The Lord of California

Lord of California, Andrew Valencia, 284 pages

Shortly before her fourteenth birthday, Ellie Temple’s father dies, and she discovers a horrible secret: he has four other families and has been using them to commit land fraud on a massive scale. The five widows and their children (ranging from two to 17 years old) get together and set up a cooperative farm, but tensions rise and their past threatens to catch up with them.

I was disappointed by this book. I felt like the premise had so much promise – these five women, forced together, coping with their trauma and their wildly different methods of raising children, must become a family and defy the patriarchal notions of the new Republic of California (oh yes, this is post-apocalyptic, though it has little to no payoff). Unfortunately, Valencia squanders that potential and opts to tell a run-of-the-mill story about an abusive father. By the end of the book, the families have grown and come together, but we don’t actually get to see any of that happen. Instead we get lengthy flashbacks of Mr. Temple’s misogynistic extemporizing about the roles of men and women in the household. One gets the feeling that Valencia wanted to write a character-driven drama but wasn’t quite up to the task of actually writing dynamic characters or making them grow.

I could write paragraphs more about the story I would’ve told and the way I would’ve used the setting and given circumstances (the story is told from three points of view, and only the first (Ellie’s) is worth using), but I’ve already spent more time on this review than this book deserves. Lord of California would be good in a creative writing workshop, exploring different, better plots that could have come out of the given circumstances, but isn’t so good for pleasure reading.