Previously, Anatoli emerges from the depths of the backstory and kidnaps Alessia. Maxim stomps.
Content Warning: Alessia is currently kidnapped by the abusive man her shitty dad betrothed her to, and the novel is constantly dangling the threats you could imagine would stem from that, like the world’s worst carrot on a string. It’s as baffling as it is predictable. Why is this like this? Who is this for? Who exactly is here for this erotic romance novel with a whole climactic third act of “gosh, will Maxim find Alessia before she gets raped?” Who the fuck enjoys this? Maybe that’s not a fair question, since art is not required to entertain, but who thinks this is important? This is that thing that movies like Crash and The Green Book do where a story conflates engaging with the worst parts of society with simply depicting them, as though merely pointing at them and going “Seeeeeee? Looooooook. Look how bad. See? Baaaaaaad.” is the same thing as depth.
And, of course, that does make it a little tricky to try to write something fun and comedic about what bad art this is. Y’all, this is rough, and it never gets easier. It’s yet another book we’ve read that exploits violence against women for cheap dramatic tension, until she has sufficiently suffered enough to get saved by a man who is merely a dick to women instead.
So now that we’re bummed out enough with that acknowledgement out of the way that nothing about this is really funny… let us review the many ways that Alessia – very conveniently for the author – is terrible at being kidnapped.
The Mister: Chapter 28
We resume with Alessia in the car with Anatoli, wondering if Maxim lied about loving her because she saw him and Caroline hugging. I feel bad calling Alessia melodramatic while she’s literally being kidnapped, but girl.
No! She can’t bring herself to think that. He said he loved her—and she had believed him. She still wants to believe him, but of course it doesn’t matter anymore. She’ll never see him again.
“Why are you crying?” Anatoli asks, but she ignores him. She doesn’t care what he does to her now.
She knows that she will die at his hands.
And there’s nothing she can do.
Maybe she can escape. In Europe. Maybe she can choose how she dies….
Ok, I promise not to critique this entire chapter in meme (although I think there’s a fair argument that if I were actually able to do that, it might say more about the quality of the book than my criticism), but:
Anatoli announces that he needs Alessia’s passport because they’re going to the Eurotunnel.
“I don’t have a passport.”
“What do you mean you don’t have a passport?”
Alessia stares at him.
“Why, Alessia? Tell me! Did you forget to pack it? I don’t understand.” He frowns.
“I was smuggled into this country by some men who took my passport.”
“Smuggled? Men?” His jaw clenches, and a muscle twitches in his cheek. “What is going on?”
You guys aren’t missing much by not reading this yourselves: all of Anatoli’s dialogue sounds like he’s learning for the first time that Alessia hates him. It’s tough being a two-dimensional abusive man stock character. Evidently, it’s very repetitive.
Speaking of barely following what’s going on, now that Alessia has very suddenly given up on life because she saw a man she has known for maybe a week hug someone, let us begin to count the ways that Alessia is really just quite bad at being kidnapped. Not that she should have to be good at being kidnapped, of course. She’s traumatized and it’s unfair to expect her to not be affected by that. But. As this chapter goes on and we see how Alessia does and does not try to escape… it’s kind of hard not to notice that Alessia is kind of distractingly bad at being kidnapped.
1. Alessia keeps taking naps
She’s too tired and too broken to explain. “I don’t have a passport.”
“Fucking hell.” Anatoli smacks the steering wheel with his palm. Alessia flinches at the sound.“Alessia, wake up.”
Something has changed. Alessia is confused.
I didn’t cut anything out; that’s an honest-to-god section break right there. It just ends mid-conversation, and then suddenly Alessia wakes up and notes that “something has changed”. What happened in the meantime? She got so bored of Anatoli that she just fell asleep? I guess that makes enough sense.
2. Anatoli comes up with the actual stupidest plan to smuggle Alessia across the border, but it somehow fucking works anyway because ????
When Alessia wakes up from her kidnap nap, Anatoli has stopped the car in the middle of a country road in the middle of nowhere and tells her to get in the trunk.
“You don’t have a passport. Get in.”
“Please, Anatoli. I hate the dark. Please.” […]
“we have no choice. Once we are on the train, I can open the trunk.”
I feel like this is not an instance where hidden in plain sight should work, but apparently it does, because apparently nobody checks the trunks of cars crossing the border, even when someone just casually opens it for Reasons.
3. Alessia uses none of this border-crossing time to try to escape, call for help, scream, fart really loudly so a guard goes “hey, did that car just fart?”, nothing
Because she takes another nap, because Alessia is terrible at being kidnapped.
Alessia is shaken awake. She looks sleepily up at Anatoli, who towers over her as he holds open the lid of the trunk. […] “What took you so long to wake up? I thought you were unconscious!”
Just absolute dogshit at being kidnapped.
They get out of the car again and Alessia finds herself in a parking lot, empty except for two other cars, near a small building that’s presumably a hotel somewhere in France, which is decidedly not the best time to try to escape.
4. And that’s when Alessia tries to escape.
Alessia “flees blindly into the dark” and is immediately tackled by Anatoli. Really starting to seem like spending a whole book being pursued by the world’s most inept sex traffickers has done her a disservice, because she sucks at this.
Anatoli lies on top of her back, panting heavily. “You stupid bitch. Where the hell do you think you’re going to go at this time?” […]
He’s going to kill her.
She doesn’t struggle. […]
This is how I am going to die… […]
She wants it. She welcomes it. She doesn’t want to live a life in fear, like her mother. “Kill me,” she mouths.
We get a lot of Anatoli’s internalized misogyny in here, partly through wildly sexist statements and partly through basically every single aspect of Alessia’s being just bouncing off of him. I’m not saying it’s not realistic, that this evil doesn’t exist in the world, that this isn’t traumatic and no wonder Alessia is making bad decisions. But I do want to point out once again that, like… what is this for? Who’s going to be like “my favorite part of the last romance novel I read was the multiple chapters where I didn’t know if the woman in it was gonna get raped or not by the guy who kept saying things like ‘a woman is a sack, made to endure’! So suspenseful. Makes U think.”
Because that is absolutely used as a point of dramatic tension.
“It’s almost midnight. We should sleep.”
Her eyes meet his, and he smirks. “Ah, carissima, I should make you mine after the stunt you pulled outside. […] You are so beautiful,” he murmurs, as if he’s speaking only to himself. “But I don’t have the energy to fight you. And I think it would be a fight. Yes?”
It’s ok though, because he’s also fallen victim to the “E.L. James wrote herself into a corner, so they’re just gonna fall asleep” trope.
He exhales, frustrated and tired. “[…] I also don’t understand why you are running.”
“Because you are an angry, violent man, Anatoli. Why would I want to spend my life with you?” Her voice holds no emotion.
He shrugs. “I don’t have the energy for this conversation.”
A trope taken from Hannah Arendt’s much less influential work, The Bedtime of Evil.
The chapter ends with Alessia realizing, hey, maybe when she’s back in Albania, she can just make a plan to get a passport and visa and go back to England herself.
Maybe I should stay alive.
Oh, ok, cool, well, glad that… worked out.
She will get back to Maxim. And see for herself. See if everything they shared was a lie.
…of course it was for the dumbest reason.
Oh, and Maxim spent the chapter planning a trip to Albania to rescue Alessia. It’s not interesting. I have not included it in this summary.
