Her Long Lost Husband

Her Long Lost Husband
by Josie Metcalfe

NO STARS

The writing itself is good and solid. I like her voice and her style. So it's too bad that her take on the long lost husband shows up and interrupts his wife's new wedding involves descriptions of wheelchair use that make me think Gregor is in some clunky old hospital chair.

"The stark contrast of the trousers that only seemed to exaggerate the extreme thinness of his thighs as he sat there passively in the chair." Passively? This is the guy who just rolled into a wedding ceremony and is about to call out that the marriage can't take place. How is that passive?

"He hadn't wanted Livvy to see him in such a pathetic state; to see him having to laboriously heave himself out of the chair when all he could rely on was his upper-body strength." If he's been in that chair longer than two months, he should not be having that much trouble transferring into a car. When I think of the complaints the Avatar movie got that Jake seemed to be struggling with transfers more than was realistic, this is just ridiculously over the top.

I couldn't keep reading. I skipped to the end to see if what I feared was true and it was. There's a surgery and cure at the end of this book. I don't hate cure endings because I'm a bad person who wants the character to be unhappy. I hate the cure ending because 1) it makes people think that SCI is fixable and those who are still paralyzed must just be lazy, 2) it supports the belief that cure is the only path to happiness.

The guys in books like this are always miserable, whiny brats who obsesses about how they are "pathetic" or "ruined" and they shouldn't ruin their woman's life by being with her. This is such crap and makes me furiously angry. Books like this support negative stereotypes about life with disability and I think that's a terrible thing.