Review: Ruthless People
First of all, I just wanted to say: woah. This is probably the worst written book I have ever read. I swear to God I could have written something better with my eyes closed. I felt like Ruthless People by J.J McAvoy was written by an amateur, and it wasn’t edited at all. The amount of grammatical errors in this novel is horrendous, I honestly don’t even know how it got published in the first place. Most of the time, I had to re-read a number of sentences in order to make sense of them, I had to put up with things like this: “Rule Three: Just because you sell drugs for a living isn’t an excuse not to dress well.” Are you kidding me?
There were also a whole bunch of other things that were dumb as hell, like at one point, the author told us that Melody was wearing a shirt, and then the next page said she was in a dress? Also, I’m pretty sure no research was done for this novel, I felt that there was no depth whatsoever and (not that I know much) the portrayal of Mafia life was pretty poor. Any person with any common sense at all will know that the language used by the Irish is not ‘Irish’ but ‘Gaelic’. Although the novel is fiction, the entire novel cannot be made completely up unless (I guess), that it’s a work of fantasy. Readers learn from fiction novels, I know that I have and I would be pretty pissed off if I found out that the information I have enjoyed learning about is fake, or under-researched.
There was so much damn swearing in this novel, I swear almost every second word was ‘fuck’. This is a very very very very poor rendition of a much better Mafia novel: Bound by Honor by Cora Reilly. So I know that in novels, there is no way you can really tell how much time passes, but when a large amount of time passes, you are aware of it. There was one point in this novel where this huge time jump happened and there was no indication that it had happened at all and it just confused me.
Also, there was so much sex in this, and it wasn’t the change in relationship kind of sex or the I love you sex, it was pretty much just two animals fucking, and I literally rolled my eyes when I came across yet another sex scene. I swear 70% of the book is just sex. Sometimes in books, you feel as if there isn’t enough of those scenes, sometimes books have just the right amount (I feel that Lisa Kleypas does this), and sometimes books overdo it – like this one. I was also subject to stupid lines like this: “the promised land, the land of milk and honey between her thighs”. No. No.
I felt that the relationship between Melody and Liam is just, I don’t know. At first they wanted to kill each other, and the hostility between them was pretty good. But then within three days, this hostility disappeared and they were practically in love with each other. This is very poor relationship development on the part of McAvoy. Like, after Liam and his reservations and dislike of Mel being the Boss, he was hella quick to change his mind? And Mel was hella quick to open up to Liam on some of her deepest secrets? Nice character development there.
Also, I thought that Mel getting pregnant was a nice twist and it would’ve been a good read (probably not if it was written by this author) for the audience to watch as Mel overcame the challenges that came with being a Mafia Boss and pregnant. But of course it was killed, Jesus.
I don’t recommend this for anyone, don’t read it, it’s a waste of time.
