The Spiral Path - two thumbs up!!!

Mark your calendars! Alert the media! A romance novel I actually LIKE! Who'd have thunk it? The Spiral Path, by Mary Jo Putney, absolutely does NOT make me want to hurl it across the room (or just plain hurl, as do so many of these door stops). In fact (takes deep breath), I would actually recommend it as a good novel. Seriously: this woman has chops. Now, this is no "War and Peace", and, frankly, I'm fine with that. I prefer something a bit less weighty, anyway.

It's a modern-day setting, and perhaps I'm biased because it's about film making, which is a love of mine, but I really enjoyed this novel. I was a bit nervous at first, because it could have gone the way of most of these stories with a bitchy hot-'n-cold heroine and a stoic, monosyllabic hero. After all, we're dealing with a couple who are in the process of divorcing. Only a few pages in, though, it became apparent that I was dealing with an author who was actually interested in ... are you ready?... character development! A good percentage of the story is told in flashbacks to the time when the couple first met, and the first couple of those confused me because the events in them were similar to the events occuring in the "present", but this may be because I was listening to it as a recording. In print, I'm sure it's readily apparent. Oh, and if you also choose to listen to a recording, be sure you get the one done by Barbara Rosenbladt: she is my all-time favourite female book reader, and probably yours, too, especially if you're a fan of the Amelia Peabody Egyptologist mystery series by Elizabeth Peters.

My nitpicks are so few and small as to be unworthy of attention. Hear that, authors and screenwriters out there? If 99% of your material is accurate to time, place, character, etc., then a few artistic touches will be tolerated!

Anyway: two thumbs way up! Putney deals with some very sensitive topics in a believable way. Also, she has cleverly spiced the story with "historical romance" flavour by having the characters work on a film set in the 19th century! There are also a few tentative references to faith in God. Is Ms. Putney a Christian? I don't know. She could be an agnostic with sensitivity to the divine, or a believer writing for the secular market. Her characters never really get into the details of belief in God, and while I'd love to read more novels like "Pascal's Wager" with its fabulous theological discussions, I'd rather have no faith talk at all over the endless preaching of "Just Above a Whisper" (see previous review). This is the second in a loose trilogy: loose because they are all stand-alone novels with a few overlapping characters. I hope the others are as good as this one. Brava!