Ranty McRanty Review: That Dangerous Energy

I picked up That Dangerous Energy by Aya de Leon based on my enjoyment of one of her previous books, A Spy in the Struggle. Like that previous reading experience, this more recent release is a genre bender, blending social commentary in a romantic thriller format. Unfortunately unlike the previous book I found this one extremely heavy-handed with all the subtlety of a chainsaw.

Morgan Faraday is grabbing every opportunity she can to pull herself up out of a family legacy of abusive partners, young single motherhood, and poverty. If that means figuring out ways to keep her Oil Tycoon Billionaire Boyfriend happy (OK, his name is Sebastian Reid), by God she'll do it. She's been getting good advice from her BFF who is working her way towards early retirement by being a Sugar Baby, and Sebastian seems hooked.  Then she meets Kevin Templeton, who from here on out I will call Crunchy Granola Climate Change Activist.

Crunchy Granola Climate Change Activist and Morgan spark right away, but she dismisses the attraction because she's hoping to keep her hooks into Oil Tycoon Billionaire Boyfriend. Then Crunchy Granola finds out that Morgan is dating Oil Tycoon, gets all butthurt and tells her her hoped-to-be-future hubby is EEEEEEEVVVVVIIIIIIIILLLLLLL!

So what makes Oil Tycoon Billionaire Boyfriend evil exactly? Well...

1. He inherited and is running his father's oil company
2. Greenwashing (I guess? His investments in wind and solar are legit so....)
3. Lobbying

Wow. So evil. Also, not illegal. 

Eventually some slapdash racketeering charges are thrown in to give readers some ultra-cheesy and laughably bad courtroom drama at the end, but up until the 90% mark I just wasn't seeing it. As far as thriller villains go this guy doesn't even make the Time 100.

Because a hot man has come into her life, and at his urging (so gross), the heroine decides to spy on Oil Tycoon Billionaire Boyfriend because golly, she believes in the cause! Power to the people y'all! That is until she has a fight with Oil Tycoon Billionaire Boyfriend, he leaks out some tears and she inexplicably has a change of heart and thinks she can "change him." Like, WUT?!  He holds all the power in your relationship and you can change him? Sure Jan.

Look, I knew what I was getting when I picked up this book. The author infuses her books with current social commentary (Climate Change, Black Lives Matter, etc. etc.) but a feminist manifesto this most certainly is not. What we have here is a heroine whose sole identity is wrapped up around men - whether it's bagging the Oil Tycoon Billionaire Boyfriend to escape the poverty cycle or Crunchy Granola Climate Change Activist because he sure is dreamy and she hits the land speed record for believing in his cause. On top of this? The social commentary is akin to an Acme anvil falling from the sky and drilling Wile E. Coyote into the desert sand. It's a bunch of buzzwords and slogans with no real meat behind them. It's all Fossil Fuels Bad, Climate Change Bad. There's no depth. There's no nuance. It's like getting beat upside the head with a baseball bat for nearly 300 pages.

Then, predictably, the author comes for the romance genre and I officially lost the last of my f*cks. Hand to God, as we're barreling towards the conclusion Crunchy Granola Climate Change Activist's lawyer takes a jab at romance novels for romanticizing billionaires and whitewashing how terrible real-life billionaires are. Look, does the romance genre romanticize billionaires? Yes. Do I know a single romance reader who confuses Bezos, Musk or Facebook Boy for romance novel heroes? Absolutely not. Maybe give women a little credit for having the ability to separate fantasy from reality.  Although I've already established how decidedly unfeminist this book is so....

(Seriously, I'll read a billionaire romance hero all day long but am just as likely to punch one in the face if the opportunity ever presents itself.  I contain multitudes.)

Other than chuckling a couple of times at some truth bombs there was nothing here that worked for me. I walked into this book knowing I was going to get political commentary and that said commentary would lean fairly far to the left. That's not my problem (at all) with this book. It's the lack of nuance. It's the lack of depth. It's a heroine who I frankly don't like all that much because she lacks an identity outside of the men in her life. The author tries to combat this by including flashbacks to her family's history and including the heroine's artistic passion for textile art (quilting). Spoiler Alert: It's nowhere near enough. 

Final Grade = D-

Review: A Spy in the Struggle

"We're not all from the Bay Area and so goddamn politically enlightened. We don't all have Black Nationalist parents who tell us what the government is really up to. Some people are from  Midwestern towns where everyone watches Fox News and believe what the preacher tells them. Some people are from places where everyone doesn't have a goddamn 'question authority' bumper sticker on their car, from places where you get your ass kicked if you question authority, so you just do what you're told. And it doesn't make them stupid, it just makes them people in a bad situation."

I have a long history with illustrated covers. I hate them, thank you very much. But I took one look at the cover for A Spy in the Struggle by Aya de Leon and I was hooked. Never mind that when it comes to suspense I've never been one to gravitate towards espionage (films yes, books not so much...). Taking advantage of my local library, I took a swing on a new to me author and am happy to report that this was a success.

Yolanda Vance has done everything right. After her preacher father dies when she's very young, she and her single mother hopscotch around - Mom chasing bad relationships, a paycheck, and fliting from one new age guru to the next. Yolanda's dream is to escape her situation and she's your classic pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps story. She lands a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school (so long flaky Mom!) and works her way into Harvard Law. She hits Manhattan next, working in corporate law at a prestigious firm until one day the SEC shows up. Yolanda ain't no fool and sure as hell she's not shredding the pile of papers one of the partners shoved into her arms. Yolanda is a survivor and turns whistleblower.

Her firm is big news, and Yolanda's name is now mud in the world of corporate law. A girl has to eat. She didn't come this far to fail. So the whistleblower takes herself and her law degree to the FBI. She's settled in a New Jersey office when she's handpicked to go undercover in Holloway, California. A group of young African-American and Latinx activists who call themselves Red, Black & GREEN! are making trouble for a biotech firm with a big government contract. Yolanda, who went to college in the area, is the FBI's only viable option - never mind she's a lawyer with less than zero undercover experience.

Yolanda is not excited or happy about this assignment and her goal is get in, get out, get back to her comfortable life. But as she reacquaints herself with Holloway, meets a handsome professor on her alma mater's jogging path, and a dead body the cops try to pass off as "just another junkie overdose" turn up - Yolanda realizes there's more going on in Holloway than meets and the eye.  The question is - how far will the government go to protect this biotech firm?

I subscribe to the school of thought that all art is political (in some way, shape or form) it's just some creators embrace it more openly than others.  The immediate echoes in this story are, quite obviously, the Black Lives Matter movement and environmental racism. What saves this book from being a political manifesto or devolving into preaching is the character of Yolanda - who is complicated, nuanced, with a fascinating backstory.  Also, de Leon writes teenagers very well - which gives Yolanda an interesting cast of characters to play off from. She's straddling the line of helpful adult mentoring these kids and FBI agent / lawyer wanting her safe, comfortable life back.

A romance comes into play in the second half and there's a few fairly spicy love scenes - which will likely please romance readers and annoy suspense readers (who generally seem to be annoyed by sex in books in general IMHO).  Naturally Yolanda is lying to everybody in this story and that's going to blow up with Jimmy - who she's starting to have very real feelings for.  It makes for some great Black Moments in the second half.

It took me a few chapters to sink into the writing because de Leon likes to employ chapter breaks and occasionally shift timelines as she delves deeper into Yolanda's past and character.  These flashbacks appear at opportune times and fit into the narrative of what's going on with Yolanda in the present day, at that moment.  But it's a bit like head-hopping (just with timeline - not characters...) and did take a little getting used to.  That said, it largely worked for me.

A final note: this is the first book I've read that mentions COVID. It happens early on when Yolanda attends her first Red, Black & GREEN! meeting and one of the speakers talks about how their community has been more adversely effected by the pandemic than the white suburbanites who drive into Holloway to work at the biotech firm.  This is great - except for the fact that nothing else in this book reflects a post-COVID world at all. There's no mention of masks, Zoom, distance learning (the kids are still "in school"), stores and restaurants are open, people are still congregating at the church where Red, Black & GREEN! meet etc. This reads like the author had the manuscript complete and at the last minute her editor was like, "you need to mention COVID!"  But here's the thing - you can't just blithely mention COVID.  It has completely uprooted peoples' lives.  A passing sentence ain't gonna cut it if you want the story to feel authentic in a post-COVID hellscape.  Much better to just not mention it at all.  Let the reader live the fantasy of a pre-COVID time when we could attend street markets, eat in a restaurant, and not wear a mask constantly.  I get the author wanted this story to feel timely, and for the most part it does. But to bring in COVID requires more extensive rewrites than one sentence towards the beginning of the story.

A misstep (YMMV) but other than that, I liked this book quite a bit. It was compulsively readable, and I stayed up way past my bedtime to plow through the second half.  I'd read this author again in a heartbeat.

Final Grade = B