She Treads Softly: Sweet Fury

Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Sweet Fury

Sweet Fury by Sash Bischoff
1/7/25; 288 pages
Simon & Schuster

Sweet Fury by Sash Bischoff is a recommended debut novel of psychological suspense.

Lila Crayne is an actress dubbed America’s sweetheart. She and her fiancé, filmmaker Kurt Royall are starting the filming of their feminist adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel, Tender Is the Night. Lila will be portraying Nicole Rider. In the novel psychiatrist Dick Rider falls in love and marries his patient, Nicole, which leads to his decline. Lila wants to flip the plot and make Nicole a strong woman and Dick the predator. To prepare for the role, Lila starts therapy with Jonah Gabriel. She claims Kurt is abusing her. Jonah, on the other hand, has been obsessed with Lila ever since they were students at Princeton. But everyone has a secret, and no one is quite who they seem.

There is no denying that the quality of the writing is very good, which kept me reading, but afterwards I had two questions to consider. The first question that begs to be asked is do we need to rewrite a classic with a feminist perspective? And the next is do long chapters following actors while filming the adaptation with shorter therapy notes and Lila's therapy musings work? For me the answer to both was not really, but I stayed with the novel basically because of the tie-in to Tender Is the Night.

With clearly unreliable narrators and no incentive to like or trust any of the characters, there was no connection to care about any of them. Making Lila an actor filming the story made me care even less. This resulted in a well-written, but very slow moving plot until the last 10% of the novel, when everything simply explodes. The ending actually dropped my rating. I'm an outlier on this debut novel, but it ended up just average for me.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.