and Terror both are.
Save the Pearls is different. While its prose is marginally better, it also tries to be Important. Where Lani Sarem quotes the Dixie Chicks and Tumblr poets, Victoria Foyt quotes Albert Einstein and Emily Dickinson. Where Lani Sarem steers clear of anything weighty or topical, Victoria Foyt has a lot of serious stuff to say about racism, Science, Nature, Love, and even communism (!). All of it is incorrect. Read on to find how just how bad it is!
Continue reading “Save the Pearls: Chapter 1 (or, The Bad Beginning)” →