Improbable

I am proud to say I got my seventh review at Amazon.com! Even if it was a three-star review, I still have a four-and-a-half star average, and that’s not bad. <g> The three stars from the seventh reviewer, I have to say, is deserved. And the reviewer gives valid reasons for giving it a lower than average score.

According to their review, the idea of Squire’s Isle being so densely populated with homosexual couples is improbable. Yes. It absolutely, positively is. It’s not like this island is an internment camp or anything. They weren’t gathered up and sent over on a ferry. But the fact is, improbability is a necessity. And who wants strict reality in their reading? Reading should be an escape. And it’s probably nice to believe, for a little while, that there could be a place like this in the world.

The truth is there are a lot of straight people on the island as well (in fact, they make up the majority of the island’s population). They just don’t get much of a focus because… well, that’s not where the audience is. The police officers are straight, all of Nadine’s coworkers at the radio station (well, except for Miranda, naturally)… the fact is that Washingtonians seem to very open-minded when it comes to this kind of thing, or at least more open-minded than a lot of the country. So it seems to me they would go with the flow.

Also, once Nadine takes her stand and makes the island a more inviting place to be out, who is to say more couples wouldn’t flock there?

So, yes, Reviewer #7, Squire’s Isle is highly improbable. The high number of callers to Nadine’s show, the support she’s shown, the “back to normalcy” that everyone gets by the end of the novel, it’s all very, very improbable and unlikely. Maybe someday it won’t be. One can only hope!

As for the other complaints about the novel (the sex scenes being stunted and the convenient plot twists), well… I can only say that hundreds of authors selling millions of books have far greater sins to their credit, and I can only hope I can take the mistakes from my first novel as learning experiences for future novels. <g>

Reviewer #7, thank you for your honesty! I’d much rather have an earned three-star review than a dishonest five. <g>