Baby Love

Cover

Title Baby Love

Author Louisa Young

ISBN 0-00-655081-9

Publisher Flamingo

Category Fiction

Shira's Rating

<==Buy from Amazon.co.uk in the U.K. (Prices quoted in British pounds, shipped from U.K. warehouse.) (Not available from U.S.-based Amazon.com.)

What It's About

This book is fiction, centering on Angeline, a former belly dancer whose dance career ended when a motorcycle accident killed her unmarried pregnant sister and injured her leg so severely that she would never dance again. The sister's baby was saved through Caesarian, so now Angeline is a single parent, raising the child and making her living as a writer.

The core plot of this book is based on the fact that after 3 years of no contact, the little girl's biological father has suddenly emerged to demand custody of the child. Remembering the many bruises that her sister had received from him, Angeline puts herself at personal risk to retain custody of little Lily and protect the child from her potentially abusive father.

It's that personal risk thing that drives the plot of this book. Angeline turns for help to people that she realizes she can't fully trust, and those people take advantage of her vulnerability. To make matters worse, Angeline learns about secrets of the past that continue to haunt her life today--secrets that shake the very foundation of what she thought she knew about people she was close to.

Sprinkled in among the plot are many references to belly dancing and Middle Eastern culture. Angeline reminisces about things that occurred in her performances back when she was still dancing, reflects on the history of the dance, and thinks about things she learned and observed during her travels in the Middle East.

Its Good Points

If you can get yourself to read beyond the slow start, the plot turns into an entertaining crime/thriller story with interesting twists and turns.

The story is told in the first person by the main character, Angeline. Her wry observations and feisty comments regarding the weirdness going on around her gave me a number of chuckles. Angeline develops as an interesting character with a strong will, and I found myself rooting for her to triumph over all the men who were trying to control her.

Although I had some complaints about the way Angeline was portrayed (see "On The Negative Side" below), there were some things that felt right. For example, it rang true when, complaining about how many people see the dance as just a sexy thing to seduce men, she said, "I'm the only person who thought there was anything other than titillation in my dancing, my joy, my pleasure, my work."

On The Negative Side....

The book gets off to a very slow start. I was rather bored throughout the first few chapters. Eventually, the plot did pick up and the last part of the book was entertaining, but it definitely took me a while to get into it.

As someone who has been a belly dancer myself since 1981, I found Angeline's character to be a bit implausible. Very, very few dancers who perform regularly in nightclubs also happen to have such in-depth knowledge of dance history and Middle Eastern culture, and even fewer find that knowledge to be sufficient to earn them a living once they retire from dance. Often, when Angeline reflected on how the history of the dance or the Middle Eastern culture related to her situation of the moment, I found myself thinking, "Yeah, right, if I was in that situation I wouldn't be sitting around comparing what's going on around me to the Ouled Nail." I'm not saying it's impossible, but it is highly unlikely.

Another oddity: for someone who seems so deeply into the dance and the culture, it's strange that Angeline doesn't talk about her ongoing friendships with fellow dancers or demonstrate an ongoing interest in periodically going to the clubs just for the joy of listening to live music and watching other people dance. It doesn't fit. She mentions her Egyptian friend Zeinab, but aside from that her only comments about other dancers are about mean-spirited competition. Yes, such mean-spirited competition exists, but the majority of dancers I know have developed close friendships with at least a few other dancers. This is a real void in Angeline's character development.

Many of the dance and cultural references seemed to be thrown in just for the sake of saying, "Hey look, I did some research and now I'm going to throw it at you just to prove that I know something about this topic." Although they did usually seem to have something to do with the plot, these references didn't blend smoothly and often jarred me out of the flow of the plot, the way a television commercial can jar you out of the flow of a televised movie.

There were a few places where the author seemed to be suggesting a negative attitude toward belly dancers, which seemed a bit peculiar for a book whose main character made her living as one. For example, Angeline would occasionally refer to the beaded, sequinned costumes she wore for her nightclub shows as "tacky". Most nightclub dancers that I know think their glittery stuff is pretty, and that's part of the appeal of the dance for them.

As a U.S. reader, I found the U.K.-specific references throughout the book to be bewildering. For example, it makes a lot of references to "Shepherd's Bush" in comparing it with other neighborhoods, and given my lack of familiarity with U.K. geography that was a bit annoying to me.

In Conclusion

I did have fun reading the last half of this book, in spite of the negative comments I made above. I generally enjoy books with strong, sassy female characters, and I think that's partly why I liked this one. Although the plot seemed rather unlikely--how many of us will ever become entangled with cops on the take, psychotic gangsters who have been admiring us from afar for years, and shocking discoveries about secrets our family members were keeping from us?--it was no worse than the plots of many television shows and movies.

So, I found the book fun to read, but it's certainly not representative of what a typical professional belly dancer's life is like. (If there is such a thing as a typical professional belly dancer...) But then, it doesn't claim to be. Treat this book as being a crime thriller that coincidentally cast its main character as a belly dancer, and you'll go into it with the right expectations. It did entertain me enough to make me decide to read the sequel, Desiring Cairo.