EASY CONNECTIONS by Liz Berry

PUBLISHER: CreateSpace, 7/2018
ORIGINAL PUB: 1983, Orion
GENRE: Fiction/Young Adult
SETTING: England
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: C

FROM PUBLISHER: No more exams. No more boring holiday work. Just two blissful weeks painting in the country - then, art college at last. Just paint, paint, paint!'

Cathy Harlow is a gifted painter. She is seventeen and three glorious years at art college stretch blissfully ahead of her.

But when she meets Paul Devlin, lead guitarist of the rock group Easy Connection and a millionaire superstar her dreams are shattered. Dev is beautiful, brilliant, and explosively violent. Cathy is attracted and repelled in equal measure, but Dev is determined to have her, and Dev usually gets what he wants...

Easy Connections is a powerful and compelling novel, a love story with a difference, set against a vivid background of art school and the larger-than-life world of successful rock stars.

MY THOUGHTS/SPOILERS: The hero in this book is despicable and I wanted him to be killed off. Aside from Cathy, who is an incredibly strong character right up until near the end, there wasn't one other likable character. No one was in her corner, on her side, not even her own flesh and blood. I don't know what happened to her but she gave in at the end and I couldn't have been more disappointed.

Dev raped her. She was unknowingly on his property, painting, when he spotted her and made her come inside his house, where his bandmate Chris was, and wait while he called the police on her for trespassing. She didn't know who he was but he didn't believe her. He thought she was a groupie, but she wasn't. He carried her outside and raped her under a tree. From that moment on, he became obsessed with her. His age isn't given but Chris mentioned something about the band being famous for 7-8 years and something about the age of 19, so I'd say both men are in their mid-to-late 20's.

Cathy lives on her own. He mother's dead and her father's not around. She tells her bother, Jim, and his wife Mary about being raped but they don't care at all. Well, Mary was concerned at first but changed her mind and like everyone else in her life, wanted Cathy, who was almost 4 months pregnant by Dev's rape of her when she found out, to marry Dev, who was trying to force her to marry him. Mary even told Dev she was staying with them knowing full well Cathy wouldn't have wanted him to know. That caused her to flee early to London, to art school. No one cared about Dev's violence, they just saw his fortune and wanted her to get some of it. Jim even told her that Dev must be a good person because he was very famous yet still wanted to marry little ole her.

She was living with multiple roommates while going to art school in London right after the rape and he was trying to take over her life, was showing up at the apartment, and he really didn't even know her at all. He was practically stalking her and she continued to tell him she wanted nothing to do with him. He told her he wouldn't apologize for raping her and told her she'd wanted it. Much later in the book, he smacked her in the mouth for telling him she wanted to abort the baby, which was her plan all along. The mindset of these fictional characters has got me in disbelief.

The current in-print edition is riddled with punctuation and grammatical errors like you wouldn't believe. There are periods randomly in the middle of sentences, no periods where there should be, commas where there shouldn't be, missing words, and Dev was even spelled Del once. The book has been back in print (print on demand via Amazon's CreateSpace) for almost one year and I guess the author has no intention of correcting the errors.

This book has a sequel, Easy Freedom, which was originally intended to be part of Easy Connections.