In the opening of J.L. Campbell’s new thriller, Flames of Wrath, we meet Alexia as she navigates a group of college kids while making for the exit. With her mother and grandmother’s voice of reason in her ear, Alexia has read the debaucherous room and decided to bail, just as soon as she finds her friends…
**Trigger Warning: the following review subject deals with sexual assault**
However Campbell writes respectfully and maturely. There are no graphic or salacious details here. Which is not to say FoW is bloodless. The aftermath is far more brutal than the assault.
Alexia is our introduction to FoW, but Geneva, the young woman's mother, is our guide. We see the horror of what Alexia has suffered through her mother’s eyes. We also see the rage of all mothers, indeed all women, in Geneva’s actions.
“Tears resolve nothing…”
Geneva is FIERCE in her love for her child, in her anger at her husband, (stymied by convention) in her disgust for a system that—rather than speed justice—spokes the wheels of law and exacerbates healing. Once she realizes that even in the best of circumstances, a system designed by men and administered by men, seldom holds men accountable, Geneva strikes out on her own path.
NOT Jessica Fletcher
Unwilling to play a game she cannot win, Geneva goes after those who assaulted her child on her own terms. Unconcerned with courts and laws, Geneva seeks justice. And Geneva’s justice is as indelible as the scars Alexia will carry forever more.
Someone you know has been a victim
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates that one-in-four women experience some form of sexual assault some point in their lives. A U.N. study is more exacting: six-out-of ten women suffer sexual assault before the age of 18. Nine-out-of-ten suffer sexual assault in their lifetime.
“Do you know how much grief you’ve caused this family?”
Campbell deals a sharp indictment to the contributing factors to rape: poverty and privilege, generational abuse and societal attitudes—worst of all, the shrugging complicity in some women. While another mother castigates her daughter for seeking justice after years of childhood abuse and trauma, Geneva comforts, protects—and in the absence of equal protection under law—she seeks retribution for Alexia. Never once does Geneva blame her daughter. Instead, she cocoons Alexia in love and support. Even as her marriage suffers. Even as her other child questions her motives.
“...without a roadmap to get back home…”
Campbell writes as maturely and soberly about families as she does about violence against women. Geneva’s marriage is the real deal, with years of grievances just under the surface of crisis-diplomacy. Her husband, Spence, is as hobbled by issues with his police-commissioner father as he is with parental fury. The husband and wife dance around one another with only the imperative of their child uniting them.
And speaking of dances
Each risk she takes is a wind-gust to Geneva’s balancing act. Each repercussion of her actions is a shock to the tightwire Geneva spans between protecting Alexia and exacting justice. But even as the police question her, (inept as they may be, the cops know vigilante work when they smell it) Geneva pushes forward, risks be-damned.
Real people, real injustice, real responses
In a review of Pierre Morel’s 2008 movie Taken, a writer called the movie “dad porn.” The hero, retired CIA agent, Bryan Mills, (Liam Neeson) warns his daughter against a trip overseas. When the daughter is kidnapped in Paris, Mills unleashes horrible retribution against the abductors. I get it, sorta. It’s wish-fulfillment for a lot of something-something-year-old dudes who wish for a license to do terrible things to “foreign people” in a violently-punctuated “I told you so…” because kids just don’t listen.
The movie took the capable man trope from clichée to punchline.
There are no heroes here, no jokes either, only survivors
What makes Geneva—no special-forces badass, no spy, no cop—so compelling is who she is: a mother. That makes her more dangerous than those stock characters. Determined to protect her daughter and affect a reckoning with the tools at her disposal as an IT professional, Geneva punches above her weight, swinging at powerful people with connections and money.
She is us and we are her
The pain and anger in FoW is universal. So is the delicious revenge that Geneva twists out of the predators she hunts. Suspenseful and satisfying, J.L. Campbell’s Flames of Wrath is way more entertaining than it should be. Check it out for pre-order here.
The photo at the top belongs to Black Odyssey Press. It is used here for instruction/educational purposes as defined by the Fair Use Doctrine.
